Product Description

Fifty years ago, in "1984", George Orwell imagined a future in which privacy was demolished by a totalitarian state that used spies, video surveillance, historical revisionism, and control over the media to maintain its power. Those who worry about personal privacy and identity - especially in this day of technologies that encroach upon these rights - still use Orwell's "Big Brother" language to discuss privacy issues. But the reality is that the age of a monolithic Big Brother is over. And yet the threats are perhaps even more likely to destroy the rights we've assumed were ours. "Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century" shows how, in these early years of the 21st century, advances in technology endanger our privacy in ways never before imagined. Direct marketers and retailers track our every purchase; surveillance cameras observe our movements; mobile phones will soon report our location to those who want to track us; government eavesdroppers listen in on private communications; misused medical records turn our bodies and our histories against us; and linked databases assemble detailed consumer profiles used to predict and influence our behaviour. Privacy - the most basic of our civil rights - is in grave peril. Simson Garfinkel - journalist, entrepreneur, and international authority on computer security - has devoted his career to testing new technologies and warning about their implications. This revised update of the hardcover edition of "Database Nation" is his account of how invasive technologies will affect our lives in the coming years. It's a timely, far-reaching, entertaining, and thought-provoking look at the serious threats to privacy facing us today. The book poses a disturbing question: how can we protect our basic rights to privacy, identity, and autonomy when technology is making invasion and control easier than ever before? Garfinkel's blend of journalism, storytelling, and futurism is a call to arms. It aims to frighten, entertain, and ultimately convince us that we must take action now to protect our privacy and identity before it's too late.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42147 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Forget the common cold. Instead, consider the rise of "false data syndrome", a deceptive method of identification that's derived from numbers rather than more recognisable human traits. Simson Garfinkel couples this idea with concepts like "data shadow" and "data sphere" to paint a decidedly unappealing scenario in which advanced technology has overriden privacy protection in Database Nation.

Garfinkel argues that "technology is not privacy neutral." It leaves us with only two choices: 1) allow our personal data to rest in the public domain or 2) become hermits (no credit cards, no midnight video jaunts--you get the point). His book, which is thoroughly researched and contains example-rich text--if American-focused--explores the history of identification procedures; the computerisation of ID systems; how and where data is collected, tracked and stored; and the laws which protect privacy. Garfinkel also explains who owns, manipulates, ensures the safety and manages the vast amounts of data (videotapes, photographs, identification numbers, medical records, etc) that make up our collective human infrastructure. The big surprise here is that it isn't governments that manage the majority of this data, it's faceless corporations that trade your purchasing habits, identification numbers and other personal information just like any hot commodity.

Quoting many horrific examples, Garfinkel explores the wide spectrum of data thievery and the future implications of larger, longer-lasting databases. "Citizens", Garfinkel theorises, "don't know how to fight back even though we know our privacy is at risk." For example, a small paragraph on a US insurance claim-form grants "blanket authorization" of all personal records (medical, scholastic etc.) to an insurance company--or else the patient may be denied reimbursement for medical treatment. "We do not have the choice [as consumers] either to negotiate or to strike our own deal", writes Garfinkel.

We can, however, build a world in which sensitive data is respected and kept private--and Garfinkel offers solutions for doing just that. He suggests that citizens, government and corporations co-operate to develop weaker ID systems and legislate heavier penalties for identification theft. But while Garfinkel's argument is thought-provoking, his paranoia-laden prose and Orwellian imagination tend to obscure the safeguards he recommends. Strangely, for all his talk about protecting your privacy, he fails to provide a list of available resources for removing your personal information from direct mail and telemarketing groups. While he would like Database Nation to be as highly regarded (and timely) as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, some may question whether the stakes in the privacy debate are really so high. --E. Brooke Gilbert, Amazon.com

Robin Abbi, Wycombe Star, March 28, 2002
This book qualifies as a must read for all parents and young adults, in fact anyone with a stake in the future direction of our society.

Raven, ravenmatrix website, June 2002
"This book shocked, disturbed, and frightened me. My eyes were forced wide open and I was made to see the reality of our current lack of privacy..."

