Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"“I’m here to tell you if you’ve ever been on a dating app that wanted your location, or if you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are 24/7, there’s a good chance a detailed log of your precise movement patterns has been vacuumed up and saved in some data bank somewhere that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to,” writes Tau.</p><p>Unraveling the story of how these strangers—everyone from government intelligence agents and local law enforcement officers to private investigators and employees of ad tech companies—gained access to our personal information is the ambitious task Tau sets for himself, and he begins where you might expect: the immediate aftermath of 9/11.</p><p>At no other point in US history was the government’s appetite for data more voracious than in the days after the attacks, says Tau. It was a hunger that just so happened to coincide with the advent of new technologies, devices, and platforms that excelled at harvesting and serving up personal information that had zero legal privacy protections. </p><p>Over the course of 22 chapters, Tau gives readers a rare glimpse inside the shadowy industry, “built by corporate America and blessed by government lawyers,” that emerged in the years and decades following the 9/11 attacks. In the hands of a less skilled reporter, this labyrinthine world of shell companies, data vendors, and intelligence agencies could easily become overwhelming or incomprehensible. But Tau goes to great lengths to connect dots and plots, explaining how a perfect storm of business motivations, technological breakthroughs, government paranoia, and lax or nonexistent privacy laws combined to produce the “digital panopticon” we are all now living in."</p><p><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/23/1118401/privacy-book-reviews-surveillance-higher-education/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">technologyreview.com/2025/06/2</span><span class="invisible">3/1118401/privacy-book-reviews-surveillance-higher-education/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Surveillance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Surveillance</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Privacy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Privacy</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DataProtection" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DataProtection</span></a> SurveillanceCapitalism <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AdTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AdTech</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DataBrokers" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>DataBrokers</span></a></p>