The All-Seeing Eye of the Third Party

Someone is watching you. In modern life, we are all tracked and surveilled to a remarkable extent, thanks to the increasingly online world in which we operate. In Means of Control, former Wall Street Journal reporter Byron Tau has set out to explain how we got here (and that it’s much worse than you thought).

After 9/11, government agencies snapped into gear in terms of expanding their range of surveillance. They started keeping tabs on more and more people, monitoring phone calls, bank accounts, and travel histories, trying to spot the next Mohammad Atta before he could do any damage. This meant scanning the lives of a lot of innocent people. But there were still limits (legally and technically) to what they could catch in these information nets.

A few years later, things became easier for them. Social media encouraged us to put more and more of our lives in public. And then we helped out by providing our own tracking devices: we bought smartphones. All the apps we use to find our way around, manage our diets, chat with our friends, and take vacation pictures, are leaking information about us. (One of the obvious reminders that we are being tracked is the phenomenon of being chased from website to website by the same ad for jeans.)

The reason much of this data is collected is that at any given moment, your attention as a commodity (and therefore real estate on your screen) is being sold to advertisers. They need to know what you’ve searched before. And they need to know where you are, to know whether to tell you about a restaurant in Memphis or one in Marblehead. And where is the crucial piece of intel that can help identify you, in a sea of data. As Tau says: “Geolocation is the single most valuable piece of commercial data to come off those devices.”

Most of us are (however dimly) aware that our data is being harvested, and we’ve grudgingly accepted it as part of online life. We click “agree” to the app’s privacy policy without reading it. We ritually click “ok” on the cookie pop-ups and then a few more taps to get rid of random video pop-ups that are in the way of the recipe or news story we want to read....

full review at https://lawliberty.org/book-review/the-all-seeing-eye-of-the-third-party/

MEANS OF CONTROL by Byron Tau traces "How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State." Tau is an investigative journalist who specializes in law, courts, and national security; he formerly wrote for The Wall Street Journal and has spent years researching this text which is based on "more than 350 interviews and tens of thousands of pages of documents." Tau conveys a sense of honesty and integrity to his readers even with the disturbing information he shares: "The truth is that no consumer or citizen can know what data is being collected about them or how it's used, let alone consent." He writes roughly chronologically and divides the text into four parts. The first begins around 9/11 and describes the evolution of consumer data brokers and their early contributions to national security. The second is about early efforts to monitor social media as it grew. The third part focuses on advertising data, smartphones, and geographic tracking. Finally, he looks at more recent "increasingly weird world of esoteric data that without even knowing it we're all generating..." Throughout, Tau comments on civil rights, especially privacy, and writes at length about the "partnership" between - and motivations of - corporate and government entities. MEANS OF CONTROL received a starred review from Publishers Weekly ("A chilling chronicle .... filled with shocking revelations and first-rate reporting..."). Kirkus said that Tau's "explanations of how surveillance techniques have evolved in the 21st century ... are exceptionally clear and unsettling.." The writing style is very accessible and MEANS OF CONTROL deserves a wide readership.