Bruce Schneier (2015) Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, London & New York, W. W. Norton & Company.
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2017, Vol 9, Issue 1
Abstract
Scepticism was the attitude governing my state of mind when I stared reading this book but it vanished as soon as I realized it challenged one of my deepest beliefs, namely: My life is so ordinary that no one, in their right minds, would bother monitor the routines. Out of my personal reflex as a psychiatrist I attributed paranoid tendencies to those concerned about being surveilled with the use of electronic devices. It might be that at an individual level, one’s life is not of primary interest, unless one is a public figure or is prosecuted for some sort of crime, but at a global level, the individual becomes an inexhaustible source of useful information no matter how mediocre their lives are and this is what the author wants to highlight from the very beginning. Everybody has heard about the existence of verbal and non-verbal communication and most of us agree that the latter is the form which bears the highest percentage of truth in an interaction. On the other hand, few of us know that there is an equivalent for them both in terms of data. Bruce Schneier defines metadata as a sort of non-verbal communication in this surveillance universe that provides accurate information of interest, for example the sender can codify a message, but facts about when/who/to whom/how often/from where the message was sent are less likely to be manipulated in an electronic communication.
Authors and Affiliations
Alecsandra Irimie-Ana
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