The Architecture of Privacy

Preface

Who Should Read This Book

This book is not for privacy experts.

If you are looking for an in-depth discussion of the legal implications of the Kyllo v. United States (2001) Supreme Court decision or thorough exploration of how to implement differential privacy in a database, then you should look elsewhere. There is no shortage of invaluable literature on these and many other privacy-related topics, and we recommend it to those readers.

This book is for privacy beginners. Those who have a niggling worry that the technology they are creating raises privacy concerns and want to do something about it, but who also are not going to spend the next 10 years perusing privacy case law and academic papers trying to figure out how to port those lessons into lines of code.

It’s also for those who have a basic understanding of law and privacy policy, but who cannot read lines of code to save their lives. It’s OK—you don’t need to be an engineer to read this book. And even after you read it from cover to cover, you still won’t be able to write code for access controls. But you will have an understanding of the range of possibilities when it comes to basic privacy-protective technical capabilities. You’ll know what to ask your coders to build.

You may be surprised how frequently what you build has privacy implications, but we live in a time of increasing capabilities for personal re-identification. This book will help you be familiar with how to spot privacy questions. If you read nothing ...