Customer Reviews

World Without Secrets: Business, Crime and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing

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It's ironic that I just finished reading a book about customer relationship management CRM) in which all of the elements are needed in order to implement and effectively use CRM are the same elements that this book exposes are threats to us as individuals. This book is chilling for a number of reasons, but the top ones (in my opinion) are:

(1) As an IT professional I am involved in CRM (customer relationship management), which has a goal of knowing your customer and providing individualized service - this requires knowing your customers and collecting data. After reading this book I had to step back and think about the impact on privacy and customer rights. This is a Catch-22 situation wherein providing high levels of service requires a great deal of data, but the same data eats away at privacy.

(2) The array of technologies to gather information, including those that have migrated from the intelligence community into business and/or law enforcement, further chip away at privacy. This is exacerbated by laws passed and national attitudes since September 11. Privacy and freedoms are interrelated, so these technologies, combined with laws and attitudes pose a threat to our freedom as well.

(3) Attitudes, business imperatives and social evolution are merging to change the entire social fabric of our way of life - and we are active participants in some aspects, and in other aspects we are facilitating this change. The ways we are doing that is through willingness to accept changes that are detrimental to privacy, and/or the pursuit of meeting business imperatives and competitive advantage without fully examining the long term ramifications.

What I like is the way the author thoroughly and systematically addresses the threats to our privacy, freedom and well being. The discussion in "Rise of the Mentat", aside from catering to fans of Frank Herbert's sci fi masterpiece, Dune, will open your eyes about how information is processed and fed to us. After reading this chapter you'll wonder how much you really know, and how much of what you think you know is based on all available facts and data. However, the real eye-opener is the way that virtual communities are coming together in ways that could not have been predicted ten years ago. The Internet has enabled people of like interests, both benevolent and malevolent, to find one another on this planet, band together and begin exerting influence. In the same manner that maps drawn with political borders do not display cultural borders, these groups called "Network Armies" in the book go beyond cultural or national interests and are changing our social fabric in ways that the author only touches upon.

This book is well written, filled with examples and facts, and arrives at thought-provoking conclusions. It does not matter if you work in IT or another technology-focused industry, law, business or non-profit organizations, what this book has to say and the facts and conclusions that are presented are important. If the author is correct (and I think he is), our lives are changing in dramatic ways and this book is a rough roadmap to where we're headed.

I bought this book when it first came out and then recently read an insiteful, positive interview with the author of World Without Secrets in the Sunday New York Times. My feelings about the subject matter in the book were similar to that of the reviewer.

Interestingly, the article and the book cover lots of privacy issues concerning Amazon.com. Issues that everyone who buys a product on Amazon (or anywhere online) should be aware: especially the policies of sharing information about customers with companies that want to sell goods and services to us (junkmail!) Of course, other companies are discussed, which, in the end just frightens us even more about the amount of information about each of us that is so readily accessible to anyone who wants it.

The NY Times reviewer states: "Mr. Hunter is right to argue that if Americans aren't involved in resolving these (privacy) issues, the issues will be resolved without them." Hunter says:"The amount of electronically stored data about individuals is massive, detailed, and growing. We don't yet know how to manage a world in which everything can be linked to me, wherever I am."

With his background as a top security expert, Hunters words will shake up any beliefs you may have left that ANYTHING is private anymore.

Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, summed up the privacy debate with his now famous remark of "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it". In World Without Secrets: Business, Crime and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous, author Richard Hunter spends 300 engrossing pages corroborating McNealy's observation.

The reality is that with advancements in computing and networking, personal privacy slowly gets chipped away, and as Hunter sees it, will ultimately deteriorate. Hunter details in each chapter how the age of ubiquitous computing, where everything short of the food we eat has a network address, can be monitored. Such technological advances creates a world where everything is known and all information is available; a world without secrets.

World Without Secrets takes a look at the implications that we are now facing with technology. A cynical reader may think that the author is no more than a Chicken Little for the digital age; yet in page after page, and chapter after chapter, Hunter details examples of how technology can be both innocuously used and offensively manipulated, resulting in the potential for huge privacy breaches.

While most books on privacy and information focus on how corporations use and misuse personal data, World Without Secrets adds an interesting twist and provides insights into what Hunter calls Network Armies; which are groups of virtual communities, sharing a similar goal. Hunter sees these Network Armies as starting points in the digital revolution.

The only downside to the book is that while Hunter does not provide any type of answer or resolution on how to better enable privacy in the digital age. Perhaps there is no answer.

World Without Secrets presents a new look at the issues of privacy and technology. Those who are paranoid may feel vindicated, and those who never understood the implications of technology and its repercussions on privacy may feel violated. Either way, World Without Secrets is a fascinating and timely book.

There are a few books out there that make you think. John Dewey's "How we think", Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and a book on the history of IP by an Australian writer whose name and book title elude me at the moment are three books that have stimulated my thoughts. This book would be the fourth.

It could be that I'm a "shallow Hal" but I have to agree with the other review on the point the author raised in connection with Herbert's "Dune".

As we gather more information and as Sandisk (or someone like them) begins to offer terabyte storage to the everyday consumer, we will see more tracking.......and I fear, that in conjunction with XML, ......knowledge will increase.

Read the later part of the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament to see what I am referring to. Next, go to the Maxwell Air Force base website and look up their link page to critical thinking. Take a while to learn some things about critical thinking and then read this section in Daniel and this book by Hunter.

Most importantly.......THINK FOR YOURSELF AND DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS.

