Here are some notable books on privacy and security from 2022. This year, I celebrate the 15th anniversary from when I began these posts. 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.
PRIVACY: GENERAL
Danielle Keats Citron, The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age
From Daniel Solove: “Danielle Citron’s The Fight for Privacy is essential reading for anyone who cares about privacy in our modern digital age. Citron deftly uses vivid stories, ones that are tragic and shocking, to show how treacherous and harmful digital technologies have become. Citron points out how attacks on privacy are disproportionately targeted at women. She lays bare these assaults, showing us how vile, hateful, and terrifying they are — as well as how much pain and damage they cause in people’s lives. Citron writes with passion; her prose is very accessible; and her arguments are masterfully developed. She thoughtfully discusses how to balance privacy and free speech, and she offers concrete legal reforms that can really work. Citron’s The Fight for Privacy is one of the best books about privacy I’ve read.”
From Shoshana Zuboff, author, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: “Privacy is politics, and if we want it back we must fight for it. In this open-hearted and down-to-earth book, Danielle Keats Citron offers reasons for optimism among the ruins of our once-cherished privacy. Lawmakers and citizens alike, this book is for you.”
Daniel J. Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, Breached! Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It
From Danielle Citron: “”With Breached!, Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog have made a foundational contribution to data security law. With deep insight, compelling storytelling, and even humor (and some needed fright), the scholars show that lawmakers must better understand that beneath the high-tech wizardry and data security do’s and don’ts are normal, fallible people. This book is a must read for everyone concerned about the security of our personal data. It is creative and practical in its solutions. Bravo!” — Danielle Keats Citron, Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law and Caddell and Chapman Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law.”
From Bruce Schneier, author of Data and Goliath and Click Here to Kill Everybody: “Data security is one of the most challenging problems of our times. Solove and Hartzog provide a readable and smart account of how policymakers keep focusing on the wrong details at the expense of the bigger picture. Breached! is a book for anyone who is interested in why data breaches keep happening and what the law should do about it.”
Discussion of Breached! with Bruce Schneier
Maurice E. Stucke, Breaking Away: How to Regain Control Over Our Data, Privacy, and Autonomy
From the book description: “Breaking Away sounds a warning call alerting readers that their privacy and autonomy concerns are indeed warranted, and the remedies deserve far greater attention than they have received from our leading policymakers and experts to date. Through the various prisms of economic theory, market data, policy, and law, the book offers a clear and accessible insight into how a few powerful firms – Google, Apple, Facebook (Meta), and Amazon – have used the same anticompetitive playbook and manipulated the current legal regime for their gain at our collective expense…Policymakers, scholars, and business owners, managers, and entrepreneurs seeking to compete and innovate in the digital platform economy will find the book an invaluable source of information.”
Jodi Daniels, Data Reimagined: Building Trust One Byte at a Time
From the book description: “In Data Reimagined, data privacy and cybersecurity experts Jodi and Justin Daniels show how to leverage your company’s privacy and security practices to transform your relationship with customers and earn their trust. Privacy and security demands evolve quickly, putting business leaders and executives in a race against time. Data Reimagined will help you fast-track your approach, create trust in your data collection, and safeguard this trust with proper data use and sharing practices. You’ll learn security measures for common vulnerabilities and how to use forward thinking as a competitive advantage to attract and build customer trust. Get ahead of the curve with this must-read for all business leaders searching for ways to build customer trust and protect their business.”
Jacqueline Lipton, Our Data, Ourselves
From Carl Coleman, Profess of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law: “There are few resources available for nonspecialists to learn about data privacy issues. This book fills this gap by providing a comprehensive overview of issues relevant to ordinary citizens, in language understandable by all.”
From David Hickton, Founding Director of Pitt Cyber: “A practical primer for anyone wishing to understand why and how their data is being used—and how individuals can attempt to protect themselves. Our Data, Ourselves also offers an overview of existing privacy protections and is ultimately a damning glimpse into the lack thereof in the United States.”
Karen Levy, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance
From danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens: “Leveraging compelling ethnographic fieldwork into the dynamics at play in the trucking sector, Levy brilliantly reveals how our collective fantasies about the future of automation are naive. This book invites readers to grapple with how technology and surveillance reconfigure work in subtle and profound ways. Data Driven is a must-read for both those who think AI is our salvation and those who see automation as the devil.”
