Here are some notable books on privacy and security from 2024. To see a more comprehensive list of nonfiction works about privacy and security for all years, Professor Paul Schwartz and I maintain a resource page on Nonfiction Privacy + Security Books.
Meg Leta Jones, The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and the Future of Technology Policy
From Danah Doyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens: “While the cookies at the center of Meg Leta Jones’s book are not made of sugar, The Character of Consent is a sweet and delicious examination of the politics of data and privacy in our digital world.”
From Sarah E. Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America: “Who knew that the humble cookie contains the crumbs of so many of our internet-age dilemmas? Discover here the compelling, necessary backstory of how we arrived at a digital present that we never truly consented to.”
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference
From Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker: “As artificial intelligence proliferates, more and more hinges on our ability to articulate our own value. We seem to be on the cusp of a world in which workers of all kinds—teachers, doctors, writers, photographers, lawyers, coders, clerks, and more—will be replaced with, or to some degree sidelined by, their A.I. equivalents. What will get left out when A.I. steps in? . . . . [Narayanan and Kapoor] approach the question on a practical level. They urge skepticism, and argue that the blanket term ‘A.I.’ can serve as a kind of smoke screen for underperforming technologies. . . . [AI Snake Oil isn’t] just describing A.I., which continues to evolve, but characterizing the human condition.”
From Reece Rogers, WIRED: “The first step to understanding AI better is coming to terms with the vagueness of the term. . . . AI Snake Oil divides artificial intelligence into two subcategories: predictive AI, which uses data to assess future outcomes; and generative AI, which crafts probable answers to prompts based on past data. It’s worth it for anyone who encounters AI tools, willingly or not, to spend at least a little time trying to better grasp key concepts.”
Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI
From Mark Lemley, Stanford University: “A delightfully wide-ranging and eminently readable exploration of how laws, norms, technology, and our own thinking guide our behavior, and how we should think about it.”
From Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor, Institute for Advanced Study: “Balancing individual freedoms and the common good is ever more critical in the velocity of today’s technologically mediated world. Gasser and Mayer-Schönberger brilliantly illustrate that it is the ballast of societal guardrails, in their variety and agility—and not brittle technology—that can protect what we hold most dear: our rights, liberties, and values. This indispensable book is an essential primer for our uncertain present and for achieving a just, democratic future.”
Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society
From Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: “The Ordinal Society will enter the pantheon, both as a work of cross-cutting social theory and as a clear-eyed reflection on the stakes of digital technology. Marshalling an astonishing range of theoretical and empirical knowledge to build their argument, Fourcade and Healy compellingly demonstrate just how integral measurement and ranking have become to markets, politics, culture, and the very fabric of social life. And they manage to do it with both rigor and style; this book is both intellectually rewarding and a true pleasure to read”
From Natasha Schüll, author of Addiction by Design: “An incisive, crystalline account of how the tracking and scoring of personal data has come to modulate contemporary existence―not only its dreary routines, creepy supervisions, and troublesome extractions and biases, but also its experiences of delight, connection, and effervescence. Essential reading for understanding the hold of digital ordering on our world, and for thinking up ways to loosen its grip.”
Daniel J. Solove and Paul M. Schwartz, Privacy Law Fundamentals (7th edition)
Privacy Law Fundamentals (7th edition) incorporates extensive new developments in privacy law. It analyzes key provisions of privacy statutes and leading cases. This concise treatise includes tables summarizing the most important statutes and summaries of key state privacy laws. Coverage includes overviews of various agency enforcement actions. This book serves both as a powerful reference guide for seasoned privacy professionals and easily digestible guide for privacy law students. It belongs front-and-center on the desk of all those who work in or study privacy law.
Hilke Schellmann, The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now
From Eliza Griswold, author of Amity and Prosperity: “In The Algorithm, Hilke Schellmann has done the impossible: she has rendered the baffling ‘Wild West’ of AI immensely readable and approachable. Schellmann gives us the dark and hidden history of tech innovation and the marketplace through the stories of those whose lives have been smashed by its glitches.”
