Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who's with you. Your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you're unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google knows what you're thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it.
The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and advertisements we each see, but also the prices we're offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches.
Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we've gained? In Data and Goliath, security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He brings his bestseller up-to-date with a new preface covering the latest developments, and then shows us exactly what we can do to reform government surveillance programs, shake up surveillance-based business models, and protect our individual privacy. You'll never look at your phone, your computer, your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again.
"Bruce Schneier's amazing book is the best overview of privacy and security ever written."--Clay Shirky
About the Author :
Bruce Schneier is a renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by the London Economist. He has written more than one dozen books, including the 2014 New York Times bestseller Data and Goliath. He teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Dan John Miller is an American actor and musician. In the Oscar-winning Walk the Line, he starred as Johnny Cash's guitarist and best friend, Luther Perkins, and has also appeared in George Clooney's Leatherheads and My One and Only, with Renée Zellweger. An award-winning audiobook narrator, he has garnered multiple Audie Award nominations, has twice been named a Best Voice by AudioFile magazine, and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards and a Listen-Up Award from Publishers Weekly.
Review :
"An accessible, detailed look at a disturbing aspect of contemporary life."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
"Dan John Miller narrates this mind-blowing exposé with an engaging tone."
-- "AudioFile"
"Lucid and compelling."
-- "Washington Post"
"Lucid and fast paced...Schneier describes with dismay the erosion of privacy, then lays out a strategy for turning the tide."
-- "Boston Globe"
"Mr. Schneier is as knowledgeable as it gets...Schneier's use of concrete examples of bad behavior with data will make even skeptics queasy and potentially push the already paranoid over the edge. Mr. Schneier writes clearly and simply about a complex subject."
-- "New York Times"
"Schneier did not need the Snowden revelations, as important as they are, to understand the growing threat to personal privacy worldwide from government and corporate surveillance--he's been raising the alarm for nearly two decades. But this important book does more than detail the threat; it tells the average low-tech citizen what steps he or she can take to limit surveillance and thus fight those who are seeking to strip privacy from all of us."
-- "Seymour M. Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of Chain of Command"
"Schneier exposes the many and surprising ways governments and corporations monitor all of us, providing a must-read User's Guide to Life in the Data Age. His recommendations for change should be part of a much-needed public debate."
-- "Richard A. Clarke, former chief counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, and author of Cyber War"
"Serves as both a primer to protecting your personal privacy and a guide to reforming business and government surveillance practices."
-- "Barnes&Noble.com"
"The public conversation about surveillance in the digital age would be a good deal more intelligent if we all read Bruce Schneier first."
-- "Malcolm Gladwell, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Blink"
"Thought provoking, absorbing, and comprehensive."
-- "Forbes"