From Julia Angwin, author of Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance: “Truckers were the first to experience working for an algorithm rather than a human boss. With grace and insight, Karen Levy chronicles their struggles to maintain dignity in the face of constant surveillance while reminding us of the algorithmic future that is coming for all of us.”
Palmer Rampell, Genres of Privacy in Postwar America
From Harrison Blackman, Los Angeles Review of Books: “Genres of Privacy is a brainy and painstaking literature review of a variety of postwar genre works and their relationship to contemporary privacy-related issues… Rampell’s expansive definition of the right to privacy gives his book a wide sweep and provides a view into several different issues and genres, lending it an immediate relevance.”
From Sean McCann, author of A Pinnacle of Feeling: “In crisp and lucid prose, Palmer Rampell gives us new and compelling views of the ambitious genre writers who explored the rough edges of the postwar liberal consensus. Bolstered with rare finds from Rampell’s original archival research, this book brilliantly shows the unnoted power of genre fiction.”
Mark Andrejevic and Neil Selwyn, Facial Recognition
From the book description: “In this timely book, Neil Selwyn and Mark Andrejevic provide a critical introduction to facial recognition. Outlining its complex social history and future technical forms, as well as its conceptual and technical underpinnings, the book considers the arguments being advanced for the continued uptake of facial recognition. In assessing these developments, the book argues that we are at the cusp of a generational shift in surveillance technology that will reconfigure our expectations of anonymity in shared and public spaces. Throughout, the book addresses a deceptively simple question: do we really want to live in a world where our face is our ID?”
Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Simson L. Garfinkel, Law and Policy for the Quantum Age
From Adam Shostack, author of Threat Modeling: Designing for Security: “This book is broad, deep, and accessible – a rare combination in a single volume. This book opened my eyes to the complex scenarios that make up the future, and then gave me frameworks for understanding them. Highly recommended!”
From Stewart Baker, former General Counsel, NSA: “[A] gracefully written and deeply informative look at the commercial and policy prospects of quantum computing.”
Annie Machon, The Privacy Mission: Achieving Ethical Data for Our Lives Online
From Cory Doctorow, novelist: “Everything we do today involves the internet; everything we do tomorrow will require it. And yet, our virtual world is a lawless one, where governments and corporations trample human rights and insist it doesn’t matter because it’s the internet. This is a book that shows you how far our human rights have slipped, and how we can take them back.”
Mikko Hypponen, If It’s Smart, It’s Vulnerable
From Misha Glenny, Financial Times: “What makes him stand out is that, although he is a master coder and cyber security engineer, he is a superb communicator.”
From Kristie Lu Stout, CNN anchor and correspondent: “An excellent and engaging survey of cybersecurity…”
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge, Access Rules: Freeing Data from Big Tech for a Better Future
From Georgetown Public Policy Review: “This book. . . .offered insights, regardless of the reader’s familiarity levels with technology policy. Access Rules offers concrete solutions and poses critical open-ended questions. We live in an increasingly digital age, and this book is truly a must-read for all policy students and policymakers.”
From Frank Pasquale, author of The Black Box Society: “Access Rules is simultaneously a practical guide to taming Big Tech’s power and a profound contribution to the political economy of digitalization. Written in a brisk and accessible style, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in a positive-sum future for global information flows.”
Sarah Lamdan, Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information
From the book description: “In this book, Lamdan contends that privatization and tech exceptionalism have prevented us from creating effective legal regulation. This in turn has allowed oversized information oligopolies to coalesce. In addition to specific legal and market-based solutions, Lamdan calls for treating information like a public good and creating digital infrastructure that supports our democratic ideals.”
Jody Westby, D&O Guide to Cyber Governance: Fiduciary Duties in the Digital Age
From the book description: “Written by leading expert Jody Westby, this resource provides the basic information directors and officers need to know to meet their fiduciary duties, exercise appropriate cyber governance, and protect their organization against shareholder derivative and securities lawsuits.”
GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE
Brian Hochman, The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States
From Andrew Lanham, New Republic: “Smart, entertaining, and occasionally alarming. . . Hochman narrates a century and a half of wiretapping, from the Civil War to the War on Terror. What emerges is a powerful prehistory of today’s private sector and government surveillance regimes. Hochman reveals the surprising strength of public resistance to all forms of electronic surveillance until the 1960s. And, crucially, he shows how national leaders used the racial backlash politics of the late 1960s to normalize government eavesdropping and build the world we live in today.”
