I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy

Social networks are the defining cultural movement of our time, empowering us in constantly evolving ways. We can all now be reporters, alerting the world to breaking news of a natural disaster; we can participate in crowd-sourced scientific research; and we can become investigators, helping the police solve crimes. Social networks have even helped to bring down governments. But they have also greatly accelerated the erosion of our personal privacy rights, and any one of us could become the victim of shocking violations at any time. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world; but while that nation appears to be a comforting small town, in which we socialize with our selective group of friends, it and the rest of the Web is actually a lawless frontier of hidden and unpredictable dangers. The same power of information that can topple governments can destroy a person's career or marriage. As leading expert on social networks and privacy Lori Andrews shows, through groundbreaking in-depth research and a host of stunning stories of abuses, as we work and chat and shop and date (and even sometimes have sex) over the Web, we are opening ourselves up to increasingly intrusive, relentless, and anonymous surveillance–by employers, schools, lawyers, the police, and aggressive data aggregator services that compile an astonishing amount of information about us and sell it to any and all takers. She reveals the myriad ever more sophisticated techniques being used to track us and discloses how routinely colleges and employers reject applicants due to personal information searches; robbers use postings about vacations to target homes for break-ins; lawyers readily find information to use against us in divorce and child custody cases; and at one school, the administrators actually used the cameras on students' school-provided laptops to spy on them in their homes.