A great piece of narrative non-fiction that reads like a thriller.

If you are interested in Big Tech and privacy issues, you are probably familiar with scandals such as Cambridge Analytica or Snowden's revelations about the NSA. But like me, you probably had no idea that it all started decades earlier, and that many of the most nefarious practices in the US today can be traced back to one man, a larger-than-life, deranged genius who "began to encode a certain paranoia - his own - into American life".

McKenzie Funk is a harsh critic of the abuses of data brokers and their (mostly governmental) clients, and he makes many convincing and powerful points. We already live in a dystopian, Orwellian future. It's time to understand it and do something about it.

Thanks to the publisher, St. Martin's Press, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.