Lorrie Faith Cranor’s latest effort to educate people about privacy is a short, colorfully illustrated book written for an audience who probably can’t read it yet.
Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Pittsburgh school’s CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratorywrote Privacy, Please! after publishing more than 200 research papers, spending a 2016–2017 stint as the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologistand making a quilt and dress illustrated with commonly used weak passwords.
In a Zoom video call, Cranor says she got the idea for this self-published children’s book when planning for a privacy-outreach event at a local library and getting input from the librarians there revealed an unmet need for one. “I asked them for their recommendations, and they didn’t know of any children’s books about privacy,” she recounts. “And you know, there really isn’t much out there.”
Especially for a younger audience. The Eyemongera frequently recommended kid’s book by George Washington University Law School professor Daniel J. Solove published in 2020, is aimed at readers ages 6 to 9. “Then I started thinking about, well, what would I want in a book for preschool kids about privacy?” Cranor says.
The answer: 25 pages of her words and artwork by illustrator Alena Karabach, in which our nameless protagonist, often accompanied by a pet dog, turtle, and goldfish, explains basic concepts of privacy.
• “Sometimes I want to be alone. I don’t want anyone to see me, hear me, or come too close. This is called privacy.”
• “Sometimes I listen to music on my headphones so that only I can hear.”
