About

I’m Doug Alexander. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I write about technology, privacy, and the policy questions that sit between them.

I spent about twenty years working in software — engineering, then consulting, then a stretch doing technical work for organizations that were trying to figure out what their data practices actually were and whether those practices were defensible. That last part is what eventually pulled me toward writing. The gap between what technology companies say they do with personal information and what they actually do is enormous, and it’s been enormous for long enough that it stopped being surprising and started being interesting.

I write here about privacy law and its gaps, about the technical mechanisms that make modern surveillance possible, about the security practices that individuals can actually use rather than the ones that sound good in articles. I try to write for people who are technically literate but not specialists — people who use these systems and have reasonable questions about them that are hard to answer well in a short format.

I’m also interested in the New England tech ecosystem specifically — Boston, Cambridge, the Route 128 corridor — and occasionally write about that.

If you’re looking for my consulting work, this isn’t the right place. This is where I write for myself.