Bruce Schneier
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
ISBN: 978-0-393-35217-7
Whether you like it or not, you are being surveilled every minute of every day. It’s the price we pay for modern conveniences, like being able to call a friend from the car, find an obscure item online and have it shipped overnight to your home, or depositing money in your bank account hundreds of miles from your nearest bank branch. Many of us have settled with being tracked, but many others are unaware of the scope of the surveillance and tracking that large corporations and governments use to track our every move.
Bruce Schneier breaks down the level and quantity of tracking and what you can do to limit your exposure to it in his book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. It’s a fascinating look into the public and private sector surveillance all of us receive each day – some more well-known than others. The author packed a ton of interesting information in between the covers, and has dozens of pages of references to check out at the end of the book. I thought I knew a lot about our current surveillance state, but there were a few things that I learned along the way.
If you want to limit your exposure to some surveillance, Schneier offers a number of tips and tricks that anyone can implement. He also gave some policy suggestions that governments could implement, in order to allow the population more privacy online and beyond. There was this strange push and pull between more and less regulation in the suggestions – I don’t know if the author was trying to strike some sort of balance between expansion and contraction of government, as government is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to data collection and retention of the citizenry. Most of the regulation seemed directed at corporations, specifically the big tech companies and platforms like Facebook and Google. I agree that we need to do something, but government surveillance needs to be curtailed as well.
The book is incredibly dense for its size. I took it with me to read next to the pool on a trip, and I didn’t end up finishing it until I returned home. There is so much information inside, from the different areas where our privacy is under attack, to Schneier’s suggestions on how to protect yourself from government and corporate surveillance. He included text from a number of initiatives that have been tried around the world to increase Internet security and give people rights to their data online. There was so much information that I ended up reading a few pages twice, just to make sure that I picked up everything I needed to before I finished the book.
Overall, 9/10, would highly recommend to anyone interested in reducing or eliminating some of the tracking they face each day. Unless you want to completely drop out of modern society and live in a shed in the woods, you need to find ways to increase your privacy and decrease the number of data access points you create each and every day. If you’re completely open to governmental and corporate spying into your every move, then this book is probably not for you. The hope is that it will open a few eyes and spur some people into taking action, as our lives continue to become more digital each and every day.