First published 2015
Security expert Bruce Schneier reveals how deeply surveillance penetrates modern life. Cell phone providers track locations and companions. Online and store purchases reveal unemployment, illness, and pregnancy. Private searches and social media activity expose thoughts and sexual orientation. Schneier shows how corporations manipulate news, advertisements, and prices using this data. Governments discriminate, censor speech, and endanger citizens worldwide. Both sectors share information with each other and lose it to cybercriminals in massive breaches. Citizens cooperate with corporate surveillance for convenience and accept government surveillance for protection, creating a mass surveillance society. Schneier questions whether we have sacrificed more than we have gained. He presents an alternative path that preserves both security and privacy. The book details specific reforms for government surveillance programs and methods to disrupt surveillance based business models. Schneier provides practical daily tips for protecting personal privacy. Readers will view their phones, computers, credit cards, and cars differently after understanding the surveillance apparatus surrounding them.
Genres: computers, non-fiction, technology, 21st-century, current-affairs, academic
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: investigative-journalism, social-issues
398 pages · Hardcover · W. W. Norton & Company