num_pages: 319
description: As the 21st century dawns, advances in technology endanger our privacy in ways never before imagined. Direct marketers and retailers track our every purchase; surveillance cameras observe our movements; mobile phones will soon report our location to those who want to track us; government eavesdroppers listen in on private communications; misused medical records turn our bodies and our histories against us; and linked databases assemble detailed consumer profiles used to predict and influence our behavior. Privacy -- the most basic of our civil rights -- is in grave peril.Simson Garfinkel -- journalist, entrepreneur, and international authority on computer security -- has spent his career testing new technologies and warning about their implications. Database Nation is his compelling account of how invasive technologies will affect our lives in the coming years. It's a timely, far-reaching, entertaining, and thought-provoking look at the serious threats to privacy facing us today. The book poses a disturbing how can we protect our basic rights to privacy, identity, and autonomy when technology is making invasion and control easier than ever before?Garfinkel's captivating blend of journalism, storytelling, and futurism is a call to arms. It will frighten, entertain, and ultimately convince us that we must take action now to protect our privacy and identity before it's too years ago, in 1984, George Orwell imagined a future in which privacy was demolished by a totalitarian state that used spies, video surveillance, historical revisionism, and control over the media to maintain its power. Those who worry about personal privacy and identity--especially in this day of technologies that encroach upon these rights-- still use Orwell's "Big Brother" language to discuss privacy issues. But the reality is that the age of a monolithic Big Brother is over. And yet the threats are perhaps even more likely to destroy the rights we've assumed were ours.Today's threats to privacy are more widely distributed than they were in Orwell's state, and they represent both public and private interests. Over the next fifty years, we'll see new kinds of threats to privacy that don't find their roots in totalitarianism but in capitalism, the free market, advances in technology, and the unbridled exchange of electronic information.Today's Threats to PrivacyThe End of Due Process. Governments and businesses went on a computer-buying spree in the second half of the 20th century, replacing billions of paper files with electronic data-processing systems. But the new computers lacked some very important qualities of the manual systems that they flexibility, compassion, and understanding. Today, humans often are completely absent from digital decision-making. As a result, we've created a world in which the smallest clerical errors can have devastating effects on a person's life. It's a world where comput- ers are assumed to be correct, and people wrong. Why This Book?This book is more than simply a journalistic summary of the current state of privacy rights and violations. It is a call to arms. Forty years ago, unbridled technology attacked our environment--and few people seemed to know or care. With the publication of "Silent Spring" in 1962, Rachel Carson opened our eyes. Her graphic depiction of the ecological and health ravages brought by technology made many people realize the risks as never before. Today, our environment still imperils us, but things are better than they might have been, and we have a population that's informed and, in many cases, activist.This book pleads the case for privacy in the same way. There is much that can be done with, not in spite of, technology. An aware public is the first step. It is our hope that this book will open the public's eyes to the many intrusions on our privacy before it is too late.
language: English
title: Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century
titlecomplete: Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century
genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Business, Internet, Computers
ratings_count: 138
publisher: O'Reilly Media