News in the Category "Data and Goliath"
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Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battle to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (Review)
Reviewed by Annie Millar1
Summary: Data and Goliath:The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World describes a world in which surveillance has become a part of our everyday life, a world we are currently living in. Schneier describes what we know as a result of Edward Snowden and his disclosure of confidential NSA information. He outlines three main concepts: the surveillance society we live in, the harms that arise from mass surveillance, and what we need to do to protect ourselves. This book review will focus on one of the two major surveillance parties in the world, the government…
Bruce Schneier—Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
One of the most striking paradoxes of our time resides in our smartphones. Our everyday use of these iconic and progressively factotum apparatuses records at various levels every activity we do in space and time, with the unbelievable outcome that, on a mass scale, we’re happy about that and willfully give up our intimate privacy to be allowed to continue using them. It’s nothing new, but we’re still turning our head to what is behind. There are battles going on to conquer the most strategic parts of the big data we produce, in the huge business called “DaaS” (data as a service). Data and Goliath is a book about these battles, written by an acknowledged security expert, who has not given up on opposing the total surveillance paradigm. He thoughtfully couples a lucid analysis deducted from plenty of facts and sources with suggestions. Schneier’s privacy advocacy clarifies the overwhelming confusion in the current post-Snowden revelation period, sorting out the wrong approach to national securities and the inflated scale of control. His passionate approach doesn’t prevent him from imagining alternative scenarios, where new types of business models replace the current privacy in exchange for free services model. On the other side, an important part of the book is dedicated to advice, from breaking up the NSA into more specialized agencies, to teaching users why they need to stop sharing so much personal and intimate details and how. Being encouraged by a major expert in the field is the best argument for privacy one can ask for…
Book Review: Data and Goliath
This is one of Bruce Schneier’s latest books, but my first read from him. The title caught my attention, and I’m glad it did.
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (Review)
Executive Summary
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World is Bruce Schneier’s manifesto on what should be done about the amount, and controls around data being collected on us. If, like me, you have been focused on Information Security this book is a great exposure to the privacy issues our profession is facing. The book is more focused on policy than practical application, but worth the read for the background and ideas presented.
Data and Goliath is a call to action around two topics: first, the cultural acceptance of not owning our personal data or understanding how it is being used; and second, the difference between nation-state espionage and mass surveillance. Trying to reduce the themes of the book to just a couple of points is a gross oversimplification. This book belongs in the Canon due to the foundational and timeless issues it addresses for our industry. Finally, don’t let the 400-page length intimidate you, as the text of the book is only 238 pages with the rest being reference notes…
Review: Data and Goliath
Hi everyone,
Political views aside, it is important to be aware of the fact that what we post online has a footprint. This is something I always tell my daughters and the younger generations. After reading “Data and Goliath” by Bruce Schneier, it is clear why corporate and government surveillance is on the rise—but more importantly the book is a good resource for learning how to protect your privacy online, if you so choose.
One story that this book reminded me of is from a few years back. The premise of the story being that targeted advertising from this teen girl’s online behavior figured out that she was pregnant before her dad did. Here’s an excerpt of the New York Times article:…
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (Review)
Data and Goliath—the very title invites you to read and have fun. But make no mistake—this is not a whimsical book. Rather,
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, by Bruce Schneier, is sobering and frightening. When Schneier, whom Wired magazine called “one of the world’s foremost security experts,” writes, “[w]e are living in the golden age of surveillance,” he does not mean it approvingly.
Schneier points out that this golden age of surveillance did not happen by accident. Indeed, we Americans have chosen convenience and safety over privacy. For the convenience of cell phones, the Internet, the Cloud, and other technologies, we have given corporations the right to know virtually everything about us at every moment of every day. And, for safety from all things dangerous, such as child abductors, drug dealers, and certainly terrorists, we have relinquished our privacy, along with our civil liberties…
The Security Reading Room: The Best Information Security Books of 2015
Excerpt
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World: Bruce Schneier could have justifiably written an angry diatribe full of vitriol against President Obama, his administration, and the NSA for their wholesale spying on innocent Americans and violations of myriad laws and the Constitution. Instead, he has written a thoroughly convincing and brilliant book about big data, mass surveillance and the ensuing privacy dangers.
Holiday Gift Guide: Good Reads Worth the Investment
Excerpt
Data and Goliath
by Bruce Schneier
W. W. Norton & Company
From the moment you wake up, you start generating data. Your phone tracks your movements. Your purchases signal whether you’re sick or pregnant or going on vacation. In the background, this information is collected and analyzed. This book looks at how this surveillance state of our own creation affects us.
Datenschutz in Rücklage
Hansueli Schöchli reviewed the German edition of Data and Goliath for Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Rolling Back Mass Surveillance
Bruce Schneier is a man worth listening to. In 1993, just as the Internet was gaining speed, he wrote one of the earliest books on applying cryptography to network communications, and has since become a well-known security specialist and author of about a dozen books on Internet security and related matters. So when someone like Schneier says we’re in big trouble and we need to do something fast to keep it from getting worse, we should at least pay attention.
The trouble is mass surveillance. In his latest book, Data and Goliath, he explains that mass surveillance is the practice of indiscriminately collecting giant data banks of information on people first, and then deciding what you can do with it. One of the best-known and most controversial examples of this is the practice of the U. S. National Security Agency (NSA) of grabbing telecommunications metadata (basically, who called whom when) covering the entire U. S., which was revealed when Edward Snowden made his stolen NSA files public in 2013. Advocates of the NSA defend the call database by saying the content of the calls is not monitored, only the fact that they were made. But Schneier makes short work of that argument in a few well-chosen examples showing that such metadata can easily reveal extremely private facts about a person: medical conditions or sexual orientation, for example…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.