Customer Reviews

A compelling read - the Silent Spring of "Shadow Watching"
Thirty five years ago Professor Alan Westin of Columbia University, New York, coined the term "data shadow" for the concept that combining different types of records (toll records, credit records, bank records, health records etc) could elicit additional information, a data shadow, which could track the life of an individual. The shadow could show "when the individual entered the highway and where he got off, how many bottles of Scotch or Vermouth he purchased from the liquor store; who paid the rent for the girl in Apartment 4B; who went to the movies between two and four p.m. on a working day at the office; who was at lunch at Luigi's or the Four Seasons on Tuesday September 15th..." (see "Privacy and Freedom" by Alan Westin 1967)

In revisiting this sphere in, what will undoubtedly be a key book of the first decade of the new century, Simpson Garfinkel has one key advantage over lawyers like Professor Alan Westin - Simpson Garfinkel is a journalist. And because his professional skill is with words he is able to paint a picture of the very real threat that "data shadows" pose to us in society far better than lawyers whose real skill is in teaching or in the courtroom. In a gripping and thought provoking three hundred pages Garfinkel shows the threat to freedom which are becoming manifest in our Internet enabled world through the variety and volume of databases which are being created beyond the control of the shadowed citizen.

But the tone of this book is not hysterical - it is factual. As example is laid upon example the direction humanity is taking is clearly laid out with a solution which is likely to be unpopular in the United States - government regulation. It is one of two weaknesses in his text: Garfinkel sets out the problem with clarity and sincerity but his solution, to this European, appears unworkable since we are already past the stage where the US Government could control data shadowing.. The US Government does not control the Internet world as their attempts to control private use of encryption and the regulation of domain names have shown. Instead the benefits of strong privacy protection need to be built into the next generation of e-business infrastructure - with support for such voluntary measures being given active support by government throughout the world. And the US law of torts needs to be extended by a determined judiciary to cover situations such as that of Nadia Velazquez who three weeks after she won New York's Democratic primary in 1994 received a telephone call from Pete Hamill, a reporter on the New York Post - someone at the St Clair Hospital in New York had faxed Velazquez's medical records to the New York Post. The records detailed the care that Velazquez had received after a suicide attempt. "When I found this information was being published in the newspaper and that I had no power to stop it, I felt violated. I trusted the system and it failed me."

As Garfinkel says the debate in "Database Nation" - "is not about the man who wants to watch pornography in complete anonymity over the Internet - it is about the woman who is afraid to use the Internet to organise her community against a proposed toxic dump - she is afraid because the dump's investors are sure to dig through her past if she becomes too much of a nuisance. It is not about people speeding on the nations highways who get automatically generated tickets mailed to them thanks to a computerised speed trap. It is about lovers who will take less joy in walking around city streets or visiting stores because they know they're being photographed by surveillance cameras everywhere they step. It is not about the special prosecutors who leave no stone unturned in their search for corruption or political misdeeds. It is about good, upstanding citizens who are now refusing to enter public service because they do not want a bloodthirsty press rummaging through their old school reports, computerised medical records and e-mail. ..."

Garfinkel's only other weakness is that his book does not sufficiently look outside the United States, in particular at World Data Flows and the changes being brought about by Electronic Commerce. One book which is not in his bibliography which should be there is "None of Your Business" by Peter P. Swire and Robert E. Litan (Brooking Institute Press 1998) which looks at the looming threat of Europe's data privacy regime on corporate America.

But all this is minor carping.

Simson Garfinkel's book is a work of great importance which should be read by anyone concerned about Freedom in the Internet Age. It is a fine exposition and analysis of where we are today and where we are going in the Database Nation.

Alistair KELMAN

Information is power - how to control the power over you.

Subtitled, the death of privacy in the 21st century, Simson Garfinkel charts a topical course through computerised personal information. Consider what might happen if you were to be able to link computer-held information about yourself. Scared? Think of everything held by distinct parties. Now join it all together. Everything from your electoral information, your tax records, your credit card bill, your mobile telephone calls, your web browser's history file, your supermarket loyalty card, your car's satnav. Now factor in face recognition from CCTV, cookies left behind from web sites, the boxes you tick when you sign an application form ...

