Privacy is a hot topic in the news of late. This book goes right to the heart of this issue. The writing is excellent. Julia Angwin speaks from and describes her own experiences with all aspects of the subject. She places her story in the context of her life and her own family. I appreciate this personal touch and the relationship to real life. Too often non-fiction books of this sort present a logical and scholarly analysis of the problem that is difficult to relate to one's own life. This book does not do that; it is relevant.
I am a technically savvy person only to an average degree. But I could tell from her discussion that the author is not seriously techie about any of the subjects she discussed. Advanced dissertations on the topics in the book was not what I was looking for when I bought the book, and if that is what you want, this is not the book for you. However, if you want to understand how privacy in your life has been impacted by government and industry, then this book is a must read.
See Clubs
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Join or create book clubs
Choose books together
Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance Hardcover – February 25, 2014
by
Julia Angwin
(Author)
{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$6.77","priceAmount":6.77,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"6","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"77","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"MGDHJzYGyMIdRc4qyjna79v7EdXCv0G0%2ByysNYGW0Cv%2BJ%2BuIJfeBiiKlJ5smVUj7XEBJPi9fhWp107%2B7E2EYbjVBF19lY06jJ66dfKzxDxGHO6BUtd1%2FH00jgiVA6e6LB1l5Ny5fw%2FxIQT1APacvZ3lozYUK%2FQkG4VrUb8KDC%2BHWU1I7QbsrG%2Fwnxe6G%2B6WY","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}]}
Purchase options and add-ons
An inside look at who's watching you, what they know and why it matters. We are being watched.
We see online ads from websites we've visited, long after we've moved on to other interests. Our smartphones and cars transmit our location, enabling us to know what's in the neighborhood but also enabling others to track us. And the federal government, we recently learned, has been conducting a massive data-gathering surveillance operation across the Internet and on our phone lines.
In Dragnet Nation, award-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin reports from the front lines of America's surveillance economy, offering a revelatory and unsettling look at how the government, private companies, and even criminals use technology to indiscriminately sweep up vast amounts of our personal data. In a world where we can be watched in our own homes, where we can no longer keep secrets, and where we can be impersonated, financially manipulated, or even placed in a police lineup, Angwin argues that the greatest long-term danger is that we start to internalize the surveillance and censor our words and thoughts, until we lose the very freedom that makes us unique individuals. Appalled at such a prospect, Angwin conducts a series of experiments to try to protect herself, ranging from quitting Google to carrying a "burner" phone, showing how difficult it is for an average citizen to resist the dragnets' reach.
Her book is a cautionary tale for all of us, with profound implications for our values, our society, and our very selves.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTimes Books
- Publication dateFebruary 25, 2014
- Dimensions6.55 x 1.02 x 9.46 inches
- ISBN-109780805098075
- ISBN-13978-0805098075
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
This item: Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance
$6.77$6.77
Get it May 10 - 13
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
+
$17.69$17.69
Get it as soon as Saturday, May 11
In Stock
Total price:
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Try again!
Added to Cart
One of these items ships sooner than the other.
Choose items to buy together.
Customers who bought this item also bought
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Welcome to life in a society of ubiquitous surveillance, tracking and data mining... Angwin, a Wall Street Journal reporter who along with her colleagues has produced essential reporting on privacy and security … aims to illuminate the costs of living with systems that track nearly everything we do, think or say… [and] she performs a herculean effort to regain her privacy… A useful, well-reported study.” ―The Los Angeles Times
“I read Julia Angwin's new book Dragnet Nation… I heartily recommend it to you… [The book is an] antidote to Big Brother's big chill.” ―Bill Moyers
“A deeply researched book that is completely of the moment. Dragnet Nation moves right to the top of the list of books we should all read about privacy.” ―Salon
“Angwin's warning that ‘information is power' resonates.” ―The Daily Beast
“Angwin elegantly chronicles this tragedy of the digital commons at the level of policy and our individual civil liberties…Dragnet Nation really kicks in--and becomes a blast to read--when she fights back…If enough people follow Angwin's lead, new networks of computer users might manage to open up ever larger holes in the dragnet world.” ―Bookforum
“Entertaining… Pacy and eye-opening.” ―The Financial Times
“Angwin, a longtime reporter on digital privacy issues for the Wall Street Journal, releases the contemporary (and, unfortunately, nonfiction) companion book to Orwell's 1984. Dragnet Nation examines the surveillance economy and its effect on free speech and thought, likely causing readers to rethink the next words they type into a search engine.” ―LA Weekly
“[Angwin is] a privacy ninja.” ―Yahoo!'s Tech Modern Family
“Informative, conversational… [Angwin's] travails educate her (and her readers) about all the ways privacy-minded developers are working to develop anti-surveillance tools, and this forms a helpful guide for readers seeking non-jargony information on minimizing their digital footprints.” ―Columbia Journalism Review
“A new hot-button issue that touches both politics and business is privacy, and the erosion of privacy is examined in Dragnet Nation.” ―Publishers Weekly (Top 10 Business & Economics Books)
“Fascinating ... Angwin, who spent years covering privacy issues for the Wall Street Journal, draws on conversations with researchers, hackers and IT experts, surveying the modern dragnet tracking made possible by massive computing power, smaller devices and cheap storage of data...A solid work for both privacy freaks and anyone seeking tips on such matters as how to strengthen passwords.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“In this thought-provoking, highly accessible exploration of the issues around personal data-gathering, Julia Angwin provides a startling account of how we're all being tracked, watched, studied, and sorted. Her own (often very funny) attempts to maintain her online privacy demonstrate the ubiquity of the dragnet--and the near impossibility of evading it. I'll never use Google in the same way again.” ―Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author of Happier at Home and The Happiness Project
“Julia Angwin's pathbreaking reporting for the Wall Street Journal about online tracking changed the privacy debate. Her new book represents another leap forward: by showing how difficult it was to protect her own privacy and vividly describing the social and personal costs, Angwin offers both a wakeup call and a thoughtful manifesto for reform. This is a meticulously documented and gripping narrative about why privacy matters and what we can do about it.” ―Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO, National Constitution Center, and author of The Unwanted Gaze and The Naked Crowd
“Dragnet Nation is an impressive picture of the new world of electronic surveillance -- from Google to the NSA. Julia Angwin's command of the technology is sure, her writing is clear, and her arguments are compelling. This is an authoritative account of why we should care about privacy and how we can protect ourselves.” ―Bruce Schneier, author of Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive
“Dragnet Nation is a fascinating, compelling, and powerful read. Many of us would simply prefer not to know how much others know about us, and yet Julia Angwin opens a door onto that dark world in a way that both raises a new set of public issues and canvasses a range of solutions. We can reclaim our privacy while still enjoying the benefits of many types of surveillance – but only if we take our heads out of the sand and read this book.” ―Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO, New America
About the Author
Julia Angwin is the author of Stealing MySpace and an award-winning investigative journalist for the independent news organization ProPublica. From 2000 to 2013 she was a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where she was on the team of reporters awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of corporate corruption and led a team covering online privacy that was a finalist for a 2012 Pulitzer Prize. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
