Deborah Pierce is a long time privacy advocate. She started out as a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and left to co-found the non-profit PrivacyActivism in 2001, where she focused on consumer education campaigns, advocacy work, and analysis of privacy issues, particularly with social networks. In 2010 PrivacyActivism produced a graphic novel (Networked: Carabella on the Run) whose main character negotiates the privacy pitfalls of college life and social networks, while fighting space aliens. The book launch took place at Comic Con. Who said advocacy work can’t be fun? Deborah was PrivacyActivism’s Executive Director until 2015.
Her ties with the Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) community stretch back to 1995 when she first attended the conference while still a law student. Deborah has always found the diversity of ideas, and the actionability of those ideas, to be necessary to law and policy. She chaired the conference in 2005. She will co-chair the conference again in 2017.
Deborah has participated widely in the privacy and civil liberties community over the years, speaking frequently on issues relating to online privacy to local bar associations, industry groups, consumer organizations and the general public.
2017 and beyond brings a shift. Deborah will continue her privacy advocacy work, but will focus most of her time writing and publishing her short stories and novels. Most of these focus on privacy and civil liberties in dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds, and often weave in goth and steampunk elements. With zombies.