Home

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 currently a Director of Engineering at Apple. Previously, they were the Chief Privacy Officer of Humu. They work to build respect for users into products and systems through product design, privacy-enhancing infrastructure, application security, and novel research into both theoretical and practical aspects of privacy. They were 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. They earned a Ph.D. 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

  • PEPR 2020

    September 30, 2020 by

    My incident-response talk from PEPR 2020 is here: When Things Go Wrong. Slides (with bonus section about how metrics are important but can really, really mess up your incident management) here. Template incident-handing doc is available here, as promised in my talk. Add whatever’s useful for your company — this is a bare template which… Read more

View all posts

Subscribe to Building With Respect

Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.