HackedWho is watching you?This was once a question asked only by kings, presidents, and public figures trying to dodge the paparazzi and criminals trying to evade the law. The rest of us had few occasions to worry about being tracked.But today the anxious question—"who’s watching?"—is relevant to everyone regardless of his or her fame or criminal persuasion. Any of us can be watched at almost any time, whether it is by a Google Street View car taking a picture of our house, or an advertiser following us as we browse the Web, or the National Security Agency logging our phone calls.Dragnets that scoop up information indiscriminately about everyone in their path used to be rare; police had to set up roadblocks, or retailers had to install and monitor video cameras. But technology has enabled a new era of supercharged dragnets that can gather vast amounts of personal data with little human effort. These dragnets are extending into ever more private corners of the world.Consider the relationship of Sharon Gill and Bilal Ahmed, close friends who met on a private online social network called PatientLikeMe.com.Sharon and Bilal couldn’t be more different. Sharon is a forty-two-year-old single mother who lives in a small town in southern Arkansas. She ekes out a living trolling for treasures at yard sales and selling them at a flea market. Bilal Ahmed, thirty-six years old, is a single, Rutgers-educated man who lives in a penthouse in Sydney, Australia. He runs a chain of convenience stores.Although they have never met in person, they became close friends on a password-protected online forum for patients struggling with mental health issues. Sharon was trying to wean herself from antidepressant medications. Bilal had just lost his mother and was suffering from anxiety and depression.From their far corners of the world, they were able to cheer each other up in their darkest hours. Sharon turned to Bilal because she felt she couldn’t confide in her closest relatives and neighbors. "I live in a small town," Sharon told me. "I don’t want to be judged on this mental illness."But in 2010, Sharon and Bilal were horrified to discover they were being watched on their private social network.It started with a break-in. On May 7, 2010, PatientsLikeMe noticed unusual activity on the "mood" forum where Sharon and Bilal hung out. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was attempting to "scrape," or copy, every single message off PatientsLikeMe’s private online "Mood" and "Multiple Sclerosis" forums.PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: it was the Nielsen Company, the New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online "buzz" for its clients, including major drug makers. On May 18, PatientsLikeMe sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nielsen and notified its members of the break-in. (Nielsen later said it would no longer break into private forums. "It’s something that we decided is not acceptable," said Dave Hudson, the head of the Nielsen unit involved.)But there was a twist. PatientsLikeMe used the opportunity to inform members of the fine print they may not have noticed when they signed up. The website was also selling data about its members to pharmaceutical and other companies.The news was a double betrayal for Sharon and Bilal. Not only had an intruder been monitoring them, but so was the very place that they considered to be a safe space. It was as if someone filmed an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and AA was mad because that film competed with its own business of videotaping meetings and selling the tapes. "I felt totally violated," Bilal said.Even worse, none of it was necessarily illegal. Nielsen was operating in a gray area of the law even as it violated the terms of service at PatientsLikeMe, but those terms are not always legally enforceable. And it was entirely legal for PatientsLikeMe to disclose to its members in its fine print that it would sweep up all their information and sell it.This is the tragic flaw of "privacy" in the digital age. Privacy is often defined as freedom from unauthorized intrusion. But many of the things thatfeel like privacy violations are "authorized" in some fine print somewhere.And yet, in many ways, we have not yet fully consented to these authorized intrusions. Even if it is legal for companies to scoop up information about people’s mental health, is it socially acceptable?Eavesdropping on Sharon and Bilal’s conversations might be socially acceptable if they were drug dealers under court-approved surveillance. But is sweeping up their conversations as part of a huge dragnet to monitor online "buzz" socially acceptable?Dragnets that indiscriminately sweep up personal data fall squarely into the gray area between what is legal and what is socially acceptable.
?We are living in a Dragnet Nation—a world of indiscriminate tracking where institutions are stockpiling data about individuals at an unprecedented pace. The rise of indiscriminate tracking is powered by the same forces that have brought us the technology we love so much—powerful computing on our desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.Before computers were commonplace, it was expensive and difficult to track individuals. Governments kept records only of occasions, such as birth, marriage, property ownership, and death. Companies kept records when a customer bought something and filled out a warranty card or joined a loyalty club. But technology has made it cheap and easy for institutions of all kinds to keep records about almost every moment of our lives.Consider just a few facts that have enabled the transformation. Computer processing power has doubled roughly every two years since the 1970s, enabling computers that were once the size of entire rooms to fit into a pants pocket. And recently, the cost to store data has plummeted from $18.95 for one gigabyte in 2005 to $1.68 in 2012. It is expected to cost under a dollar in a few years.The combination of massive computing power, smaller and smaller devices, and cheap storage has enabled a huge increase in indiscriminate tracking of personal data. The trackers are not all intruders, like Nielsen. The trackers also include many of the institutions that are supposed to be on our side, such as the government and the companies with which we do business.Of course, the largest of the dragnets appear to be those operated by the U.S. government. In addition to its scooping up vast amounts of foreign communications, the National Security Agency is also scooping up Americans’ phone calling records and Internet traffic, according to documents revealed in 2013 by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.But the NSA is not alone (although it may be the most effective) in operating dragnets. Governments around the world—from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe—are snapping up surveillance technology, ranging from "massive intercept" equipment to tools that let them remotely hack into people’s phones and computers. Even local and state governments in the United States are snapping up surveillance technology ranging from drones to automated license plate readers that allow them to keep tabs on citizens’ movements in ways never before possible. Local police are increasingly tracking people using signals emitted by their cell phones.Meanwhile, commercial dragnets are blossoming. AT&T and Verizon are selling information about the location of their cell phone customers, albeit without identifying them by name. Mall owners have started using technology to track shoppers based on the signals emitted by the cell phones in their pockets. Retailers such as Whole Foods have used digital signs that are actually facial recognition scanners. Some car dealerships are using a service from Dataium that lets them know which cars you have browsed online, if you have given them your e-mail address, before you arrive on the dealership lot.Online, hundreds of advertisers and data brokers are watching as you browse the Web. Looking up "blood sugar" could tag you as a possible diabetic by companies that profile people based on their medical condition and then provide drug companies and insurers access to that information. Searching for a bra could trigger an instant bidding war among lingerie advertisers at one of the many online auction houses.And new tracking technologies are just around the corner: companies are building facial recognition technology into phones and cameras, technology to monitor your location is being embedded into vehicles, wireless "smart" meters that gauge the power usage of your home are being developed, and Google has developed Glass, tiny cameras embedded in eyeglasses that allow people to take photos and videos without lifting a finger.?Skeptics say: What’s wrong with all of our data being collected by unseen watchers? Who is being harmed?Admittedly, it can be difficult to demonstrate personal harm from a data breach. If Sharon or Bilal is denied a job or insurance, they may never know which piece of data caused the denial. People placed on the no-fly list are never informed about the data that contributed to the decision.But, on a larger scale, the answer is simple: troves of personal data can and will be abused.Consider one of the oldest and supposedly innocuous dragnets of all: the U.S. Census. The confidentiality of personal information collected by the census is protected by law, and yet census data have been repeatedly abused. During World War I, it was used to locate draft violators. During World War II, the Census Bureau provided the names and addresses of Japanese-American residents to the U.S. Secret Service. The information was used to round up Japanese residents and place them in internment camps. It was not until 2000 that the Census Bureau issued a formal apology for its behavior. And in 2002 and 2003, the Census Bureau provided statistical information about Arab-Americans to the Department of Homeland Security. After bad publicity, it revised its policies to require that top officials approve requests from other agencies for sensitive