Now think that all this could be drawn together. Now automate it so that a computer, not a person, makes decision on your life based on these related clues. Scary, huh?

And boy does he cover some ground - from medical records, web logs, satelite imagery, encryption products, mail redirection - we get the full gamut. His central tenet is clear - just what does personal information mean? What rights to you have over information about yourself? Your name, your date of birth, your income, your shoe size, your magazine subscriptions, your web life. All disparate facts, but when combined, a powerful profile and useful to many people. From an insurer worrying about you as a policy, to a prospective employer who's interested in seeing what you've said on the net, to the local council who noticed you've built a new outhouse on your land ... the truth is out there, but can you connect it up?

The body is yours, but what's right do you have to your identity? You can fight back - pay in cash, wear dark glasses, don't get ill, don't travel outside your country's borders, browser through an anonymiser - but the tide needs to be stemmed and only, apparently, the governments can do it ... but do they have the inclination?

A truly scary read and a wake-up call that information is, now more than ever, power. And if you've either it got it, or you ain't, just how to you decide who gets information about you?

A Chilling Orwellian Nightmare of a Free Enterprise "1984"
Mr. Garfinkel shares a bad dream with us of how unpleasant our lives could be made by unlimited assaults on our privacy.

-- Instead of just getting telemarketing calls at dinner time, marketers send thousands of e-mails to follow up on every transaction you make (15,000 restaurants send you an e-mail coupon when they learn you are coming to New York on your honeymoon).

-- Someone steals your identity by lifting a credit card application from your junk mail, spends $150,000 in your name, and ruins your credit record for 7 years so you cannot get a mortgage or another credit card (after yours are cancelled)-- because the credit bureaus cannot clean this information out of their systems.

-- You get locked in a "smart" elevator that has stopped functioning because it has recognized your fellow passenger as a criminal. You suffer from a psychotic assault by the criminal, as a result, who holds you hostage in the disabled elevator.

-- Telemarketers get through your caller ID screen by using software to pretend to call from your relatives' telephone numbers.

-- Your computer at work monitors your output, and sends you messages about needing to do more work.

George Orwell feared the government as "Big Brother" in "1984." Mr. Garfinkel says that we have Big Brother under control, but profit-making enterprises are going to get us instead. We are at risk from the universal use of the Social Security Number, "body identifying equipment" like fingerprint and voice print detectors, and massive data bases that are unwieldy.

When focused on describing the parts of the threat that have not yet manifested themselves, Mr. Garfinkel is brilliant and effective. When focusing on the solutions, he is less so. Basically, he wants to create federal laws and a federal agency (albeit a small one) that will monitor technology threats and inform Congress on the choices to protect people. I think Mr. Garfinkel is pretty naive in thinking this will be enough. How much has Congress helped us stop intrusions from other forms of free enterprise? Basically, Congress listens to special interests far more than citizens. I marked the book down one star for these weak solution proposals.

I do agree with Mr. Garfinkel when he says that technology is invasive. I think instead that we have to rely on our own efforts to protect our own privacy and that of people who we are responsible for. I also think we must business with companies that use our data in responsible ways, and demand full disclosure on privacy policies. For example, encryption technology can help a lot of companies allow us to work with these businesses in ways we prefer to. I can see the rise of intermediaries which provide confidentiality and data security. I certainly would like to do business with companies like that. Are there any entrepreneurs out there listening?

After you have finished reading this book, think about how you can protect yourself from the worst invasions of your privacy. A good start is to get your name taken off of bulk lists. Change your address (using P.O. boxes and private services) and e-mail address often, if necessary, to help. Inquire about what other uses are made of the information you generate. Ask to see your medical records. Find out how they are being sold, and make changes to put a stop to that abuse. Armed with this book, you can make a lot of progress in protecting yourself. Mr. Garfinkel deserves our thanks and support for providing this valuable information.