Woodrow Hartzog - Privacys Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies

Modern discussions of privacy can give rise to worry, but I did not write this book as a privacy and technology fatalist. Quite the opposite. This book is the culmination of both the first part of my academic career as well as my lived experience on the important role that privacy plays in our lives. I have worked for a library, a television station, a restaurant, a university newspaper, a law firm, an advocacy group, and several educational institutions. At every step I have seen how necessary privacy is and how challenging it can be to balance privacy with other important, competing values. And, if Im being honest, this book was at least partially motivated by the blessed obscurity of the awkward growing pains of my youth.

While my experiences and prior work informed the values I highlight and the theory I propose in this book, I do not mean for this theory to be the final or only word at the intersection of privacy and design. Theories are meant to evolve; they are meant to interact with other theories, to be criticized, reinterpreted, and, with any luck, eventually contribute to a momentum that improves our world.

Portions of this book were adapted from parts of the following articles: The Indispensable, Inadequate Fair Information Practices, Maryland Law Review 76 (2017): 952982; The Feds Are Wrong to Warn of Warrant-Proof Phones, MIT Technology Review, March 17, 2016; The Internet of Heirlooms and Disposable Things, North Carolina Journal of Law andTechnology 17 (2016): 581598 (coauthored with Evan Selinger); Taking Trust Seriously in Privacy Law, Stanford Technology Law Review 19 (2016): 431472 (coauthored with Neil Richards); Increasing the Transaction Costs of Harassment, Boston University Law Review Annex, November 4, 2015 (coauthored with Evan Selinger); Social Media Needs More Limitations, Not Choices, Wired, April 2015; Surveillance as Loss of Obscurity, Washington and Lee Law Review 72 (2015): 13431387 (coauthored with Evan Selinger); The FTC and the New Common Law of Privacy, Columbia Law Review 114 (2014): 583676 (coauthored with Daniel J. Solove); Reviving Implied Confidentiality, Indiana Law Journal 89 (2014): 763806; The Value of Modest Privacy Protections in a Hyper Social World, Colorado Technology Law Journal 12 (2014): 332350; The Case for Online Obscurity, California Law Review 101 (2013): 150 (coauthored with Fred Stutzman); The Fight to Frame Privacy, Michigan Law Review 111 (2013): 10211043; Obscurity by Design, Washington Law Review 88 (2013): 385418 (coauthored with Fred Stutzman); Social Data, Ohio State Law Journal 74 (2013): 9951028; Website Design as Contract, American University Law Review 60 (2011): 16351671; The Privacy Box: A Software Proposal, First Monday 14 (2009); and Promises and Privacy: Promissory Estoppel and Confidential Disclosure in Online Communities, Temple Law Review 82 (2009): 891928. In some cases, I have used only selected passages from the articles. In many cases, the text and argument of the articles have been significantly reworked. I give special thanks to Neil Richards, Evan Selinger, Daniel Solove, and Fred Stutzman for allowing me to adapt some of our coauthored material for this book.