information such as race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, and sexual orientation.The United States is not alone in abusing population statistics. Australia used population registration data to force the migration of aboriginal people at the turn of the twentieth century. In South Africa, the census was a key instrument of the state’s "apartheid" system of racial segregation. During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Tutsi victims were targeted with the help of ID cards that indicated their ethnicity. During the Holocaust, France, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Germany used population data to locate Jews for extermination.Personal data are often abused for political reasons. One of the most infamous cases was a program called COINTELPRO run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the late 1960s. The FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, set up the secret program to spy on "subversives" and then used the information to try to discredit and demoralize them. The FBI went as far as to send Martin Luther King Jr. a tape recording from surveillance of his hotel room that was meant to cause King to get separated from his wife—along with a note that King interpreted as a threat to release the recording unless King committed suicide.Criminal hackers have also found that using personal data is the best way to breach an institution’s defenses. Consider how Chinese hackers penetrated the sophisticated computer security pioneer RSA. The hackers trolled social media websites to obtain information about individual employees. They then sent those employees an e-mail titled "2011 Recruitment Plan." The e-mail looked legitimate enough that one employee retrieved it from the junk mail folder and opened it. That file installed spyware on the individual’s machine, and from there the attackers gained remote control of multiple computers in the organization.In short, they hacked people, not institutions.Hacking people is not just for criminals. Marketers are following us around the Web in the hopes that they can obtain information that will let them "hack" us into buying their products. The NSA is scooping up all of our phone calls to establish patterns that it believes will let authorities "hack" a terrorist cell.Here are some of the ways you may be already being hacked:? • You can always be found.? • You can be watched in your own home—or in the bathroom.
? • You can no longer keep a secret.
? • You can be impersonated.
? • You can be trapped in a "hall of mirrors."
? • You can be financially manipulated.
? • You can be placed in a police lineup.
This is not a comprehensive list. Rather, it is a snapshot in time of real-life events that are happening right now. In the future, we will likely read this list and laugh at all the things I failed to envision.
You can always be found.Your name, address, and other identifying details—even the location of your cell phone at any given time—are all stored in various databases that you cannot view or control. Stalkers and rogue employees have consistently found ways to abuse these databases.In 1999, a deranged man named Liam Youens paid an online data broker called Docusearch to find the social security number, employment information, and home address of a woman he was obsessed with, Amy Boyer. A few days later, Youens drove to Boyer’s workplace and fatally shot her as she left work. He then shot and killed himself.Boyer’s family sued the data broker, but the New Hampshire Supreme Court held that while the data broker had a duty to "exercise reasonable care" when selling personal data, it was also true that because information such as a work address "is readily observable by members of the public, the address cannot be private."Boyer’s parents got very little: in 2004, they settled with Docusearch for $85,000, having grown weary of years of legal battles. Docusearch is still in business and its website still advertises services including "reverse phone number search," "license plate # search," "find SSN by name," and "hidden bank account search."Since then, the price of buying people’s addresses has fallen from the nearly $200 that Youens paid to as low as 95 cents for a full report on an individual. Cyber-stalking cases have become so common that they rarely make news.Consider just one example. In 2010, a Sacramento sheriff’s deputy, Chu Vue, was convicted of murder after his brothers shot to death Steve Lo, who was having an affair with Vue’s wife. During the trial it came out that Vue had searched law enforcement databases for Lo’s name, had asked a colleague to look up Lo’s license plate, and had searched for Lo’s address using an online phone lookup service. Vue was sentenced to life without parole.Even the most innocent data—such as airline travel records—can be abused. In 2007, a Commerce Department employee, Benjamin Robinson, was indicted for unlawfully accessing, more than 163 times, the government database that contains international airline travel reservation records. After a breakup with a woman, he accessed her files, as well as those of her young son and husband. He left a message on her answering machine stating that he was going to check the files "to see if there is anything you lied about." He suggested that he might be able to get her deported. In 2009, Robinson pleaded guilty to unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and he was sentenced to three years’ probation.And the day is not far off when real-time tracking will become routine. The United States already embeds radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips that can transmit data over a short range of about ten feet in passports, and schools and employers are starting to embed the chips in ID cards. In 2013, a federal judge in Texas denied a student’s challenge to her school’s requirement that she wear an RFID-enabled ID card. Some employers have even flirted with the idea of implanting the chips under their employees’ skin, which prompted California to outlaw the practice in 2008.Cell phone tracking has already become routine for police departments. In 2011, my colleague at theWall Street Journal Scott Thurm and I submitted open records requests to the twenty largest state and local police departments in the United States. Eight agencies produced at least summary statistics suggesting that state and local agencies track thousands of cell phones in real time each year. It is as routine as "looking for fingerprint evidence or DNA evidence," said Gregg Rossman, a prosecutor in Broward County, Florida.Inevitably, phone companies have started selling cell phone location data to a wider audience than just police. In 2013, Verizon said it would sell a new product called Precision Market Insights that would let businesses track cell phone users in particular locations.One of Verizon’s first customers is the Phoenix Suns basketball team, which wants to know where its fans live. Scott Horowitz, a team vice president, said: "This is the information that everyone has wanted that hasn’t been available until now."You can be watched in your own home—or in the bathroom.In 2009, fifteen-year-old high school student Blake Robbins was confronted by an assistant principal who claimed she had evidence that he was engaging in "improper behavior in his home." It turned out that his school—Harriton High School, in an affluent suburban Philadelphia school district—had installed spying software on the Apple MacBook laptops that it issued to the school’s twenty-three hundred students. The school’s technicians had activated software on some of the laptops that could snap photos using the webcam, as well as take screen shots of the students’ computers. Blake’s webcam captured him holding pill-shaped objects. Blake and his family said they were Mike and Ike candies. The assistant principal believed they were drugs.Blake’s family sued the district for violating their son’s privacy. The school said the software had been installed to allow technicians to locate the computers in case of theft. However, the school did not notify students of the software’s existence, nor did it set up guidelines for when the technical staff could operate the cameras.An internal investigation revealed that the cameras had been activated on more than forty laptops and captured more than sixty-five thousand images. Some students were photographed thousands of times, including when they were partially undressed and sleeping. A former student, Joshua Levin, said he was "shocked, humiliated, and severely emotionally distressed" when he viewed some of the eight thousand photos and screen shots captured by the camera on his laptop. Levin, Robbins, and one other student sued the school and won monetary settlements. The school board banned the school’s use of cameras to surveil students.We’re used to the idea that surveillance cameras are everywhere. It is estimated that there are more than four thousand surveillance cameras installed in lower Manhattan. London is famous for its more than five hundred thousand security cameras.But as the cameras are getting smaller, they are traveling into our homes and intimate spaces, upending our definitions of public and private. Drones equipped with cameras have become cheap enough that they are becoming a nuisance. In May 2013, a Seattle woman complained on a local blog. A stranger had "set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house. . . . I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day." Her husband approached the man flying the drone, who declared that it was legal for him to