Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies

by Woodrow Hartzog

Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves—even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.In Privacy’s Blueprint, Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.

Genres: Law, Technology, Nonfiction, Internet

364 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Jordan Mazur · Rating 4 out of 5]

More useful as a discussion of the current gaps in the consent-based regime and some thoughts on what would be better than as an actual operational roadmap toward a design-based solution.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A law professor who clearly distilled his ideas.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hartzog’s ideas are admirable, and his recentering the discourse around design is thought provoking from a basic sense, however outdated reading it 6 years after its publication — which might as well be 60 in privacy years. With the coming ISO on PbD, one can’t help but think his theory helped move the movement forward. His writing style left no stone unturned, which resulted in a repetitive, textbook-like drone that frankly I was ready to be done with about 150 pages in. It was worth finishing for the penultimate chapter on IoT — a personal pet interest — throughout which Hartzog lets his snark fly. I’d love to read an updated version of this chapter, and the book as a whole (but truncated).

[Mills College Library]

342.73085 H338 2018