3 Excellent Books on Data Privacy
When You are the Product, Privacy Becomes Nonexistent — And Tricky
Much has been written about data privacy since the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal in March of 2018. What happens at places like Facebook or Google where a company’s business model is dependent as much on extracting value from their customers as it is on providing value to them? Even companies like Uber or Netflix — where customers pay directly for services — data is an important part of their business as well. What do we do as consumers in this age? Do we really want all of our data to remain private? Probably not — we want to get the value from our data as well. So, how do we sort through it all? And how do we hold the companies and our government responsible for helping us protecting ourselves?
Below are three books that I believe do a good job at helping us understand privacy in 2019.
#1. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. By Jaron Lanier.
Pretty much any book by Jaron Lanier is worth reading. He is a tech philosopher, computer scientist, visual artist and musician. Oh yeah, and he is considered to be one of the founding fathers of virtual reality, actually coining the term in 1987. He was one of the firsts to put forth the idea of all of us owning our personal data and actually monetizing that ownership so that we can play an active part in the digital economy. I actually couldn’t decide between his seminal book: You Are Not a Gadget and this one, but I chose this one because it is more recent and a quicker read.
#2. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Douglas Rushkoff.
Douglas Rushkoff has written 20 books and I am sure every one of them is worth reading. In this book, he discusses many of the flaws in our digital economy while ultimately being optimistic about what we can do about it. Along the way, he discusses data and data privacy. Ultimately, in this book, and in Team Human, Rushkoff has an expansive and sometimes scary philosophical outlook on our relationship with our data and the digital world that sometimes differs from Lanier’s. Together, they offer an intriguing look at how we might all make sense of what is happening in the world we live in today.
#3. Understanding Privacy. By Daniel J. Solove. This book is a much more academic look at privacy than the other two on the list. It looks at the history of privacy and how the definition of privacy has changed over time. He answers questions like: is privacy the same for us today as it was in the past? Should we be thinking about it differently? And be thinking about contexts as well as content? It is designed for those who are interested in understanding all the aspects of privacy debate — from policy making to surveillance, data mining to identity theft. Although it is a more academic book, Solove has an easy writing style and so the book can be read fairly quickly.
What do you think about these books? Or about the issue of privacy in 2019? Are you ready to delete your Facebook account yet?