fly it and that the drone was equipped with cameras. "We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom," she said.With all this cool technology, the bad guys are of course setting up their own camera dragnets. In 2013, the journalist Nate Anderson described a robust hacker community that trades tips and techniques for installing spyware on women’s webcams. "They operate quite openly online, sharing the best techniques," he wrote. "Calling most of these guys ‘hackers’ does a real disservice to hackers everywhere; only minimal technical skill is now required."In 2011, a Santa Ana man named Luis Mijangos was convicted of computer hacking and wiretapping after he was found to have installed malicious software that allowed him to control the webcams of more than one hundred computers. In one case, he gained control of a teenage girl’s webcam and obtained naked photographs of her. He used the images to extort further nude images from his victims. During the sentencing, the judge said, "This was nothing short of a sustained effort to terrorize victims." Mijangos was sentenced to six years in prison.And widespread camera dragnets are right around the corner. The arrival of wearable computers equipped with cameras, such as Google Glass, means that everything is fair game for filming. TheNew York Times columnist Nick Bilton was shocked when he attended a Google conference and saw attendees wearing their Google Glass cameras while using the urinals.But Google Glass enthusiasts say that wearing cameras on their heads changes their life. "I will never live a day of my life from now on without it (or a competitor)," wrote the blogger Robert Scoble after trying out the glasses for two weeks. "It freaks some people out," he conceded, but he said, "It’s new, that will go away once they are in the market."You can no longer keep a secret.Bobbi Duncan, a twenty-two-year-old lesbian student at the University of Texas, Austin, tried to keep her sexual orientation secret from her family. But Facebook inadvertently outed her when the president of the Queer Chorus on campus added her to the choir’s Facebook discussion group. Bobbi didn’t know that a friend could add her to a group without her approval and that Facebook would then send a note to her entire list of friends—including her father—announcing that she’d joined.Two days after receiving the notification that Bobbi had joined the Queer Chorus, her father wrote on his Facebook page: "To all you queers. Go back to your holes and wait for GOD. Hell awaits you pervert. Good luck singing there."When informed about the case, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said that the "unfortunate experience reminds us that we must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust privacy controls." His position seemed to put the blame on the victim for incorrectly flipping Facebook’s dials and levers. But there was no dial or lever on Facebook that Bobbi could have set to prevent her being joined to the group without her permission."I blame Facebook," Bobbi said. "It shouldn’t be somebody else’s choice what people see of me."As more personal data are swept up into various databases, it has become harder for any secrets to be kept—even by professional secret keepers. The most notable example is CIA director David Petraeus, who resigned after an unrelated FBI investigation uncovered e-mails that indicated he was conducting an extramarital affair. In 2012, former CIA analyst John Kiriakou was indicted for passing classified information to journalists, based in part on e-mail evidence. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to thirty months in prison.Even minor secrets are difficult to keep. People who download porn movies on their computers have been targeted by so-called copyright trolls who file mass lawsuits that allow them to obtain information about the identities of people who have downloaded copyrighted porn movies from file-sharing networks, with the intent of embarrassing the defendants into paying a quick settlement.In July 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sanctioned one such plaintiff, an attorney for an adult movie producer, who had sued 670 downloaders based on their computer addresses and sought to obtain their identities without court approval. The court described the attorney’s "violations as an attempt to repeat his strategy of suing anonymous Internet users for allegedly downloading pornography illegally, using the powers of the court to find their identity, then shaming or intimidating them into settling for thousands of dollars."In May 2013, a California judge went even further, declaring that the copyright trolls had used a "nexus of antiquated copyright laws, paralyzing social stigma and unaffordable defense costs" to "plunder the citizenry."You can be impersonated.Jaleesa Suell was taken away from her mother and placed in foster care when she was eight years old. She was placed in seven different foster homes before leaving the foster care system. When she turned twenty-one and was nearing graduation from George Washington University, she applied for a credit card. That’s when she found out that a family member had stolen her identity, opened up a credit card in her name, and defaulted on the payments.Without access to credit, Jaleesa couldn’t get a car and worried she wouldn’t be able to get an apartment after graduation. "I often find myself worried about if I was going to have a place to live the next day or have food, and I’ve worked so hard to ensure that that won’t happen after, you know, I emancipated," she told participants in a workshop on identity theft in 2011. "But now I find myself in that exact situation, just for the simple fact that, like, I don’t have a line of credit."Sadly, foster children like Jaleesa are among the most common victims of the crime known as identity theft. I prefer to call the crime "impersonation," because no one can really steal your identity. Jaleesa is still herself. Someone has simply impersonated her for financial gain.In response to the rising problem of impersonation among foster children, President Barack Obama signed a law in 2011 that contained a provision requiring the credit-reporting companies to provide foster children with a free credit report annually after they turn sixteen years old for as long as they remain in the system.But the underlying problem of impersonation continues to rise. Complaints of identity theft increased by nearly one-third in 2012—up to 369 million from 279 million a year earlier—after remaining fairly steady for the previous five years, according to statistics compiled by the Federal Trade Commission.Credit card fraud used to be the most common complaint, according to Steve Toporoff, the FTC attorney who coordinates the agency’s identity protection program. These days, he said, tax fraud is the top complaint. "We also see new forms of fraud, such as medical fraud, in which people use identity information to obtain health treatment," he said. It’s harder for people to catch tax and medical fraud, as they do not have access to their files as easily as they do with credit reports.In 2013, two Florida women were convicted of defrauding the government in a scheme in which they submitted nearly two thousand fraudulent tax returns to the IRS seeking $11 million in refunds. The Department of the Treasury paid out nearly $3.5 million. One of the women, Alci Bonannee, filed many of the fraudulent returns using personal information purchased from a hospital nurse. The hospital, Baptist Health South Florida, stated that 834 patient records had been accessed. An IRS agent, Tony Gonzalez, told a local TV station that "the bad guys that are able to get these social security numbers are buying them from employees that work at these hospitals and these medical centers which are sold up to $150 each."Identity information is not only being stolen, it is also being lost all the time, for reasons ranging from carelessness to hacking. Public reports of data breaches have been steadily on the rise since 2009, and jumped by a dramatic 43 percent in 2012, according to the Open Security Foundation’s DataLossDB website.And companies are rarely penalized for losing customer data. A test case is playing out as a result of the repeated hacks of the Wyndham hotel chain. In 2008, hackers broke into the computer network of the Wyndham hotel in Phoenix. Through that network, the hackers gained access to the credit card accounts of more than five hundred thousand customers at all forty-one Wyndham hotels and transferred the information to Russia. The hackers allegedly racked up more than $10.6 million in fraudulent charges.But even after that breach, Wyndham failed to secure its computer network. The following year, it was hacked twice, losing another fifty thousand and sixty-nine thousand customer credit cards, respectively. In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission sued Wyndham, alleging that its failure to secure its network was deceptive and unfair to customers.Wyndham fought back. It claimed the FTC was unfairly penalizing the company for being the victim of a crime. It called the FTC’s case "the Internet equivalent of punishing the local furniture store because it was robbed and its files raided." The FTC responded in a legal filing that "a more accurate analogy would be that Wyndham was a local furniture store that left copies of its customers’ credit and debit card information lying on the counter, failed to lock the doors of the store at night, and was shocked to find in the morning that someone had stolen the information."
