🧑💻About the Author
Privacy geek in residence. | A privacy lawyer aspired to become a privacy engineer. | Director at Bilgi Privacy Innovation Lab | Founder at Verilogy
Last updated
Privacy geek in residence. | A privacy lawyer aspired to become a privacy engineer. | Director at Bilgi Privacy Innovation Lab | Founder at Verilogy
Last updated
I was always a dreamer.
In my childhood, my imagination was shaped by Dragon Lance, Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons role-playing, and even creating maps and stories on the school bus while I was ten-something.
Then I met Tolkien, his works are still the driving fuel of my imagination and creativity. Star Wars, the prequels made me love science fiction and considering the FX Darth Maul lightsaber, I carried from Boston back to Turkey -which was literally bigger than my body- demonstrates my passion.
In high school, I was fully focused on becoming a musician. I was practicing piano for hours after school. I was the keyboardist of four different high school bands of Tarsus American College music band “Echo”, and played in festivals and bars to earn money.
We even released an album, which become a local hit in Spotify's Top 50 Viral Playlist and won awards in high school music competitions.
Then I started law school but I was always intrigued by tech and creative things more than dull textbooks and the education system.
I got more involved in entrepreneurship thanks to the Turkish Entrepreneurship Foundation and eventually, I became a data protection lawyer. Then, it turned into a passion that made me build more than seven products in privacy and start my own company Verilogy.
I am also the director of Istanbul Bilgi University Privacy Innovation Lab where students and stakeholders gain interdisciplinary skills in modern software development, privacy engineering, data security, and legal compliance to fuel data protection and privacy innovation.
This journey thought me a lot with regard to innovation around privacy and paved my way to becoming the director of the Privacy Innovation Lab.
Where we work with undergrad and LLM students to innovate on privacy.
Our current projects include developing an open-source local differential privacy library, public awareness around privacy activism, privacy patterns development, and a privacy engineering track for the master's program.
In PIL, working with young minds, and trying to teach them about privacy was a new challenge. I learned the hard truth, as starting with the privacy legislation itself was not intriguing for the students.
When we set out to work on privacy innovation, we saw that they don't know anything about privacy and more importantly, they didn't even care. Some of them didn’t even know how to close their mics. So, I needed to improvise.
To teach them about privacy, we needed things that bring it to their attention first.
That is why I started the year with a documentary called General Magic. It's about how engineers from Apple quit the company to create some of the best Apple products like the iPhone.
Then helped the students come up with their own innovative projects and we did pitching competitions that fed their interest.
Then when they are finally hooked, I kicked off the why privacy matters part.
And we started storytelling around how our data is used against us, and how it can harm us, or even harm democracies. We invited amazing storytellers such as Aral Balkan to tell us stories about privacy.
And we made it fun and engaging and it managed to hook a lot of students.
We were over 30 people working on privacy projects at the end of the year. By telling them about privacy using creativity and art rather than something boring and legalese.
Thus, I noticed this crazy little thing called a “creative privacy mindset”.
As a person with ADHD looking down at long texts or watching long videos has always been a challenge for me.
Therefore I always tend to learn better when the information is flowing through something original and creative, out of the box, and using different ways to keep me coming back to learn more.
As a Tolkien, Frank Herbert, and Douglas Adams fan, Magic the Gathering cards collector, and fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, my imagination and the appetite to constantly create something have come up with a new plan.
The idea of sharing what I learned on my road to privacy engineering with a science fiction-themed comic book that utilizes environmental storytelling seemed crazy enough to give it a try.
Why not teach the privacy engineering skillset I have gained over the years, using the newly learned skills in no-code development together with the power of magically creating any kind of digital art with creative AI, and then adding some good storytelling and original soundtracks to turn this into a comic book that teaches privacy engineering to privacy lawyers.
Therefore, I proudly present my initial work on Hitchhiker’s Guide To Privacy Engineering. Here you will find a story-driven, immersive cyberpunk artwork coupled with some cosmic horror elements having babies with the most ambitious privacy engineering knowledgebase.
I hope you enjoy learning more about the technical side of privacy and use this book on your own journey of becoming a privacy engineer.
This is quite a passion project of mine so loved working on every detail of it, hope it finds a connection with the creative children in all of us.
Yours forever, Mert Can Boyar.
The next section will provide you with basic knowledge of how everything started which will be enough for you to start your journey.
