Fans pick 100 books like Industry Unbound

Privacy’s Blueprint presents a deep, vivid, and concrete account of how technology companies design devices, websites, and software in ways that diminish privacy. Design choices are frequently clandestine, built so that people don’t notice them or how they are being pushed and manipulated into sharing more data or making choices that surrender their privacy. With clear and engaging examples, Hartzog illuminates these shadowy designs and shows how they work. He contends that privacy law can’t be effective unless it regulates design. According to Hartzog, design can be regulated in ways that aren’t overly controlling or stifling to innovation. This is a great book, filled with countless insights, and it is highly accessible. 

Hate Crimes in Cyberspace begins with a series of horror stories, showing in the most compelling and visceral way the harm caused by online harassment. Citron shows us that online harassment is disproportionately focused on women and marginalized people. Far from rare, the harassment is frighteningly prevalent. The harassers make vile threats of rape and murder, post nude photos, engage in doxing, and spew disturbing messages of hate. All the more terrifying is that the people seething with hatred are not in a distant faraway land. They are here among us; they are professionals, students, and others that appear polite in person. 

After opening our eyes to this harrowing shadowy world, Citron discusses how the law ought to respond. She argues that civil rights law can effectively address the problem – but the law must evolve to make this happen.  She also thoughtfully explores how protections against harassment don’t infringe… show more.

I had a hard time choosing which book by Richards to include, as his earlier book, Intellectual Privacy, is a superb discussion about how privacy is essential for our expression and consumption of ideas. In Why Privacy Matters, Richards broadens his focus to discuss other reasons why privacy is important. He debunks common myths, such as privacy is dying or privacy is about creepiness. In an eloquent and clear way, Richards explains why privacy matters for our identity, freedom, and protection. This book powerfully shows that how we think about privacy is essential to effectively safeguarding it. Richards writes in an engaging and accessible way, but his book has tremendous depth and insight. 

Anita Allen is one of the pioneers of privacy law who began exploring privacy issues long before most others. She holds a PhD in philosophy, and in all her books, she explores privacy in a rich theoretical way but also a personal way too. Deeply humanistic, her work is thought-provoking and wide-ranging. I could have listed many of her great books, but the one that stands out the most to me is Uneasy Access. One of the earliest books written about privacy, Uneasy Access discusses privacy in the most illuminating way. The book makes an enormous contribution in discussing the role that privacy plays in women’s lives, but its conceptual work on privacy provides such clarity that it makes this book one of the best theoretical discussions of privacy across all contexts. 

Kevin Mitnick is often called the “world’s most famous hacker,” and he spent years in prison for his crimes. However, he’s since reformed, and now advises individuals and corporations on how to protect their data. In this book, he talks about strategies that we can all use to better protect our data from exploitation by corporations and governments. Although it’s never possible to be truly “invisible” (despite the title of his book) he presents some great strategies to lower your risk profile.

Privacy Is Power gets to the heart of why we should all be worried about encroachments on our privacy. 

Carissa Veliz is a philosopher and a talented writer who brings complex and profound ideas to life on the page. Some writing about technology can feel dry and detached, but Veliz makes you understand viscerally how the impact of technology is a human, not a technological issue. 

When I first heard about cryptography at university, it sounded like mathematical magic. After looking into some randomly chosen crypto books, I was discouraged from digging deeper because they were full of math details.

Understanding Cryptography was different. It was aimed at engineering students like me, and it provided me with the most relevant facts necessary for designing secure devices. Since then, it has always been a great reference book for me.

I love this book because Perlroth chronicles the proliferation of cyberweapons, which began in the hands of mischievous young hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in widely used software. Once some of those hackers joined the NSA, their tools were developed into sophisticated weapons to undercut technological developments in enemy states like Iran.

Once NSA’s hacks leaked to the wider world, they spawned an arms race and fueled rampant criminal ransomware attacks on vulnerable institutions. Informed by Perlroth’s book, I see a future in which dwindling human fertility and the ballooning costs of advanced weaponry will enhance the military role of cyber-attacks, leading to Mutually Assured Cyber Destruction, in which many countries have cyberweapons deeply embedded in the critical infrastructure of their adversaries, just waiting to activate them.

Do you still have a Facebook account? I do—though I feel increasingly torn about it. I still use it for professional purposes, but part of me would gladly delete it (not, you know, that anything would actually get deleted, I suspect…). Christopher Wylie agrees. This wonderful account traces his role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a mysterious “political consulting firm” used Facebook data to help swing the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s successful presidential run. It’s a very personal story, which I love, and we get an insider’s view not only on the shocking and frankly terrifying practices Wylie became embroiled in, but also his own moral struggle to get out of them. A wonderful book.

In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Constitution guaranteed a “right to privacy” as it struck down Connecticut’s longstanding ban on the sale and use of birth control. (Amazing trivia: the state legislator who drafted the state’s 1879 anti-contraceptive law was P.T. Barnum.) Garrow’s history recounts the decades-long efforts of Connecticut activists to challenge the restriction, and how lawyers shifted their choice of plaintiffs from doctors asserting the law interfered with their ability to provide medical advice to married women claiming a right to privacy within their marriages. In the years following Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court gradually expanded that novel privacy doctrine, extending it to the intimate decisions of unmarried people, and eventually to cover the right to an abortion with Roe v. Wade.