Building Web Apps that Respect a User's Privacy and Security

Chapter 1. Introduction

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.

Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life

If only the “controversial” stuff is private, then privacy is itself suspicious. Thus, privacy should be on by default.

Tim Bray

We live more and more of our lives digitally. We consistently create significant portions of our social, health, financial, and work data through web services. We then link that data together by connecting accounts and permitting the services that we use to track the other sites we visit, trusting these sites implicitly. Even our use of search engines can predict patterns and provide insights into our health and personalities. In 2016 John Paparrizos MSc, Ryen W. White PhD, and Eric Horvitz MD PhD published a study in which they were able to use anonymized Bing search queries to predict diagnoses of pancreatic cancer.

In the article “With Great Data Comes Great Responsibility,” Pascal Raabe (Paz) eloquently describes how our digital data represents our lives:

We’re now producing more data on a daily basis than through all of history. The digital traces we’re leaving behind with every click, every tweet and even every step that we make create a time machine for ourselves. These traces of our existence form the photo album of a lifetime. We don’t have to rely on memory alone but can turn to technology to augment our biological memories and virtually remember everything.

In light of how much data we produce, ...