From Ryan Fuller, former vice president for workplace intelligence at Microsoft: “Hilke Schellmann is writing on one of the most important topics of our time—one that impacts all of us more than we realize. The book takes a balanced approach to illuminating the current state of AI in the workplace. It’s not just about incredible benefits or doomsday scenarios, but a real look into the current state of these tools, the incentive systems driving their proliferation, the mixed results they provide, and how we might ensure better outcomes. Highly recommended.”
Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State
From Jack Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard Law School: “Byron Tau’s extraordinary book recounts in engrossing detail how the U.S. government exploits massive loopholes in U.S. surveillance law to purchase in vast digital bazaars the intimate personal data that Americans unwittingly spew from their phones, cars, and computers every minute of every day. Means of Control exposes how American surveillance capitalism breeds secret government surveillance on a scale never imagined.”
From Shane Harris, author of The Watchers: “A testament to the singular and indispensable power of journalism to shine light in the dark and find answers to the hardest questions.”
Carissa Véliz, The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance
This book is intended to contribute to a better understanding of privacy from a philosophical point of view — what it is, what is at stake in its loss, and how it relates to other rights and values. The five parts that compose this book respond to five basic questions about privacy: Where does privacy come from? What is privacy? Why does privacy matter? What should we do about privacy? Where are we now?
James B. Rule, Taking Privacy Seriously: How to Create the Rights We Need While We Still Have Something to Protect
From David Murakami Wood, Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa: “This book is direct, impatient (in the best way possible), and urgent. It doesn’t waste time summarizing all the things we already know about privacy in the United States, but instead asks, What is to be done? We need a book like this.”
Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert: The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance
From Jonathan Sterne, Professor of Culture and Technology, McGill University: “At once fascinating and terrifying, The Secret Life of Data offers a kaleidoscopic view of the industries and technologies that collect, mine, churn, and trade our data, and what to do about them.”
From Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies, The University of Virginia: “I have been waiting a long time for a clearly written book that cuts through the hype and describes how data—big and small, old and new—actually operate in our lives. Neither utopian nor dystopian, The Secret Life of Data just tells it like it is.”
Özgür Heval Çınar and Aysem Diker Vanberg: The Right to Privacy Revisited: Different International Perspectives
The right to privacy is one of the rights enshrined in international human rights law. It has been a topic of interest for both academic and non-academic audiences around the world. However, with the increasing digitalisation of modern life, protecting one’s privacy has become more complicated. Both state and non-state organisations make frequent interventions in citizens’ private lives. This edited volume aims to provide an overview of recent development pertaining to the protection of the right to privacy in the different judicial systems such as the European, South Asian, African and Inter-American legal systems.
Hideyuki Matsumi, Dara Hallinan, Diana Dimitrova, Eleni Kosta and Paul De Hert: Data Protection and Privacy, Volume 15: In Transitional Times
This book covers a range of topics, including: data protection risks in European retail banks; data protection, privacy legislation, and litigation in China; synthetic data generation as a privacy-preserving technique for the training of machine learning models; effectiveness of privacy consent dialogues; legal analysis of the role of individuals in data protection law; and the role of data subject rights in the platform economy.
Hideyuki Matsumi, Dara Hallinan, Diana Dimitrova, Eleni Kosta and Paul De Hert: Data Protection and Privacy, Volume 16: Ideas that Drive Our Digital World
This interdisciplinary book takes readers on an intellectual journey into a wide range of issues and cutting-edge ideas to tackle our ever-evolving digital landscape. The first half of the book focuses on issues related to the GDPR and data. The second half of the book shifts focus to novel issues and ideas that drive our digital world.
Damian Clifford, Data Protection Law and Emotion
Original and insightful, Data Protection Law and Emotion offers a unique contribution to a contentious debate that will appeal to students and academics in data protection and privacy, policymakers, practitioners, and regulators.
Lowry Pressly, The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life
From Ben Tarnoff, New Yorker: “A radiantly original contribution to a conversation gravely in need of new thinking…takes up familiar fixations of tech discourse―privacy, mental health, civic strife―but puts them into such a new and surprising arrangement that they are nearly unrecognizable…Lawyers like to make privacy about process. Pressly makes it about power.”
