Engineering & security leader
Most of what has gone wrong in consumer software comes down to one arrangement: products are built to extract from the people using them, and the terms of that exchange were written by the people doing the extracting.
I work on the alternative at four altitudes — a standard, a protocol, a product, and a practice. Each one makes the same argument in a form someone can actually adopt.
One problem approached at four levels: what is owed, how to prove it, what it looks like built, and what to do tonight.
Standard
Eleven commitments setting out what technology owes the people it is built on — covering data, relationships, AI, and the verification that any of it is true. Terms of service written in reverse: drafted by the people whose data, attention, and memory the products are made from, rather than by the companies making them.
Any use that serves us is permitted; any use that serves anyone else at our expense is not.
Protocol
A question can be answered without surrendering the record that answers it. Q2D has the custodian of the data evaluate a signed, typed contract — question, purpose, recipient, maximum scope — locally, and return only the bounded answer. Nothing else about the record moves, or needs to be trusted not to.
The question travels. The record stays.
Product
A private, structured memory for the people in your life. Records stay encrypted on the device. The people in them can maintain their own details, so what you hold stays current without you maintaining it. Sharing is per-field and revocable, and never travels onward. You choose which AI provider ever sees any of it — or none.
Practice
Plain-English device safety for parents — no fear and no jargon, which is most of what makes the existing advice useless. Before You Hand Over the iPhone is out; the iPad guide is in editing and the rest of the series follows. A free weekly tip, and short walkthroughs you can follow on screen while you change the setting.
Also
Accessible editions of classic literature — the same books, made readable for people who bounced off them the first time. Unrelated to the work above, and the one I do simply because it is worth doing.
I am an engineering and security leader. Over twenty-five years — fifteen of them in cybersecurity — I have built teams and modernized systems across startups, non-profits, enterprise organizations, and Big Tech, most recently at CrowdStrike and AWS. I am a Vice President in Core Engineering at Goldman Sachs.
I hold an MS in Cybersecurity Management from Purdue, and a graduate certificate in Strategic Management from Harvard.
Everything on this site is independent of my employer: built on my own time and my own resources, not connected to my work, and representing only my own views.
More on how these fit together, and why the same argument is worth making four times, is on the about page.
Happy to hear from you about any of the above.