Author of the week: Julia Angwin

last updated 8 January 2015

Julia Angwin is definitely being followed, said Michael De Groote in the Salt Lake City Deseret News. Like most Americans, the former Wall Street Journal reporter lives under surveillance, her movements and purchases tracked and compiled for use by marketers and, at least potentially, the government. When she dug up some of the information that data-tracking firms had on her, she was unnerved: “They knew I had bought underwear the week before; does anybody really need to know that?” Such information allows the firms to include her name on various lists that marketers are willing to pay for, even when the lists are inaccurate. One list, for instance, incorrectly pigeonholed her as a single mother without a college degree.

Even Angwin’s best efforts weren’t enough to win freedom from Big Data’s reach, said Andrew Leonard in Salon.com. “I was at best 50 percent successful,” she says. And that was after she had, among other things, gotten her name removed from 92 marketing lists and started encrypting her phone conversations and carrying her cellphone in a metal-lined wallet. In her new book, Dragnet Nation, she details the steps she took so that readers can follow her lead. Our vulnerability to government and corporate snooping, she says, “is something that we will change through laws and also through being smart about what choices we make.” We are, she says, “just now starting to see the true cost of all the free services we [use]. Because they are not free.”