Schneier on Security

Another Coward • April 6, 2016 9:40 AM

Name wrote:

…the book is worthless if you read
“No Place to Hide Edward Snowden the NSA and the Surveillance State”
and Tor project’s manual/Wiki

Not even close. D&G aims to give the laymen an solid overview of the kinds of data that others collect about them and a framework for understanding recent public debates over security and privacy.

Here’s an example from real life. I turned off all my Google account tracking. Google warned me that my ads weren’t going to be personalized. Ok. Sure enough, ads for biking, camping gear, statistical software and clothing were replaced with a new ads, all for mail-order brides. When it was clear that I had enough wives, the ads started offering porn. So I pulled up YouTube music videos and left it on auto-play for a good long time until Google decided I had ADHD.

Then I had to swap out my internet router and Comcast gave me back an IP address I had used years ago. Suddenly, YouTube videos rotated a series of ads about social security, “Hillary for Prison 2016” and “Trump for…” along with ads for two different medical conditions I had discussed over GMail with family members. I’m a middle-aged unemployed software developer. Now I’m beginning to wonder if the deafening silence from the job market isn’t about a surplus of qualified, cheaper H-1Bs or subconscious age discrimination but might be those pesky Applicant Tracking Systems. If it’s not illegal to buy household health cost estimates tied to my name, e-mail and IP address, what’s to stop businesses from integrating that data into the Applicant Tracking System and sorting candidates so healthy ones appear at the top of the list? They’ll never know that I don’t have the medical condition I was researching, but heck, it might be hereditary or contagious, so better safe than sorry. I suppose someone would have to introduce a new law and see if there was any opposition to know if this was going on.

This book raises awareness of many of the ways that secret data collection and dissemination can unfairly affect your life. You typically don’t have any right to challenge this “digital slander” and its getting worse.

It’s a quick read and I thought some of the author’s assertions were unsupported until I realized that he includes 125 pages of footnotes with explanations and supporting URLs. An important book.