"I Have Nothing to Hide"
And 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy
-
- £9.99
Publisher Description
An accessible guide that breaks down the complex issues around mass surveillance and data privacy and explores the negative consequences it can have on individual citizens and their communities.
No one is exempt from data mining: by owning a smartphone, or using social media or a credit card, we hand over private data to corporations and the government. We need to understand how surveillance and data collection operates in order to regain control over our digital freedoms—and our lives.
Attorney and data privacy expert Heidi Boghosian unpacks widespread myths around the seemingly innocuous nature of surveillance, sets the record straight about what government agencies and corporations do with our personal data, and offers solutions to take back our information. “I Have Nothing to Hide” is both a necessary mass surveillance overview and a reference book. It addresses the misconceptions around tradeoffs between privacy and security, citizen spying, and the ability to design products with privacy protections. Boghosian breaks down misinformation surrounding 21 core myths about data privacy, including:
• “Surveillance makes the nation safer.”
• “No one wants to spy on kids.”
• “Police don’t monitor social media.”
• “Metadata doesn’t reveal much about me.”
• “Congress and the courts protect us from surveillance.”
• “There’s nothing I can do to stop surveillance.”
By dispelling myths related to surveillance, this book helps readers better understand what data is being collected, who is gathering it, how they’re doing it, and why it matters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Attorney Boghosian (Spying on Democracy) refutes common misconceptions that lead to public apathy about surveillance technology in this alarming yet clearheaded account. Without appropriate oversight by policymakers and independent government agencies, Boghosian argues, tech products such as Google Nest and Amazon-owned Ring can be compromised by hackers or appropriated by police and used to circumvent due process. She contends that surveillance initiatives launched as part of the "war on terror" have been "abject failures," and notes that one NSA program continues to collect metadata from hundreds of millions of phone calls annually, despite an oversight board's finding that between 2001 and 2014, such bulk collection programs failed to make a "concrete difference" in any counterterrorism investigation. Boghosian also describes how the East German secret police and today's Chinese Communist Party use surveillance technology to stifle political dissent and control citizen behavior, and notes that the U.S. National Guard has used drones to track Black Lives Matter protests. In addition to calling for Congress to update digital privacy laws, Boghosian offers advice for how individuals can "stave off the surveillance state" by using encryption technologies and switching to a search engine that "doesn't track you the way Google does." The result is an accessible and informative introduction to the issues surrounding the rise in surveillance technology.
