Your Car May Be Spying on You

Are you aware that you’re being watched by big tech companies? In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff explores the concept and consequences of “surveillance capitalism”—a term she created to describe the invasive and controlling data collection practices that tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have adopted to maximize their profits. By learning about these practices, you’ll be better equipped to protect your privacy and fight to protect the privacy of us all.

In this guide, we’ll explore what surveillance capitalism is, how it’s been able to thrive despite growing opposition, and what we can do to prevent it from destroying our freedom and democracy. We’ll also expand on Zuboff’s ideas by suggesting counterarguments to some of her claims, adding context where possible to enhance understanding, providing updated examples of tech companies’ actions, and recommending concrete steps you can take to combat surveillance capitalism.

In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the existence of STELLARWIND, the US government’s mass surveillance program. Until Snowden revealed the program, the US government was recording the phone and computer activities of nearly everyone in the world.

In Permanent Record, Snowden explains how he became involved with the government, how he learned about the mass surveillance program, and how he ultimately made the decision to speak up—a decision that would change his life, and the lives of everyone who uses the Internet, forever.

When you read the words “average person,” who do you picture? Most people picture a man. In her best seller Invisible Women, feminist campaigner Caroline Criado Perez explains that this is because most humans operate on a male-as-default mindset: We think the average person is male. This mindset leads to and is reinforced by a gender data gap—a lack of information about the female experience—that ultimately harms women’s health, safety, and economic standing.

In this guide, you’ll learn how our male-as-default mindset leads us to create cars and medicines that put women’s health at risk. You’ll also discover how this mindset both results in and stems from a gender data gap that harms women’s economic standing. Finally, you’ll learn how our lack of consideration for gender-specific concerns harms women’s safety everywhere from trains to refugee camps—and ultimately reinforces the male-as-default mindset. Along the way, we’ll provide recent data that sheds further light on the gender data gap and examine how countries and institutions have tried to remedy it.

In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the existence of STELLARWIND, the US government’s mass surveillance program. Until Snowden revealed the program, the US government was recording the phone and computer activities of nearly everyone in the world.

In Permanent Record, Snowden explains how he became involved with the government, how he learned about the mass surveillance program, and how he ultimately made the decision to speak up—a decision that would change his life, and the lives of everyone who uses the Internet, forever.

Data privacy is a hot topic these days, given the ubiquitous tracking that follows you everywhere on the web. You might want to know that your medical data isn't as private as you might think. Your healthcare providers—pharmacy, hospital, health insurer, lab test provider, and genome sequencers—are continuously selling your medical data to data brokers. Data brokers compile this information into a patient record, which is then resold with records of hundreds of millions of other patients for marketing and industry analysis purposes.

Our Bodies, Our Data is a useful survey of the medical data industry and its current worrisome capabilities. You’ll learn how the industry progressively sold more and more data, how patient records are compiled, and why there’s a market for this data.

Mass surveillance has become a daily part of life, as corporations and governments around the world openly collect data about who we are and how we live our lives. But has this always been the case? And if not, how did we get here?

Are you aware that you’re being watched by big tech companies? In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff explores the concept and consequences of “surveillance capitalism”—a term she created to describe the invasive and controlling data collection practices that tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have adopted to maximize their profits. By learning about these practices, you’ll be better equipped to protect your privacy and fight to protect the privacy of us all.

In this guide, we’ll explore what surveillance capitalism is, how it’s been able to thrive despite growing opposition, and what we can do to prevent it from destroying our freedom and democracy. We’ll also expand on Zuboff’s ideas by suggesting counterarguments to some of her claims, adding context where possible to enhance understanding, providing updated examples of tech companies’ actions, and recommending concrete steps you can take to combat surveillance capitalism.

Many of us are glued to our smartphones, tablets, and laptops, to the point that we’ve lost control of how we spend our time and attention. We feel overpowered and exhausted by the multitude of digital tools at our fingertips, including smartphones and tablets, websites, addictive apps, and social media platforms. Meanwhile, tech companies continue to invest major resources into making their products and services addictive so that we’ll continue scrolling and tapping.

This book explains how you can transform your tech habits by adopting digital minimalism, which aims to maximize the benefits of technology and avoid the pitfalls by identifying your values and determining how to use technology to support them. Learn how tech companies use human psychology to make their apps addictive, how likes and comments are weakening your relationship, and why trading your smartphone for a dumb phone could change your life.

For millennia, humans struggled with three serious problems—famine, plagues, and war—which led to the deaths of millions of people and to the rise and fall of global empires. People coped with these problems and answered life's questions with religion. However, in the modern era, we no longer rely on prayer—we’ve mostly overcome these three problems through the development of technology and medical knowledge.

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, envisions a future in which technology replaces humanist ideals and liberal government. Dissecting the concepts of religion, immortality, and technology, Harari argues that the world of the future may be run by advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence, not human beings.