"Privacy is becoming a luxury good" -- Dragnet Nation
This book "Dragnet Nation" comes out today, according to NPR. Anybody catch the spot on "Fresh Air"? One of the author's most disturbing assessments is that to protect yourself from invasion of privacy will cost serious money to the point of being a luxury. And even then, you're still on somebody's radar screen. We need new laws.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/02/24/282061990/if-you-think-youre-anonymous-online-think-again
University of Chicago review this week:
Julia Angwin, AB'92
Author
From the publisher:"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."
Excerpt:
"On what data brokers "know"
"I found out there are a lot of data brokers out there. It took me almost a month to compile a list, because there's no real list of who they all are, and I was able to identify about 200 or so of them. Of those, very few were willing to let me see my data. It was about a dozen that would let me see my data: some of the bigger brokers, LexisNexis, Axium, and some very small outfits. ...
What was shocking about it was that it ranged from incredibly precise — every single address I'd ever lived at including the number on my dorm room in college, which I couldn't even remember ... to very imprecise, inaccurate things ... that were not at all true — that I was a single mother ... with no college education living in a place I didn't live.
We've learned from [Edward] Snowden, for instance, that the NSA is getting data from Google and Facebook and Yahoo and all the big companies that are out there, and in fact, even from things that I wouldn't have thought were worth our time — like information that flows between an app you're playing like Angry Birds and an advertiser that might be trying to advertise within that app. And so we have seen that these commercial databases have so much data and [are] so granular and so enticing to the government that they come in either way."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/02/24/282061990/if-you-think-youre-anonymous-online-think-again
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Last edited Tue Feb 25, 2014, 01:46 PM - Edit history (1)
As the author says on the video I posted, she doesn't advocate the position of hopelessness or want to promote ostrich behavior (ie. "privacy is dead, get over it"
-- she addresses the issues head on.
Angwin suggests identifying all the sensitive areas that we wish to protect--children's data, health data, financial data, political data (right now your voting records are accessible to anyone), etc. --and calls for specific legal protections on these databases. Also protections against certain data about consumer habits going to (for example) car dealers who are able to scan your financial and buying data before you get to the lot and limit your negotiating leverage. She talks about the police-only tool called Stingray, a hand-held device currently in use via cell phone technology--which can collect all data about you from outside your house.
She also recommends encryption and use of services such as Duck Duck Go (search), Disconnect, Tor (browser), and anti-tracking tools. She cautions however that these are only stopgap.
This woman is looking at all this fearlessly. Most of us (including me) have a lot of fear about our surveillance state. Angwin, like Snowden, is raising the alarm. After The Booshcheney era, do we really trust the corporatocracy? And yet, like Angwin says, we all want the tech goodies (including her). She's very real about this dilemma that touches all of us in some way.
Who's surveilling the surveillers?