You can be trapped in a "Hall of Mirrors."Companies that monitor people’s Web-surfing behavior say their actions are innocuous: they only want to show ads for shoes to people who have recently looked at shoes, or to show political news to people who prefer political news. I call this type of mass customization a "hall of mirrors."Sometimes the hall of mirrors is helpful. I don’t particularly mind seeing an ad that reminds me to purchase a product I was just looking at. But the hall of mirrors can also veer into disturbing territory.Consider this: searching for a traditionally black-sounding name such as "Trevon Jones" is 25 percent more likely to generate ads suggesting an arrest record—such as "Trevon Jones Arrested?"—than a search for a traditionally white-sounding name like "Kristen Sparrow," according to a January 2013 study by Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney. Sweeney found this advertising disparity even for names in which people with the white-sounding name did have a criminal record and people with the black-sounding name did not have a criminal record.Data about people’s Web-surfing behavior is also increasingly used to provide so-called customized content. For instance, Google uses information from past searches and browsing habits to provide different search results to different people—even when they conduct identical search requests. Sometimes those extrapolations can be useful, such as when Google suggests a restaurant near where you live instead of across the country. But sometimes they are intrusive.In the months leading up to the November 2012 presidential election, Google took its guesses into the political realm in a controversial way. Searchers who looked up Barack Obama saw news about the president threaded into their future searches on other topics. Searchers who looked up Mitt Romney did not see news about the Republican presidential candidate included in subsequent searches.Google said that the disparity was simply the result of the mathematical formula it was using to predict users’ queries. Google’s technologists viewed their effort as helping us figure out the answer to our needs before we know we have those needs. But it is worth noting that if a newspaper did the same thing—inserted Obama news into articles about toothpaste for certain readers—it would be roundly called out as biased and intrusive. Similarly, a newspaper would be called out if it placed only gay ads in the papers of subscribers it deemed to be gay, or diabetes treatment ads in the papers of subscribers it guessed had the disease.Does technology immunize Google from something that would not otherwise be socially acceptable? Or is Martin Abrams, a leading privacy expert, right to call this type of behavior restrictive "boxing," where "my vision of what is possible is limited by the box" in which I am placed?You can be financially manipulated.As companies gather more digital data about potential customers, they have the ability to use that information to charge different prices to different users or steer different users to different offers.Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, calls this the "mass production of bias," in which companies use personal data to exploit people’s vulnerability. For example, companies can chip away at consumers’ willpower until they finally give in to making a purchase. Or a computer algorithm can set prices for each individual at exactly the price that is the most he or she is willing to pay for a given product or service.The credit card companies have started using some of these techniques. In 2010, my colleagues at theWall Street Journal and I discovered that Capital One was showing different credit cards (with different rates) to different website visitors, based on its guesses about their income and geographic location. The result was that when Thomas Burney, a Colorado building contractor, visited Capital One’s website, he was greeted with offers for a card for people with excellent credit, the "Capital One Platinum Prestige." By comparison, when Carrie Isaac, a young mother from Colorado Springs, visited the website, she was shown a card described as being for people with "average" credit.The reason was buried in the computer code. Contained in the 3,748 lines of code that passed between Thomas’s computer and Capital One’s website were the credit card company’s guesses about his income level ("upper-mid"), education ("college graduate"), and his town ("avon"). Capital One had assessed Carrie as having only "midscale" income with "some college" education. A Capital One spokeswoman told us, "Like every marketer, online and off-line, we’re making an educated guess about what we think consumers will like and they are free to choose another product of their liking."By 2012, when my team again tested for market manipulation, the techniques had become more widespread and increasingly sophisticated. We found that credit card companies were still offering different cards to different users. Discover was showing a prominent offer for the "it" card to computers connecting from cities including Denver, Kansas City, and Dallas, but not to people connecting from Scranton, Pennsylvania; Kingsport, Tennessee; and Los Angeles.But we also found that websites were varying prices based on their guesses about where users were located. In our tests, Lowe’s was selling a refrigerator for $449 to users in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Ashburn, Virginia. But it cost $499 in seven other test cities. Similarly, a 250-foot spool of electrical wiring was displayed at six different prices on Home Depot’s website depending on the user’s location: $70.80 in Ashtabula, Ohio; $72.45 in Erie, Pennsylvania; $75.98 in Olean, New York; and $77.87 in Monticello, New York. Both Lowe’s and Home Depot said the variations were an attempt to match online prices to the closest store.We found the most comprehensive price differences on the website of the office supply giant Staples, which appears to use data about visitors to guess where they live. It then displays different prices to different users based on its estimate of their geographic location. The end result: when Trude Frizzell logged on to Staples.com from her work computer in Bergheim, Texas, she saw a Swingline stapler listed for sale for $14.29. Just a few miles away, in Bourne, Kim Wamble saw the same stapler listed on the same website for $15.79. The difference was not due to shipping costs, which are calculated after purchasing the item. Rather, the prices seem to reflect how far Staples believes the user lives from a competitor’s store. Staples confirmed that it varies prices by a number of factors but declined to be specific.It’s not illegal to charge different prices to different users, as long it is not based on race or other sensitive information that could constitute redlining. But offering price variations to different users can result in unfair results that are unintended. Our tests of the Staples website showed that areas with higher average income were more likely to receive discounted prices than lower-income areas. "I think it’s very discriminatory," said Kim.The worst types of financial manipulation exploit the poor, the old, or the uneducated. Consider the so-called sucker lists that data brokers compile of people who are old, in financial distress, or vulnerable in some other way to certain types of marketing pitches. Sucker lists are often sold to unscrupulous marketers who pitch fraudulent products.In October 2012, the Federal Trade Commission fined one of the nation’s largest data brokers, Equifax, and its customers a total of $1.6 million for abusing personal data by selling lists of people who were late in paying their most recent mortgage bills to fraudulent marketers. The lists were marketed with names like "Save Me From Foreclosure" and "Debt Regret." One of the buyers was a particularly seedy Southern California boiler room operation that allegedly bilked more than $2.3 million from at least fifteen hundred home owners who paid fees ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 for loan modifications that almost never materialized. Many of those home owners eventually lost their homes.When I asked an official at the Direct Marketing Association whether there are any lists its members won’t sell, such as "seniors with Alzheimer’s who like sweepstakes," she sent me the organization’s ethical guidelines, which prohibit the sale of lists that are "disparaging." Otherwise, it’s fair game, apparently.
