Lorrie Faith Cranor’s latest effort to educate people about privacy is a short, colorfully illustrated book written for an audience that probably can’t read it yet.
Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Pittsburgh school CyLab Usable privacy and security labwrote Privacy, please! after publishing more than 200 research articles, an issue of a 2016–2017 stint as Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commissionand make a duvet And dress illustrated with commonly used weak passwords.
In a Zoom video call, Cranor says she came up with the idea for this self-published children’s book when she was planning a privacy outreach event at a local library and input from the librarians there indicated there was an unmet need for it. “I asked them for their recommendations, but they didn’t know any children’s books about privacy,” she says. “And you know, there really isn’t much.”
Especially for a younger audience. The Eye Tradera frequently recommended children’s book by George Washington University Law School professor Daniel J. Solove, published in 2020, is intended for readers ages 6 to 9. “Then I started thinking about: What would I want in a book for preschoolers about privacy?” says Cranor.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Lorrie Faith Cranor]
The answer: 25 pages of her words and artwork by illustrator Alena Karabakh, in which our nameless protagonist, often accompanied by a dog, turtle and goldfish, explains the basic concepts of privacy.
• “Sometimes I want to be alone. I don’t want anyone to see me, hear me, or get too close. This is called privacy.”
• “Sometimes I listen to music through my headphones so only I can hear it.”
• “When my best friend comes over, we play in my clubhouse. It’s our private space!”
• “Sometimes I want to make works of art without anyone watching.”
• “Privacy can help us have more fun! Superheroes need privacy to put on their costumes.”
• “My parents lock their phones so no one can see their private things.”
• “When I play online games, I use a funny name and photo so that strangers don’t know who I really am.”
• “It’s nice to put away my technology and play outside where there is a lot of privacy.”
Cranor drew inspiration for this from a previous public outreach project: Privacy illustrateda workshop she started in 2014 to invite people of all ages to create images of what they thought the concept looked like.
For example, that’s where the turtle came from, she remembers. “I had never thought about turtles this way until I saw people drawing pictures of turtles and saying that turtles carry their privacy with them.” The goldfish, meanwhile, is a fin metaphor for having no privacy at all. “I said to the illustrator, make the goldfish look as sad as you can,” says Cranor.
The first design also featured a dog who gave himself some privacy by retreating to a doghouse. But the kindergarten teachers Cranor consulted pointed out that none of their city children had doghouses and might not recognize a reference to Peanuts anyway. Instead, the dog hides under a bed.
At no point do we see this child’s entire face, a choice Cranor made early on.
“I also wanted the main character to be a little ambiguous about whether they are a boy or a girl and what race they are,” she says. The idea was to give every child who reads it the opportunity to see a part of themselves in it.
There is also little technology on display, apart from one page where the main character sits in front of an iMac G4 that would now be at least 21 years old and must therefore be some kind of hand-me-down.
And any adult reader looking for explain-as-I-5 advice on reading lengthy privacy policies won’t find it in this little book. “Many of the more complicated lessons about online privacy just didn’t seem appropriate for this audience,” says Cranor. “But I didn’t want any digital privacy there at all, because hey, they already play with their parents’ phones.”
Moreover, it won’t be long before members of the book’s preschool audience will need some basic knowledge of the basics of tech privacy. “You know, next year they’re coming online, and that’s why I wanted to plant the seeds for that,” says Cranor.
As for the parents, aunts and uncles and other adults who read the book to children, Cranor says she hopes this work will encourage them to listen a little more. “It’s okay to say you don’t want to have your picture taken, and this is a struggle for parents because parents like to take pictures of their children,” she says.
The book’s website includes a discussion guide for parents and a door hanger exercise for kids that invites them to turn a cut-up cereal box into a version of a hotel door label (“Privacy, Please!” or “Let’s Play!”) for their rooms.
Cranor expects that a large portion of the sales of this $14.99 book — which she self-published after realizing it would take much less time than finding an agent to sell a traditional publisher the idea — will involve other privacy professionals. “They want to buy it all for the children in their lives,” she explains.
But I’m thinking of another potential target group: founders of large tech companies who demonstrably don’t pay enough attention to privacy and miss people’s taste in technology – especially founders with young children of their own.
By that I mean Mark Zuckerberg. Did Cranor send him a copy of the book? “I don’t have that,” she says. “I mean, it’s probably worth a try.”
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