Julia brought these up as well, and quoted sci-fi writer David Brin: The key question is, who has access? and what do they do with it? The culture of fear was very different then, and although there’s all this data out there, important distinctions need to be made: both what the data is used for and the extent to which people feel threatened by that usage are very different now. citizen with what happened under Nazi Germany, and she makes the point that the Stasi would have been amazed by all this technology. That was a bit far for me.Įarly on in the book she compares the tracking of a U.S. At some point she finds herself with two phones – including a “burner”, which made me think she was a character in House of Cards – and one of them was wrapped up in tin foil to avoid the GPS tracking. In fact, she goes pretty far, and pays for quite a few different esoteric privacy services along the way she explores questions like how you decide to trust the weird people who offer those services. She doesn’t want to hand herself over to them on a silver platter. Rather, she wants to make the trackers work harder.

She’s a working mother with a web presence, and she doesn’t want to live in paranoid fear of being tracked. Spoiler alert: her attempts do not succeed.įrom the get go Julia is not a perfectionist, which is a relief. Julia takes us along her journey of trying to stay off the grid, and for me the most fascinating parts are her “data audit” (Chapter 6), where she tries to figure out what data about her is out there and who has it, and the attempts she makes to clean the web of her data and generally speaking “opt out”, which starts in Chapter 7 but extends beyond that when she makes the decision to get off of gmail and LinkedIn. So for that reason alone I think this book should be widely read. After reading this book you have a good idea of the data landscape as well as many of the things that can currently go wrong for you personally with the associated loss of privacy. I actually met Julia a few months ago and talked to her briefly about her upcoming book when I visited the ProPublica office downtown, so it was an extra treat to finally get my hands on the book.įirst off, let me just say this is an important book, and a provides a crucial and well-described view into the private data behind the models that I get so worried about. I recently devoured Julia Angwin‘s new book Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.

Dragnet nation