Julia Angwin Quotes

speculated that cameras are effective only when they are actively monitored by law enforcement agents, who act quickly upon the information obtained by the cameras.

Is mass surveillance worth it when its fiercest advocates can only say that it "contributed to our understanding" of cases "at the margins"?

Location is also predictive. Researchers at Microsoft found that location data can be used to predict fairly accurately where people will be located in the future.

Privacy and pollution are similar problems. Both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource--whether it is land, water, or information. Both suffer from difficult attribution. It is not easy to identify a single pollutant or a single piece of data that caused harm. Rather, the harm often comes from an accumulation of pollutants, or an assemblage of data. And the harm of both pollution and privacy is collective. No one person bears the burden of all pollution; all of society suffers when the air is dirty and the water undrinkable. Similarly, we all suffer when we live in fear that our data will be used against us by companies trying to exploit us or police officers sweeping us into a lineup. (212-213)

Pseudonymity is key to our online privacy.

the prices seem to reflect how far Staples believes the user lives from a competitor's store. Staples confirmed that it varies prices by a number of factors but declined to be specific.

Some research suggests that collecting vast amounts of data simply can't predict rare events like terrorism. A 2006 paper by Jeff Jonas, an IBM research scientist, and Jim Harper, the director of information policy at the Cato Institute, concluded that terrorism events aren't common enough to lend themselves to large-scale computer data mining.

Highly-automated tools and techniques cannot be easily applied to the much more difficult problem of detecting and preempting a terrorist attack, and success in doing so may not be possible at all.

Dragnets that indiscriminately sweep up personal data fall squarely into the gray area between what is legal and what is socially acceptable.

Dragnets that scoop up information indiscriminately about everyone in their path used to be rare; police

did highlight the case of Najibullah Zazi. In 2009, Zazi was arrested just days before he and friends were allegedly planning to carry out a suicide bombing in the New York City subway. According to Alexander, Zazi was swept up in a dragnet called "Operation High-Rise." The

In 1989, roughly one in fifty East Germans between the ages of eighteen and eighty worked for the Stasi in some capacity.

In a culture where people judge each other as much by their digital footprints as by their real-life personalities, it's an act of faith to opt out of sharing your data.