Watching the watchers
Maintaining your privacy is harder than you think
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. By Julia Angwin. Times Books; 209 pages; $28. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
IF THE online service is free then you are the product, techies say. Google and Facebook make a fortune collecting personal information to help them target their advertisements more accurately. Free smartphone apps typically suck in all the data they can, such as the person’s location or their entire address book. At the same time, governments collect oodles of information about everyone, not only through mass surveillance, as the disclosures by Edward Snowden have made clear, but also by gathering mundane things, such as voter registration and driving-licence records that are then sold on to commercial firms.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Watching the watchers”
From the March 1st 2014 edition
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