McNealy is right. The frogs are already in the pot (loss of privacy) and most will never notice that they are being boiled until it's too late.

Hunter has done us a favor by raising this issue in the manner that he did.

This book is scarier than fiction. Technology is changing how we live, but not all change is good. Hunter brings to life many real life scenarios that show how pervasive technology will have an irreversable effect on our right to privacy unless we do something now.

This book, published a scant four years ago, was old before its time.

Authors who have to create new words to discuss their oh-so-advanced concepts always strike me as self-aggrandizing, pretentious and usually silly. Author Hunter borrows and invents words like "Mentat" and "I-filters" to describe mundane, everyday concepts. Mentat is taken from Frank Herberts "Dune": a Mentat is essentially a human computer. The bottom line is that we rely on others to help us in reaching decisions and - surprise - those others may not have our best interests at heart and may, in fact, be using our "secrets", like our music preferences, to influence our decisions.

This is not news.

Hunter not only likes movies, he draws life lessons from them. There are dozens of references to movies in this book.

Hunter has a few schmaltzy rules that he has created, like "When everything is known, no one knows everything." Ponder that. But don't expect to get paid for it.

Ultimately this wandering book of nostrums, recycled newspaper stories and references to Hollywood movies as sources of wisdom comes down to a muffled sales pitch for Gartner, "the world's largest technology research firm." "Lots of systems administrators aren't taking these basic steps now, and that's a prime reason why their systems get cracked." But fear not is the implied message, Gartner can help save you! "Any credible vulnerability assessment will find two out of three Web servers connected to the Internet are vulnerable to simple attacks that can ar least result in changing the contenrt of the Web server," my Gartner colleague said . . . Get the message?

Ultimately the hyper-ventilated theme is that there are no secrets. Moreover, the author fears deep ". . . surveillance of ordindary citizens." Excuse me, but in a nation where your income sources, bank accounts, spending patterns, medical histories and everything else have been closely scruitinized for decades, what are you concerned with?

The message is fear-mongering about a situation that has been with us for a long time. Hunter brings nothing new to the table, except a penchant for quoting from movies as if they were brothers and sisters to Socrates.

Jerry

"World Without Secrets: Business, Crime and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing" - Reviewed by Stephen Lafferty

The title of Richard Hunter's book refers to the growing availability of information about the personal lives of consumers living in capitalist democratic states. The book begins with the assumption that "very little of consequence can't and won't be known about anyone or anything". Hunter approaches the subject of the erosion of personal privacy from two angles: the business and the governmental/police justifications for retaining information on individuals. His argument, that citizens in democratic countries had better take responsibility for the power of surveillance technologies while they still can, emerges from the discussion of the increasing possibilities for deriving behaviour patterns from recombining archived data.

Hunter's first point, that people adapt at a slower rate than the
introduction of new technologies, is underlined using examples of
Amazon.com and Acme-Rent-A-Car of Connecticut. Neither set of
consumers, when they began relationships with either company, realised that information collected about their shopping habits and movements would be sold to third parties or used for law enforcement purposes.

Hunter then goes on to demonstrate how organisations that create and retail information, such as Microsoft and record companies, are responding to threats being posed by self-organising groups using the Internet to communicate. Hunter calls these groups 'Network Armies' and provides an analysis of how such groups coalesce and fight their cause, using examples of the Open Source software movement and Linux vs. Windows, Napster and digital distribution of music and the anti-capitalist protestors in Seattle and Genoa.

The discussion then moves on to identifying social groups within the 'world without secrets'. Hunter and a team of researchers at Gartner identify four groups: 'Network Armies', the 'Lost and the Lonely', 'Conscientious Objectors' and the 'Engineered Society'. This analysis implies that the world without secrets is inevitable and the area of society to which you belong depends upon whether you support or oppose the authority of the leadership that passes legislation to eliminate barriers to information flow.

The last two chapters are dedicated to discussion of war when all
enemy movements are known; and the possibility of a war in cyberspace.

Parts of this book were written on or after September 11th 2001 and Hunter considers the development of terrorist network armies and the response that an 'engineered society' can make to such attacks. The New York Electronic Crimes Task Force is used as a model network army for terrorist threats from cyberspace, an Internet version of Interpol with intercontinental crime-fighting agreements.

Richard Hunter believes that a world without secrets is inevitable.

He urges his readers to take responsibility for the ways that
technologies are implemented through democratic means, such as
building in limitations for information usage by the authorities.

This book makes a compelling argument for educating both the
authorities and the public about the type and uses of recorded
information and is an excellent introduction to contemporary
attitudes towards and policies of surveillance. Readers who are
interested in the freedoms that they enjoy in their societies should read this along with Simson Garfinkel's 'Database Nation' and Michael Caloyannides 'Desktop Witness' and be careful about to whom they give their personal information.

Every day I see electronic privacy issues in the news. Nanny camera hacking, .coms selling previously private data, fervent calls for a national ID. If I had not read this book, I would have seen these as random stories. World Without Secrets gave me the insight to see the big picture in these events that lead us to ever increasing exposure and exploitation of the data trails we leave behind every day. Hunter has done a good job of synthesizing the threat, opportunities and strategies for dealing with this new reality.

Fascinating book. Fascinating man. Why didn't Amazon reprint the New York Times review of this book (William J. Holstein, NYT April 28, 2002)?

Easy to read review of what digital technology is going to promise us in the future - both good & bad.

It's not intended to scare, nor to defend the undefendable, but it gives a good all round review in an easy entertaining style.