The Architecture of Privacy

Foreword

When I was an undergraduate majoring in computer science a few decades ago, books published by O’Reilly and Associates possessed talismanic power to me. As it happened, some of the earliest O’Reilly books were being published during my freshman year, and their mix of great writing, beautiful production value, and hyper-specificity were tailor-made for a young geek learning about Unix, perl, and the Internet for the first time. My dorm room bookshelves were lined with a rainbow of brightly colored book spines. Across my desk roamed a veritable menagerie of cover illustrations, from camels to grasshoppers, from crabs to crowned pigeons. I read every line of Dale Dougherty’s book, and Cricket Liu’s book; the tattered pages of my copy of Larry Wall’s Perl Programming began to fall apart in my hands. I even splurged (well, my parents did) and bought the entire set of pricey X Window System guides, although I confess that I didn’t read most of those.

I tell you this history to come clean: I gladly would’ve written a Foreword to contribute text to an O’Reilly book to honor my twenty-year-old self’s obsession even if that book was just average. What a happy moment it is for me, then, to be able to contribute front matter to an O’Reilly book that is much more than just average. You hold in your hands (or view on your screen) a fantastic contribution to the burgeoning literature of privacy engineering.

Privacy requires a dialogue between two types of people: those who speak policy ...