Book Review on Consumer, Personal, Cell Phone, and Internet Privacy Issues

Book Review on Consumer, Personal, Cell Phone, and Internet Privacy Issues

People have been talking about the Internet and online privacy for quite some time, since I have used it. I can remember some people discussing it even in 1993, and in 1996 some people were alarmed, and rightly so. Back then, it was clear that this would become a big problem, especially as public records came online. So the whole concept of privacy, well, it went out the window from there.

Today, we complain about social media and privacy, as well as companies that disclose information, but it is not that people do not freely give up their rights to privacy often enough of their own free will, yes, to exchanging some online service or freebie To better understand all of this, you may need some background on the subject, how we got here today, and the reality that we never had complete privacy guaranteed, the illusion of such online.

Now I would certainly like to recommend a very good book on this subject if you want to get a little history. This way, when you are discussing this topic, you will understand how we got here today. The name of the book that I would like to recommend is:

“Privacy at stake: the politics of wiretapping and encryption” by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, (1999), pp. 364, ISBN: 0-262-04167-7.

You will learn the arguments of both sides, the real issues of national security, and what goes on behind the scenes. And from there you can easily imagine what happens today. It hardly takes much thought to see it, or read a lot to see where this is all going from here. Please consider all of this.

++ I also recommend reading To bring you up to speed are these two articles recently published in the Wall Street Journal, viz;

  1. Wall Street Journal Article – “At the forefront of the web, anonymity in name only”, which was written by Emily Steel and Julia Angwin.
  2. “Google is dying on privacy as the world of advertising advances”, Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2010 – by Jessica E. Vascellaro.
  3. “The great debate on privacy”, which was debated by Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, versus Nicholas Carr, author of “The Swallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” which appeared in the Saturday-Sunday edition of the WSJ on August 7-8, 2010.

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