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.
How does a flashlight track your data?
One of the certainly more powerful lessons is how surveillance technologies hide their data harvesting from consumers:
That camera flash can also be used as a flashlight. One of the flashlight apps available for Android phones is Brightest Flashlight Free, by a company called GoldenShores Technologies, LLC. It works great and has a bunch of cool features. Reviewers recommended it to kids going trick-or-treating. One feature that wasn’t mentioned by reviewers is that the app collected location information from its users and allegedly sold it to advertisers.
It’s actually more complicated than that. The company’s privacy policy, never mind that no one read it, actively misled consumers. It said that the company would use any information collected, but left out that the information would be sold to third parties. And although users had to click “accept” on the license agreement they also didn’t read, the app started collecting and sending location information even before people clicked.
This surprised pretty much all of the app’s 50 million users when researchers discovered it in 2012. The US Federal Trade Commission got involved, forcing the company to clean up its deceptive practices and delete the data it had collected. It didn’t fine the company, though, because the app was free.”
pgs. 80-81.
These abuses go virtually unnoticed to a majority of consumers. Mobile app data harvesting is the worst abuse possible.
Minority Report in real life?
Certainly, even technology experts cannot fully escape from tracking technologies today. For everyday users this privacy appears to b a lost cause. While you can certainly plan to minimize your risk, yet today Facebook even tracks non members. Let that surveillance sink in.
In conclusion, Bruce simply wrote a book that should be read by everyone, especially parents of young children with phones and tablets. I also enjoyed his book Click Here to Kill Everybody, an excellent read addressing modern cyber attacks.
Talks at Google | Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data
Democracy Now | Bruce Schneier on the Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society | Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath
TalkingStickTV | Bruce Schneier Data and Goliath
Commonwealth Club of California | Bruce Schneier
NDC Oslo | Keynote Bruce Schneier