Emphasizing other people’s perspectives on the demonstrations that readers are developing, Chapter 7 opens by asking readers to imagine specific people who they might encounter in an informal learning setting and to reflect on why those people might care about their topic area and what they might already know about it. The chapter then reviews several examples of connections between language and broader, real-world experiences that many people are likely to have had. One of the advertising examples uses Bounty’s "quicker picker upper" phrase to show morphological processes. One of the cell phone examples uses mistakes in automatic speech recognition to show sociolinguistic comparisons across accents and genders. One of the popular song examples uses mondegreens (or misperceptions of lyrics such as Taylor Swift’s "lonely Starbucks lovers") to show phonotactic regularities. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to write down specific ways that people might encounter their demonstration’s central topic in everyday life.

Chapter 4 discusses the topic of reactive surveillance, such as thermal imagers, decryption tools, and devices that reveal the phone numbers that are being dialed on a telephone. These are tools which the government needs in order to respond to privacy-enhancing technology used by private citizens. Although reactive surveillance tools can be very intrusive in some ways, in most contexts they are only being used to learn information that would ordinarily be public, but has been hidden by new forms of privacy-enhancing technology, such as heat lamps, encryption tools, and cell phones. In evaluating reactive surveillance, we need to consider both the level of criminal activity that is potentially masked by the privacy-enhancing technology, and how the privacy-enhancing technology has affected society’s expectations of privacy. In the context of encryption, we need to assist law enforcement even further, by creating a key escrow system which will give law enforcement the ability to decrypt any piece of data once they have obtained the proper legal authority