Data and Goliath

Schneier describes the surveillance that falls out of ordinary technology use, covering both government collection and the commercial data economy that supplies it. The first part sets out what gets collected and how, including location history, metadata and the inferences drawn from combining otherwise dull sources. The second part argues about the harms, covering chilling effects, discrimination through algorithmic sorting, and the security weaknesses created by building collection capability into systems. The third part is prescriptive, with separate sets of recommendations for governments, for corporations and for individuals. Read it as background before writing a privacy policy or specifying an analytics event.