Data and Goliath Quotes

“Our relationship with many of the Internet companies we rely on is not a traditional company–customer relationship. That’s primarily because we’re not customers. We’re products those companies sell to their real customers. The relationship is more feudal than commercial. The companies are analogous to feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and—on a bad day—serfs. We are tenant farmers for these companies, working on their land by producing data that they in turn sell for profit.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“By 2010, we as a species were creating more data per day than we did from the beginning of time until 2003.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Privacy is not a luxury that we can only afford in times of safety. Instead, it's a value to be preserved. It's essential for liberty, autonomy, and human dignity. We must understand that privacy is not something to be traded away in some fearful attempt to guarantee security, but something to maintain and protect in order to have real security.

None of this will happen without a change of attitude. In the end, we'll get the privacy we as a society demand and not a bit more.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Buzzfeed is an entertainment website that collects an enormous amount of information about its users. Much of the data comes from traditional Internet tracking, but Buzzfeed also has a lot of fun quizzes, some of which ask very personal questions. One of them—“How Privileged Are You?”—asks about financial details, job stability, recreational activities, and mental health. Over two million people have taken that quiz, not realizing that Buzzfeed saves data from its quizzes.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“I used to say that Google knows more about what I’m thinking of than my wife does. But that doesn’t go far enough. Google knows more about what I’m thinking of than I do, because Google remembers all of it perfectly and forever.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“The science and engineering of programming just isn’t good enough to produce flawless software, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. The”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Snowden put it like this in an online Q&A in 2013: “Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“The nature of computerized systems makes it easier for the attacker to find one exploitable vulnerability in a system than for the defender to find and fix all vulnerabilities in the system.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“we fear terrorists more than the police, even though in the US you’re nine times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“But eavesdropping acquired a new, and more intense, life after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “Never again” was an impossible mandate, of course, but the only way to have any hope of preventing something from happening is to know everything that is happening. That led the NSA to put the entire planet under surveillance.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“US law requires financial institutions to report cash transactions of $10,000 or larger to the government; for currency exchangers, the threshold is $1,000.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Retail store surveillance systems register our presence, even if we are doing nothing but browsing and even if we pay for everything in cash.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“The world now knows that US telcos give the NSA access to the Internet backbone and that US cloud providers give it access to user accounts.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Apple has a worldwide database of Wi-Fi passwords, including my home network’s, from people backing up their iPhones.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“We need to resist the urge to do something, regardless of whether or not the proposed action is effective.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Surveillance is the business model of the Internet for two primary reasons: people like free, and people like convenient. The truth is, though, that people aren’t given much of a choice. It’s either surveillance or nothing, and the surveillance is conveniently invisible so you don’t have to think about it.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“US government secrecy has exploded. No one knows the exact number—it’s secret, of course—but reasonable estimates are that hundreds of billions of pages of government documents are classified in the US each year.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Already law enforcement agencies make use of predictive analytic tools to identify suspects and direct investigations. It’s a short step from there to the world of Big Brother and thoughtcrime.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Post-9/11 surveillance has caused writers to self-censor. They avoid writing about and researching certain subjects; they’re careful about communicating with sources, colleagues, or friends abroad.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“For example, we know that the US government convinced Skype—through bribery, coercion, threat, or legal compulsion—to make changes in how the program operates, to facilitate eavesdropping.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Many cyberweapons manufacturers sell hacking tools to governments worldwide. For example, FinFisher is an “offensive IT Intrusion solution,” according to the promotional material from the UK and German company that makes it, Gamma Group.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“483,000 government contractors hold top-secret clearances: a third of the 1.4 million people cleared at that level.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“A 2010 investigation found that 1,931 different corporations are working on intelligence, counterterrorism, or homeland security inside the US.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Opting out just isn’t a viable choice for most of us, most of the time; it violates what have become very real norms of contemporary life.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“You can load your own documents onto your Kindle, but Amazon is able to delete books it has already sold you. In 2009, Amazon automatically deleted some editions of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from users’ Kindles because of a copyright issue. I know, you just couldn’t write this stuff any more ironically.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Post-9/11 surveillance has caused writers to self-censor. They avoid writing about and researching certain subjects; they’re careful about communicating with sources, colleagues, or friends abroad. A Pew Research Center study conducted just after the first Snowden articles were published found that people didn’t want to talk about the NSA online. A broader Harris poll found that nearly half of Americans have changed what they research, talk about, and write about because of NSA surveillance.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“One analysis of 2013 financial reports calculated that the value of each user to Google is $40 per year, and only $6 to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. This is why companies like Google and Facebook keep raising the ante.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Worldwide, Google has the capacity to store 15 exabytes.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“Embedded in digital photos is information such as the date, time, and location—yes, many cameras have GPS—of the photo’s capture; generic information about the camera, lens, and settings; and an ID number of the camera itself. If you upload the photo to the web, that information often remains attached to the file.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

“our personal information is being bought and sold without our knowledge and consent.”
― Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World