Data and Goliath summary

In the 1700s, British philosopher Jeremy Bentham developed a novel and important concept: the panopticon, a hypothetical prison where every inmate could be watched at all times. Bentham was interested in the effect that constant surveillance would have on the prisoners' behavior.

Until recently, Bentham's idea was just that – an idea. Even in a prison, it simply wasn't possible to keep watch over everyone, all the time. But today, digital technology has changed this for good.

Facial recognition software, for example, allows authorities to use video cameras to digitally identify people. The FBI already has a database of 52 million faces, and they can use it to track persons of interest.

Meanwhile, authorities in Dubai are using facial recognition software from Google Glass to identify people on the street. And video cameras aren't the only tools of surveillance, either: authorities can also track our actions online.

A total of 76 exabytes (76 billion billion bytes) of information pass through the internet every year, and the development of cloud technology has made it easier and cheaper to store all this data.

Every bit of data you generate online can be collected or tracked by someone else. A law student named Max Schrems realized the gravity of this situation in 2011, when he demanded that Facebook disclose all the data they had on him.

Facebook sent Schrems a 1,200-page document – and it wasn't only information from his profile and newsfeed. Facebook also had a record of every page and photo he'd ever clicked on, and every advertisement he'd ever seen.

Jeremy Bentham's panopticon is already all around us. We're monitored at all times and all of our actions are recorded and stored indefinitely. Welcome to the global surveillance state.