Category: Google

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier. He is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project.

Bruce is moreover, writing a book about surveillance. He is addressing the who and why, how it works, and the business models. This is certainly a complicated issue. Most importantly, your privacy is very important.

Above all, we live in a surveillance state today. Bruce is sharing enormous amounts of resources revealing how vast amounts our personal data are harvested. In addition, Facebook is the greatest abuser, with Google’s Gmail not far behind.

One of the important lessons is that much of this has become voluntary. We want free services (email, cloud storage) or cheap hardware mobile phones and big, smart TVs, so we actually permit corporate surveillance within our living rooms.

In addition, this reminds me of lessons from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Companies promise cheaper services and convenience to justify their surveillance technology, while local, state and federal governments make a promise of protection and physical security.

Apps are tracking us all day long

We certainly all understand by now that cellular carriers track everywhere you travel. Facebook records your location each time you open their app on your phone. In addition, Google Maps and their Waze traffic app records your GPS data, and even your credit card purchases.