You can be placed in a police lineup.On April 5, 2011, John Gass picked up his mail in Needham, Massachusetts, and was surprised to find a letter stating that his driver’s license had been revoked. "I was just blindsided," John said.John is a municipal worker—he repairs boilers for the town of Needham. Without a driver’s license, he could not do his job. He called the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles and was instructed to appear at a hearing and bring documentation of his identity. They wouldn’t tell him why his license was revoked.When John showed up for his hearing, he learned that the RMV had begun using facial recognition software to search for identity fraud. The software compared license photos to identify people who might have applied for multiple licenses under different aliases. The software had flagged him and another man, Edward Perry of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, as having similar photos and had required them to prove their identities.John was a victim of what I call the "police lineup"—dragnets that allow the police to treat everyone as a suspect. This overturns our traditional view that our legal system treats us as "innocent until proven guilty."The most obvious example of this is airport body scanners. The scanners conduct the most intrusive of searches—allowing the viewer to peer beneath a person’s clothes—without any suspicion that the person being scanned is a criminal. In fact, the burden is on the individual being scanned to "prove" his or her innocence, by passing through the scanner without displaying any suspicious items. These dragnets can be Kafkaesque. Consider the no-fly list. People placed on the list are not told how they got on the list, nor can they argue against the decision.John Gass luckily was given a chance to plead his case. But it was an absurd case. He was presented with a photo of himself from thirteen years ago."It doesn’t look like you," the officer said."Of course it doesn’t," John said. "It’s thirteen years later. I was a hundred pounds lighter."John presented his passport and his birth certificate, and his license was reinstated. But the officers wouldn’t give him any paperwork to prove that it was reinstated. He wanted a piece of paper to show his boss that he was okay to drive again. "It was kind of like a bad dream," John said.Angry at his treatment and his lost income, John filed a lawsuit against the RMV, claiming that he had been denied his constitutionally protected right to due process. The RMV argued that he had been given a window of opportunity to dispute the revocation because the letter had been mailed on March 24 and the license wasn’t revoked until April 1. John didn’t pick up his mail until April 5.The Suffolk County Superior Court granted the RMV’s motion to dismiss. Gass appealed, but the appellate court also ruled against him. "Although Gass’s pique at having to defend his identity is understandable, it does not follow that his case raises larger legal questions that appellate courts must resolve at this time," the court stated.John felt betrayed by the whole process. He now is very careful around state police because he worries that he won’t be treated fairly. "There are no checks and balances," he said. "It is only natural humans are going to make mistakes. But there is absolutely no oversight."I do think we are trading our liberties for security," he said.?These stories illustrate a simple truth: information is power. Anyone who holds a vast amount of information about us has power over us.At first, the information age promised to empower individuals with access to previously hidden information. We could comparison shop across the world for the best price, for the best bit of knowledge, for people who shared our views.But now the balance of power is shifting and large institutions—both governments and corporations—are gaining the upper hand in the information wars, by tracking vast quantities of information about mundane aspects of our lives.Now we are learning that people who hold our data can subject us to embarrassment, or drain our pocketbooks, or accuse us of criminal behavior. This knowledge could, in turn, create a culture of fear.Consider Sharon and Bilal. Once they learned they were being monitored on PatientsLikeMe, Sharon and Bilal retreated from the Internet.Bilal deleted his posts from the forum. He took down the drug dosage history that he had uploaded onto the site and stored it in an Excel file on his computer. Sharon stopped using the Internet altogether and doesn’t allow her son to use it without supervision.They started talking on the phone, but they missed the online connections they had forged on PatientsLikeMe. "I haven’t found a replacement," Sharon said. Bilal agreed: "The people on PLM really know how it feels."But neither of them could tolerate the fear of surveillance. Sharon said she just couldn’t live with the uncertainty of "not knowing if every keystroke I’m making is going to some other company," she said. Bilal added, "I just feel that the trust was broken."Sharon and Bilal’s experience is a reminder that for all its technological pyrotechnics, the glory of the digital age has always been profoundly human. Technology allows us to find people who share our inner thoughts, to realize we’re not alone. But technology also allows others to spy on us, causing us to pull back from digital intimacy.When people ask me why I care about privacy, I always return to the simple thought that I want there to be safe, private spaces in the world for Sharon and Bilal, for myself, for my children, for everybody. I want there to be room in the digital world for letters sealed with hot wax. Must we always be writing postcards that can—and will—be read by anyone along the way?Do we want to live in a world where we are always at risk of being hacked? A world where we can always be found, we can’t keep secrets, we can be watched even in our own homes, we can be impersonated, we can be trapped in a hall of mirrors, we can be financially manipulated and put in a police lineup? This book is my attempt to answer that question in two parts.In the opening chapters, I explore why indiscriminate surveillance matters. To do that, I examine the legal and technical origins of our Dragnet Nation, the uses and abuses of surveillance, and its impact on individuals and society.In the chapters that follow, I examine whether there is any hope of building an alternative world, where we can enjoy the fruits of technology without fear of being hacked. I test various strategies for evading dragnets, ranging from using a burner phone to establishing fake identities.I hope that my exploration will help the conversation about privacy evolve beyond the simple anxiety of "Who’s watching me?" into a more nuanced discussion of "Why does it matter?" and, ultimately, to a productive conversation about what we can do about it.Copyright © 2014 by Julia AngwinProduct details
- ASIN : 0805098070
- Publisher : Times Books; First Edition (February 25, 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780805098075
- ISBN-13 : 978-0805098075
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.55 x 1.02 x 9.46 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,517,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #188 in Politics of Privacy & Surveillance
- #928 in Privacy & Online Safety
- #1,101 in Marketing & Consumer Behavior
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
174 global ratings
How customer reviews and ratings work
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2014
Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2014
Aside from all the worries over NSA sweeps of digital communications, what really got me was the extent to which marketers will track prospective customers...my goodness! Julia Angwin does a really good job of explaining it all. Most importantly, why we should be concerned. She describes in her book the steps she took to 'appear' to be off-grid.
I would have given this 5 stars, but for the lack of a listing of all the software and web sites that she mentions. If you think that perhaps it would be good to write a list of these things as you read them, note that at some points she decides that yet another product is better.
Yes, I have followed some of the advice that she and her technical experts give. First up --change all wimpy passwords.
