Harvard Business Review Emotional Intelligence Collection (4 Books) (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)

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How Facebook Uses Empathy to Keep User Data Safe

By Melissa Luu-Van

Online security often focuses on technical details: software, hardware, vulnerabilities, and the like. But effective security is driven as much by people as it is by technology. After all, the point is to protect the consumers, employees, and partners who use our products.

The ways those people interact with technology and each other can completely change the effectiveness of your security strategy. So security products and tools must take into account the human context of the problems they’re solving—and that requires empathy.

At Facebook, empathy helps us create solutions that work because they’re designed around our users’ experiences and well-being. Specifically, we see ...