From Grayson Clary, Washington Post: “[This] thoughtful, searching history reminds us that the practice of wiretapping was steeped from the start in lawlessness…Wiretapping, in the public’s mind, was what crooks did…The Listeners does a wonderful job evoking a world shaped by intense distaste for surveillance, even if the sharp emotions that once energized the battle now seem lost to history.”
David Lyon, Pandemic Surveillance
From Evan Selinger, LA Review of Books: “Since future pandemics will undoubtedly occur, it is essential that we establish trustworthy institutions to conduct public health surveillance. Hopefully Lyon’s insights will help shape the hard conversations that lie ahead…By integrating some of the core insights from privacy theory, data justice, and care ethics, he creates a novel conceptual toolkit that’s a solid theoretical starting point for critically analyzing pandemic surveillance.”
From LSE Review of Books: “This is a timely contribution that highlights the global amplification of surveillance in the pandemic age and recognises its likely long-term consequences.”
Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control
From Evan Osnos, The New Yorker: “A truly groundbreaking investigation . . . The global scope and deep detail of [Chin and Lin’s] account retires the notion of an ‘all-seeing’ surveillance as some future scenario; it is happening already. They will open your eyes to the astonishing intersection of data, politics, and the human body. Anyone who cares about the future of technology, of China, or of free will cannot afford to miss this.”
From Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy: “Josh Chin and Liza Lin show how some of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated advances, along with some of its most exalted companies, have enabled a vast experiment in Chinese social engineering that is terrifying and seductive in equal measure. Surveillance technologies, both inside China and around the world, are creating an alternative to the liberal order far more swiftly than most people believe. This book gives us a vital glimpse into what might replace it.”
Amy B. Zegart, Spies, Lies, and Algortihms: The History and Future of American Intelligence
From Dina Temple-Raston, Washington Post: “Zegart provides not just a sweeping history of the U.S. intelligence community but also nuggets that help place events in a new context. . . . A perfect primer for anyone trying to understand how the intelligence community is meeting the challenges of the digital age.”
From Harvey Klehr, Wall Street Journal: “A lucid and sobering account of how digital and other technological breakthroughs are ‘generating new uncertainties and empowering new adversaries’ for the United States at a time when its intelligence agencies are uniquely stressed. . . . Zegart offers no easy solutions but warns that the world of cyberwarfare requires both a ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘mobilization in milliseconds.’ In the new world, national security must take precedence over intelligence gathering, enabling decision makers to respond forcefully and quickly to cyberattacks. The divide between Washington and tech giants must be bridged or a day of reckoning will surely come.”
PRIVACY AND SPEECH
Amy Gajda, Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy
From The New York Times: “Wry and fascinating…Gajda is a nimble storyteller [and] an insightful guide to a rich and textured history that gets easily caricatured, especially when a culture war is raging.”
From The Atlantic: “Gajda’s chronicle reveals an enduring tension between principles of free speech and respect for individuals’ private lives. But it also throws into sharp relief how much the context for that debate has changed in the past several decades . . . just the sort of road map we could use right now.”
Jeff Kosseff, The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shapes Online Speech
From Library Journal: “Amid surging social media and online speech wars, readers concerned about the future of free speech, privacy, and the law will appreciate Kosseff’s ability to deftly place the many-sided anonymity debate in the context of constitutional values and social norms.”
From Anupam Chander, professor at Georgetown Law: “A superb book, accessibly written, that canvasses the history of anonymous speech and its interaction with the law. Jeff Kosseff has created a major framework for any future discussions of anonymity.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Orly Lobel, The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
From Science Magazine: “A masterful analysis…Lobel expertly describes both the opportunities and the discrimination engendered by new technologies, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI).”
From Kirkus: “Enthusiastic yet measured argument for technology’s potential to promote equality across many facets of culture and industry.”
From Daniel Solove: “[A}n exuberant and insightful account of the bright side of AI and related digital technologies. Her book is filled with fascinating facts and engaging stories. It’s a refreshing perspective and a wonderful read.”
Ready my interview with Orly Lobel.
Daniel J. Solove is John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. He is the founder of TeachPrivacy, a company that provides computer-based privacy and data security training. His most recent book is Breached! Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It, published by Oxford University Press 2022.
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Previous Notable Privacy
and Security Book Lists
- 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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