I would have given this 5 stars, but for the lack of a listing of all the software and web sites that she mentions. If you think that perhaps it would be good to write a list of these things as you read them, note that at some points she decides that yet another product is better.
Yes, I have followed some of the advice that she and her technical experts give. First up --change all wimpy passwords.
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2014
I am not a 'conspiracy theorist' or paranoid. This book is very down to earth and doesn't come from a 'survivalist' or 'tea party' kind of viewpoint. Scary to say the least, though! I bought this after seeing her interviewed on CBS news. I KNOW these things are true, because I have had very weird experiences (for example, someone posted a photo on my Pinterest account at the top of a Pinterest email alerting me to 'other Pins I might like.' It was a photo of myself standing next to a person-mostly chopped off-that I do not remember ever seeing. It was taken at least 20-30 years ago. I am a senior and have a graduated summa cum laude with a social work degree. I have seen how 'poor' people's lives (which includes a large portion of the middle class now) are completely invaded when they ask for social services of any kind. A must read for people with children, even infants: stop the cyber tracking and invasion of your child's privacy before it is irreversible.
Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2014
Julia Angwin's Dragnet Nation is a thoroughly researched, ambitious effort to expose nearly every threat to privacy posed by the very technology by which many of us choose to shop, communicate, work and entertain ourselves. In that sense, it serves as a good starting point for those who are just learning about these topics. By indiscriminately bundling those surveillance techniques employed by the government and private sector that pose significant risks to our civil liberties with low level nuisances into a hodgepodge she collectively labels a "dragnet," though, we learn perhaps less than we should about what matters most while wading through what may seem like petty concerns.
She begins well enough with a broad survey of all of the ways we can be tracked and our privacy compromised by technology, some more alarming than others. She follows with a history of how they developed from simpler technologies into their current state. By chapter three we see her becoming increasingly foreboding, discussing the East German Stasi's methods and using them as a touchstone to determine how concerned we should or should not be about various activities undertaken by government or the private sector.
After these opening chapters, the book turns away from journalism and toward memoir, detailing Angwin's attempt to remove herself from the dragnet. In some cases she is more successful than others. She ultimately realizes there's not much of a developed market in privacy technology, as many of her technological tools turn out to be clumsy, not worth the effort to properly implement, or even downright failures as she illustrates very well in her discussion of companies that offer to disconnect you from the many Internet databases for a fee.
Dragnet Nation is at its best when illustrating how law enforcement's keystone cops handing of online chatters can lead us to alter our lives in a way inconsistent with a free society, as in the case of Yassir Affifi or Gulet Mohamed. Her journalism bringing these stories to light is a great example of the sort of reporting we need to keep our government honest. By comparison fretting about how companies might lower her purchasing willpower by targeting discounts at her in vulnerable moments seems comically out of place in terms of its social impact. Sometimes readers will cringe about what sounds like very real threats to their liberty but wonder why they're really supposed to care about others.
Dragnet Nation suffers from its failure to consider the government's side of these issues. She takes for granted that privacy is an unquestioned good, never seriously considering whether the government's limited resources might explain its intrusive methodologies. Ultimately, though, Dragnet Nation's biggest failing is that it never establishes what true privacy is and why it really matters. In the last chapter, she offers some tests to use in evaluating when a threat to privacy may be of concern, but her thoughts are left underdeveloped and comes too late to help the reader evaluate whether the many threats Angwin identifies and against which she tried to protect herself are valid. A more robust consideration of such issues up front would have provided her reader with a better guide to understanding what is at stake when dealing with these issues.
She begins well enough with a broad survey of all of the ways we can be tracked and our privacy compromised by technology, some more alarming than others. She follows with a history of how they developed from simpler technologies into their current state. By chapter three we see her becoming increasingly foreboding, discussing the East German Stasi's methods and using them as a touchstone to determine how concerned we should or should not be about various activities undertaken by government or the private sector.
After these opening chapters, the book turns away from journalism and toward memoir, detailing Angwin's attempt to remove herself from the dragnet. In some cases she is more successful than others. She ultimately realizes there's not much of a developed market in privacy technology, as many of her technological tools turn out to be clumsy, not worth the effort to properly implement, or even downright failures as she illustrates very well in her discussion of companies that offer to disconnect you from the many Internet databases for a fee.
Dragnet Nation is at its best when illustrating how law enforcement's keystone cops handing of online chatters can lead us to alter our lives in a way inconsistent with a free society, as in the case of Yassir Affifi or Gulet Mohamed. Her journalism bringing these stories to light is a great example of the sort of reporting we need to keep our government honest. By comparison fretting about how companies might lower her purchasing willpower by targeting discounts at her in vulnerable moments seems comically out of place in terms of its social impact. Sometimes readers will cringe about what sounds like very real threats to their liberty but wonder why they're really supposed to care about others.
Dragnet Nation suffers from its failure to consider the government's side of these issues. She takes for granted that privacy is an unquestioned good, never seriously considering whether the government's limited resources might explain its intrusive methodologies. Ultimately, though, Dragnet Nation's biggest failing is that it never establishes what true privacy is and why it really matters. In the last chapter, she offers some tests to use in evaluating when a threat to privacy may be of concern, but her thoughts are left underdeveloped and comes too late to help the reader evaluate whether the many threats Angwin identifies and against which she tried to protect herself are valid. A more robust consideration of such issues up front would have provided her reader with a better guide to understanding what is at stake when dealing with these issues.
Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2016
This book was not quite what I was expecting, but in the end it turned out to be a readable account of the author's personal exploration of data tracking and privacy, with societal implications emerging from that experience. While I was anticipating a more comprehensive treatment of the actual "dragnet" and all of its players, what we instead are treated to is the author's attempt to tighten up on her own personal privacy, and all of the frustrations in that effort. The author - as a professional reporter - obviously has a good contact list and indeed she consults with a number of well-known privacy experts in her endeavor, as well as experimenting with a variety privacy enhancement tools recommended to her by these various experts. In the end, readers will have a good account of the frustrations of ensuring personal online privacy, and also be treated to the author's reportage about why the online privacy landscape is so difficult, and what might be done to correct it.
Top reviews from other countries
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars
good book
Reviewed in Canada on March 20, 2020
worth reading
Rain
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent read. Couldn't put it down.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 4, 2016
Excellent, eye opening book!
Anton S. from Vancouver,BC.Canada
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very scary book.
Reviewed in Canada on February 14, 2023
"Dragnet Nation" is about the struggle for personal freedom in an age of ubiquitous surveillance. exposes a terrifying reality that many of us refuse to accept and deal with effectively: we are being monitored in ways that are both personal and intimate. Julia Angwin explains that this goes well beyond the NSA leaks from Edward Snowden and affects practically every aspect of our lives, whether online, over the phone, or even in person. Among the many ways we are being influenced, or "hacked," according to Angwin, are the following.