From John Kaag, The Atlantic: “A probing critique of a modern public sphere that overwhelms the private realm, but it goes further than that…Pressly offers a unique vision of what can be gained by stepping back from the outside world, and the screens that try to possess us.”
Kieron O’Hara, The Seven Veils of Privacy: How Our Debates About Privacy Conceal Its Nature
From Charles Raab, Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh: “O’Hara gives us a refreshingly provocative, learned, distinctive and lively book about privacy that will stimulate important debates.”
From Woodrow Hartzog, author of Privacy’s Blueprint: “How should we talk about privacy? Before you answer that question, read this book.”
Petra Molnar, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
From Greg Grandin, professor of history, Yale University: “Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes is an unnerving look at the use of artificial intelligence for border surveillance—how governments and private business are forcing the most vulnerable and desperate of people through a virtual sieve, which captures bits of their being for profit and discipline. We are going to need another word to describe the horror that lies ahead, for dystopia now just describes everyday life. A must-read.”
From John Washington, author of The Case for Open Borders: “A deeply empathetic, intelligent, and courageous book describing not only the myriad harms imposed by militarized borders, but the inspiring human will and solidarity that break through those barriers. Molnar has produced an intrepid and essential work documenting the dangerous cocktail of tech and xenophobia besetting much of the world today. She both sounds alarm on what the near future holds, and gives hope for a better way forward. This book is a critical intervention.”
Paul Wragg, Peter Coe and Paul Mitchell, Landmark Cases in Privacy Law
From Barbara McDonald, University of Sydney Law School, Gazette of Law and Journalism: “Highly readable, with the editors and authors the Who’s Who of privacy law, and each chapter providing interesting factual or contextual background to what might otherwise be rather dry or complex legal arguments in the judgments … if you are interested in privacy and in the media, you will enjoy this book and come away enlightened and more knowledgeable, and on the look-out for further landmarks.”
From Ardi Kolah, London, UK, Journal of Data Protection & Privacy: “This new addition to Hart’s acclaimed Landmark Cases series [is] a diverse and engaging edited collection of privacy cases over the past 120 years … The case book is a valuable reference for those undertaking privacy and data protection research at graduate and post-graduate levels and are looking for a scholarly approach to charting the history of privacy case law.”
Vagelis Papakonstantinou and Paul De Hert, The Regulation of Digital Technologies in the EU
This book identifies three phenomena which are common to all EU digital technologies-relevant regulatory initiatives: act-ification, GDPR mimesis, and regulatory brutality. These three phenomena serve as indicators or early signs of a new European technology law-making paradigm that now seems ready to emerge. They divulge new-found confidence on the part of the EU digital technologies legislator, who has now asserted for itself the right to form policy options and create new rules in the field for all of Europe.
Janet S. Loengard, Light, Privacy, and Neighbors: Windows in Late Medieval and Early Modern London
With both legal and social themes, the book will be of interest to historians, architects, city planners, lawyers curious about the background for modern law on physical privacy, and anyone fascinated by the history of London.
Lindsay Weinberg, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age
Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness: “Smart University is a much-needed sociohistorical analysis of how data capture, surveillance, and austerity measures govern student life in higher education. From algorithmic recruitment and neoliberal wellness apps to the punitive digital tracking of Black student-athletes and invasive exam proctoring software, Weinberg brilliantly demonstrates that rather than enhancing learning, edtech and other digital tools often reify structural inequities. This bookis a crucial addition to critical information studies, with far-reaching implications for questions of privacy, education policy, and computing platforms.”
Audrey Watters, author of Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning: “The ‘smart university’ is a site of surveillance and austerity, and Weinberg’s book underscores that the so-called innovations promised by new technologies have both undermined learning and accelerated inequality. An important corrective to the narratives of ‘digital transformation.”
Previous Notable Privacy
and Security Book Lists
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2023
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2022
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2021
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2020
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2019
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2018
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2017
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2016
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2015
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2014
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2013
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2012
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2011
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2010
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2009
- Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2008
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Professor Daniel J. Solove is a law professor at George Washington University Law School. Through his company, TeachPrivacy, he has created the largest library of computer-based privacy and data security training, with more than 150 courses. He is also the co-organizer of the Privacy + Security Forum events for privacy professionals.
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