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We have seen a wide range of products fail because they were not built with sufficient respect for users’ wishes, their privacy, or their security. Sometimes this happened because a system did not work as designed, but very often these failures happened when the system did work as designed. For companies, this has meant everything from minor PR embarrassments to complete product shutdowns and regulatory and legal consequences; for the people affected, the consequences were typically far more severe.

This site is devoted to building with respect: the how and why of how to build products and systems with privacy, security, and anti-abuse woven through their design. In order to do this well, you need to consider the whole stack: all the way from humans and the societies they build down to hardware. Humans are not all the same; you have to build for the huge diversity in the world.

I’ve done the theory, I’ve done the practice, and now I’m writing it down (and speaking about it) so that we don’t all have to learn these lessons the hard way.

I tweet @LeaKissner.

RSS at https://buildwithrespect.com/feed 

Lea is the Chief Privacy Officer of Humu. She works to build respect for users into everything that Humu does, such as product design, privacy-enhancing infrastructure, application security, and novel research into both theoretical and practical aspects of privacy. She was previously the Global Lead of Privacy Technology at Google, working for over a decade on projects including logs anonymization, infrastructure security, privacy infrastructure, and privacy engineering. She earned a PhD in computer science (with a focus on cryptography) at Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley.
  • Featured

    By popular request

    November 16, 2019 by

    It took me a bit, but I’ve put together this site to house my longer-form articles and pointers to talks. As requested, there’s an RSS feed. If you have any more requests (especially pointers to Twitter threads which really should have been articles), drop me a line. I’ve started out with pointers to my external… Read more

  • Pants problems

    November 16, 2019 by

    I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but there are a large number of men on the internet who have problems with their pants. The way I can tell is that first they take a picture of the “affected area” and then share that picture with someone who doesn’t want it. The way I figure… Read more

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