Privacy & Surveillance
In honor of Data Privacy Week, we have a new display of books, films, novels, zines, and other media that explore privacy and surveillance, particularly in our digital age. From government video surveillance to corporate use of social media user data, to AI’s unquenchable thirst to record and reuse its user’s data–we live in an era of an unprecedented lack of privacy.
Why does privacy matter? And what can you do to protect your privacy? We encourage you to find out. Visit the display on the second floor of the Tioga Library Building (TLB).
Additional recommendations
You will have to visit our display to find a wide range of books and media recommendations. Here are some more to get you started.
The Verifiers by Jane Pek
Claudia Lin is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. She’s also used to keeping secrets from them, such as that she prefers girls–and that she’s just been stealth-recruited by Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency. A lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, Claudia believes she’s landed her ideal job. But when a client goes missing, Claudia breaks protocol to investigate–and uncovers a maelstrom of personal and corporate deceit. Part literary mystery, part family story, The Verifiers is a clever and incisive examination of how technology shapes our choices, and the nature of romantic love in the digital age.
Borderland circuitry : immigration surveillance in the United States and beyond by Ana Muñiz
Political discourse on immigration in the United States has largely focused on what is most visible, including border walls and detention centers, while the invisible information systems that undergird immigration enforcement have garnered less attention. Tracking the evolution of various surveillance-related systems since the 1980s, Borderland Circuitry investigates how the deployment of this information infrastructure has shaped immigration enforcement practices. Ana Muñiz illuminates three phenomena that are becoming increasingly intertwined: digital surveillance, immigration control, and gang enforcement. Using ethnography, interviews, and analysis of documents never before seen, Muñiz uncovers how information-sharing partnerships between local police, state and federal law enforcement, and foreign partners collide to create multiple digital borderlands. Diving deep into a select group of information systems, Borderland Circuitry reveals how those with legal and political power deploy the specter of violent cross-border criminals to justify intensive surveillance, detention, brutality, deportation, and the destruction of land for border militarization.
Means of control : how the hidden alliance of tech and government is creating a new American surveillance state by Byron Tau
A sweeping exposé of the U.S. government’s alliance with data brokers, tech companies, and advertisers, and how their efforts are reshaping surveillance and privacy as we know it. Our modern world is awash in surveillance. Most of us are dimly aware of this-ever get the sense that an ad is “following” you around the internet?-but we don’t understand the extent to which the technology embedded in our phones, computers, cars, and homes is part of a vast ecosystem of data collection. Our public spaces are blanketed by cameras put up in the name of security. And pretty much everything that emits a wireless signal of any kind-routers, televisions, Bluetooth devices, chip-enabled credit cards, even the tires of every car manufactured since the mid-2000s-can be and often is covertly monitored. All of this surveillance has produced an extraordinary amount of data about every citizen-and the biggest customer is the U.S. government. Reporter Byron Tau has been digging deep inside the growing alliance between business, tech, and government for years, piecing together a secret story: how the whole of the internet and every digital device in the world have become a mechanism of intelligence, surveillance, and monitoring. Tau traces the unlikely tale of how the government came to view commercial data as a principal asset of national security in the years after 9/11, working with scores of anonymous companies, many scattered across bland Northern Virginia suburbs, to build a foreign and domestic surveillance capacity of such breathtaking scope that it could peer into the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. The result is a cottage industry of data brokers and government bureaucrats with one directive-“get everything you can”-and, as Tau observes, a darkly humorous world in which defense contractors have marketing subsidiaries, and marketing companies have defense contractor subsidiaries. Sobering and revelatory, Means of Control is our era’s defining story of the dangerous grand bargain we’ve made: ubiquitous, often cheap technology, but at what price to our privacy?
What can we do?
Learning about privacy and surveillance can feel scary, overwhelming, and leave us with a sense of helplessness. But it is not hopeless! Here are some resources for carving out your own sense of privacy.
Surveillance Self Defense from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Read the BASICS to find out how online surveillance works. Dive into our TOOL GUIDES for instructions to installing our pick of the best, most secure applications. We have more detailed information in our FURTHER LEARNING sections. If you’d like a guided tour, look for our list of common SECURITY SCENARIOS.
The fight for privacy : protecting dignity, identity, and love in the digital age by Danielle Keats Citron
Collectively, Citron argues, citizens, lawmakers, and corporations have the power to create a new reality where privacy is valued and people are protected as they embrace what technology offers. Introducing readers to the trailblazing work of advocates today, Citron urges readers to join the fight. Your intimate life shouldn’t be traded for profit or wielded against you for power: it belongs to you. With Citron as our guide, we can take back control of our data and build a better future for the next, ever more digital, generation.
Online safety and privacy toolkits from National Cybersecurity Alliance
You have the power to stay safe online! Use our massive collection of resources to learn how to take control of your online life and find peace of mind in our interconnected world. We have hundreds of articles, videos, infographics, and more for you to learn from and share. Use our materials to raise awareness at home, work, school, or anywhere in your community! Check out their handy how-to videos as well, with step-by-step instructions on making your iphone or android more secure.