Data and Goliath

The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

by Bruce Schneier

Number of pages: 448

BBB Library: Technology and Globalization

ISBN: 978-0393352177

About the Author

He’s an internationally renowned security technologist, and is the author of 13 books, as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers.

Editorial Review

Every morning when you put your cell phone in your pocket, you’re making an implicit bargain with the carrier: “I want to make and receive mobile calls; in exchange, I allow this company to know where I am at all times.” In this book, we get to know about the here’s a whole industry devoted to tracking you in real time, and that the longer we wait, the more people and organizations become used to having broad access to our data and the more they will fight to maintain that access. We’re at a unique time to make the change.

Book Reviews

"When it comes to what government and business are doing together and separately with personal data scooped up from the ether, Mr. Schneier is as knowledgeable as it gets…. Mr. 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.” — New York Times

"Those were the good old days. In 21st-century America, we’ve got more informants than citizens, all of them digital. Our phones and computers incessantly rat us out, broadcasting our interests, friendships, and locations to governments and corporations alike, according to renowned cryptographer and Internet privacy advocate Bruce Schneier in his new book, “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World.” — Boston Globe

"A pithy, pointed, and highly readable explanation of what we know in the wake of the Snowden revelations, with practical steps that ordinary people can take if they want to do something about the threats to privacy and liberty posed not only by the government but by the Big Data industry.” — Neal Stephenson, author of Reamde

Books on Related Topics

Wisdom to Share

Our relationship with many of the Internet companies we rely on is not a traditional com-pany-customer relationship. That’s primarily because we’re not customers. We’re products those companies sell to their real customers.

“Free” is a special price. Free warps our normal sense of cost vs. benefit, and people end up trading their personal data for less than its worth.

Privacy violations are intrusions. There’s a strong physiological basis for privacy.

The problem is that the entire weight of insecurity is compared with the incremental invasion of privacy. That’s a sloppy characterization of the trade-off.

We need to recognize that, to society as a whole, security is more critical than surveillance.

Privacy needs to be regulated in many places: At collection, during storage, upon use, during disputes.

Data becomes its own justification. The longer we wait, the more people and organizations become used to having broad access to our data and the more they will fight to maintain that access.

Today’s technology gives governments and corporations robust capabilities for mass surveillance.

Surveillance puts us at risk of abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.