Customer Reviews

Protect Your Privacy: How to Protect Your Identity as well as Your Financial, Personal, and Computer Records in an Age of Constant Surveillance (Outwitting)

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The cover and foreword of this book seemed promising, but the bulk of the text failed to deliver. The book discusses major ways to protect one's privacy, from the home to the internet to the telephone. Unfortunately, however, often the advice is "don't write any email you wouldn't want posted publicly" or "when using the phone, act as though you are shouting onto a busy street with a megaphone." In short, the single best way to protect your privacy is never to communicate in the first place. Great, but not exactly helpful.

The author also discusses RFID tags at length; how they might be used to track your purchases, your physical whereabouts and movements, and how nefarious persons might locate expensive property on your person or within your home. He even explains how one might construct a Faraday Cage to keep such tags from being read by passers-by. The problem though is that Long never describes how to identify, remove, or destroy RFID tags on/within items (if this is even possible, which I know in some cases it is). Instead, the best solution is to keep such items in a foil-lined box (insert joke here).

By the final chapter of the book, it seems the author's purpose is simply to inform the reader that data miners and others hoping to compromise one's privacy are everywhere and the best course of action is simply not to reveal any information in the first place. A bit of a chilling read, but if you're looking for a how-to guide, there are better options.

BOOK WAS ENJOYABLE AND OFFERED SOME GOOD INSIGHT. SOME OF THE MATERIAL WAS BASIC AND ALREADY KNOWN. I WOULD RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO PERSONS WHO WANT TO LEARN MORE OR REVIEW AND UPDATE WHAT THEY ALREADY KNOW. I LIKED IT.