On a daily basis, we produce a huge amount of data by using laptops, mobile phones, or any other computer-based systems. The book’s scary title is no exaggeration. It covers the most interesting case studies on the use of our data by governments, marketing companies, and any corporation we interact with either as customers or as users, for surveillance and monitoring. This trend, as stated by the author, has been assisted by the decline in the costs of surveillance technology and storage media.

As examples, companies such as Google and Microsoft, which in the past were storing only metadata (such as email headers, sender, recipient, and so on) pertaining to our communications, are now storing whole messages. This makes it easy to build an extremely accurate profile of anyone using online technologies. Many of the online services we use don’t consult their customers, and the latter are therefore not aware that their data is being collected and analyzed.

Data and Goliath is a collection of 16 chapters divided into three parts. Part 1 discusses the rise in the amount of produced data as a result of using technology. It also discusses the emergence of the business of control. Part 2 covers the main concerns over surveillance and exposes a set of real case studies. In Part 3, the author presents a set of best practices in order to counter this systematic collection of our data for surveillance use. In my opinion, although this list of countermeasures is useful, most of them relate to political activism. I believe that we need more concrete solutions in order to block surveillance and protect our data. Proper research on data obfuscation mechanisms is of primordial importance if we don’t want to drown in Orwell’s 1984 world.

The case studies are very well documented. Schneier’s support for freedom and the right for privacy are quite apparent. The writing style is very light, and the book is interesting. I would highly recommend this book, along with a few other titles [1,2,3], to anyone wanting to discover the real world we live in.

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