- You can always be found \s- You can be observed in your own home-or in the bathroom \s- You can no longer maintain a secret \s- You can be impersonated \s- You can be caught in a hall of mirrors \s- You can be financially manipulated \s- You can be put in a police lineup
She backs up her claims with current-day instances, warning of even more serious security breaches in the future.
.
The book's subtitle, "A search for privacy, security, and freedom in a world of constant monitoring," provides a succinct synopsis of its central theme. Briefly, Julia Angwin details (a) how state agencies and companies in the United States (and elsewhere) use a variety of practises (such as using cookies, data trackers, wifi and MAC address sniffing, spyware) to track and trace the use of phones, apps, websites, and online transactions and purchases; (b) her attempts to reclaim her privacy and evade mass surveillance, and to i. Her reporting for the Wall Street Journal, which included interviews with important witnesses and sifting through relevant material, informs her thinking, but so do her personal efforts to set up different pieces of software and alter her online and comms habits.
An recommendation on the book's back cover calls it a "antidote to Huge Brother's big chill," yet I found the reverse to be true. A fascinating and enlightening read, but also a bit depressing because it shows the US government to be completely paranoid about its citizens, spying on them like they're all criminal suspects (often in secret and without legal recourse; as the Snowden and Wikileaks revelations have also highlighted), and businesses treating their customers like a commodity to be monetized and sold, with almost all of their online interactions being monitored and recorded (with such actions authorised in the small print of complex legal documents that detail terms and conditions, or not at all as in the case of many apps). In both circumstances, privacy has evaporated nearly fully, despite claims to the data being anonymized (it is relatively trivial to de-identify the data given the overlapping information) (it is incredibly easy to de-identify the data given the overlapping metadata). The loss of privacy is compounded when one considers the multiplicity of smart home and smart city technologies, such as mass digital CCTV, automated systems, and the internet of things, in contrast to Angwin's thesis, which solely addressed the internet and mobile phones.
Angwin ultimately thinks that a compromise must be reached between "those who urge us to give up all our data and "get over it," and others who propose that we throw our body on the tracks in from the rushing train that is our data economy." To combat pollution, we did not halt industrial production. In order to have polluters take more responsibility, we just urged them to do so (p. 223-224). However, given the competing interests at play, it's unlikely that a middle ground will be found or implemented quickly. Overall, an intriguing read that illustrates the scale of the existing dragnet and the difficulty of escaping it, but a bit weak on how the data acquired is being utilised and alternative privacy visions (which may have been obtained by exploring privacy, technological and legal arguments) (which might have been gained by examining privacy, technology and legal debates). Read this if you want to feel even more uneasy about the ways in which your personal information is being created and sold.
As an intriguing side note, Angwin details the steps she took to avoid being followed and tracked online. For instance, she explains how to use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. While DuckDuckGo does not monitor user queries, it also does not provide all the "amenities" that Google offers, such as automatically filling in search forms for you, predicting what you may be looking for, and so on. Angwin talks about how she had to change the way she searched the internet after realising that she let Google do most of the work for her and was thereby allowing the firm free reign over her personal data.
In spite of taking a journalistic approach to the subject, the book is an engaging read. Angwin often deviates from his main topic by telling anecdotes that illustrate his point. The narrative momentum of "surveillance issue" is weakened at times by the book's tendency to ramble and focus too much on the minutiae of the side tales.
- You can always be found \s- You can be observed in your own home-or in the bathroom \s- You can no longer maintain a secret \s- You can be impersonated \s- You can be caught in a hall of mirrors \s- You can be financially manipulated \s- You can be put in a police lineup
She backs up her claims with current-day instances, warning of even more serious security breaches in the future.
.
The book's subtitle, "A search for privacy, security, and freedom in a world of constant monitoring," provides a succinct synopsis of its central theme. Briefly, Julia Angwin details (a) how state agencies and companies in the United States (and elsewhere) use a variety of practises (such as using cookies, data trackers, wifi and MAC address sniffing, spyware) to track and trace the use of phones, apps, websites, and online transactions and purchases; (b) her attempts to reclaim her privacy and evade mass surveillance, and to i. Her reporting for the Wall Street Journal, which included interviews with important witnesses and sifting through relevant material, informs her thinking, but so do her personal efforts to set up different pieces of software and alter her online and comms habits.
An recommendation on the book's back cover calls it a "antidote to Huge Brother's big chill," yet I found the reverse to be true. A fascinating and enlightening read, but also a bit depressing because it shows the US government to be completely paranoid about its citizens, spying on them like they're all criminal suspects (often in secret and without legal recourse; as the Snowden and Wikileaks revelations have also highlighted), and businesses treating their customers like a commodity to be monetized and sold, with almost all of their online interactions being monitored and recorded (with such actions authorised in the small print of complex legal documents that detail terms and conditions, or not at all as in the case of many apps). In both circumstances, privacy has evaporated nearly fully, despite claims to the data being anonymized (it is relatively trivial to de-identify the data given the overlapping information) (it is incredibly easy to de-identify the data given the overlapping metadata). The loss of privacy is compounded when one considers the multiplicity of smart home and smart city technologies, such as mass digital CCTV, automated systems, and the internet of things, in contrast to Angwin's thesis, which solely addressed the internet and mobile phones.
Angwin ultimately thinks that a compromise must be reached between "those who urge us to give up all our data and "get over it," and others who propose that we throw our body on the tracks in from the rushing train that is our data economy." To combat pollution, we did not halt industrial production. In order to have polluters take more responsibility, we just urged them to do so (p. 223-224). However, given the competing interests at play, it's unlikely that a middle ground will be found or implemented quickly. Overall, an intriguing read that illustrates the scale of the existing dragnet and the difficulty of escaping it, but a bit weak on how the data acquired is being utilised and alternative privacy visions (which may have been obtained by exploring privacy, technological and legal arguments) (which might have been gained by examining privacy, technology and legal debates). Read this if you want to feel even more uneasy about the ways in which your personal information is being created and sold.
As an intriguing side note, Angwin details the steps she took to avoid being followed and tracked online. For instance, she explains how to use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. While DuckDuckGo does not monitor user queries, it also does not provide all the "amenities" that Google offers, such as automatically filling in search forms for you, predicting what you may be looking for, and so on. Angwin talks about how she had to change the way she searched the internet after realising that she let Google do most of the work for her and was thereby allowing the firm free reign over her personal data.
In spite of taking a journalistic approach to the subject, the book is an engaging read. Angwin often deviates from his main topic by telling anecdotes that illustrate his point. The narrative momentum of "surveillance issue" is weakened at times by the book's tendency to ramble and focus too much on the minutiae of the side tales.
kris
4.0 out of 5 stars
i don't like where this is heading
Reviewed in Canada on October 25, 2016
made me cautious with sharing info about myself on social media, phone, and in public in general. unfortunately, surveillance causes people to not express their opinions. i don't like where this is heading. privacy should be a right.
Jenny Lee
5.0 out of 5 stars
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 6, 2015
Came in great condtion, really helped with coursework!
