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Interrogates how digital self-surveillance can be turned against us by police, prosecutors, and political whims
For consumers living in a digitally-connected world, smart technologies have built an inescapable trap of digital self-surveillance. Smart cars, smart homes, smart watches, and smart medical devices track our most private activities and intimate patterns. While these devices allow users to receive personal insights by monitoring their every move, that data can be accessed by police and prosecutors looking to find incriminating clues. Digital technology exposes everyone, everywhere, all at once, and we have few laws to regulate it.
In Your Data Will Be Used Against You, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson warns us of how the rise of sensor-driven technology, social media monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be weaponized against democratic values and personal freedoms. At the same time, that data will solve crimes, radically transforming how criminal cases are prosecuted. Ferguson explores how this proliferation of private data in combination with public surveillance networks promises new ways to solve previously unsolvable crimes, but also leaves us vulnerable to governmental overreach and abuse. He argues for legal interventions that address the threat of digital self-surveillance and provides concrete suggestions about how legislators, judges, and communities should respond.
As consumers, citizens, and potential subjects of surveillance, the questions in this book must be confronted now, before the trap of surveillance captures us completely. Providing a stark warning of the dangers of digital self-surveillance, Your Data Will be Used Against You is a defense of civil liberties against the growing threat of data-driven policing.
— Matthew Guariglia, author of Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York
If you have a phone and do not live entirely off the grid in the wild, then you have to read this book. Just about everything you do can be potentially used as evidence in our rapidly digitizing courts, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson details in this compelling, important and highly readable new book.
— Brandon Garrett, Duke University School of Law
Andrew G. Ferguson has again delivered a tour de force, reminding all of us of the dangers of the pervasive surveillance state. Worse still, it’s all become frighteningly commonplace, largely without our knowledge.
— Cyrus Farivar, author of Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech
Andrew Ferguson has done it again. His last book, The Rise of Big Data Policing, opened our eyes to the expanding world of digital surveillance. But technology has not stood still – not hardly – and Ferguson has captured the promise but also the perils in this latest volume. The short of it is that the accumulation of all the data about all of us puts way too much power in government hands and the protections are way too insufficient. We see that daily in the news, as government mines location, social media, and much, much more. Highly readable, incredibly educational, and urgent and attention getting, this is a must read.
— Barry Friedman, New York University School of Law