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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

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Featured
By popular request
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
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PEPR 2020
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
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CCPA: Bugs and engineering commentary on the California Consumer Privacy Act Regs
CCPA, the California Consumer Privacy Act, is coming into effect soon — but the regulations are still in draft. CCPA is quite hard to read (even for those of us who spend a lot of time in the space!) and the regulations have some rather interesting implications and a number of bugs. This isn’t a… Read more
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