Watched by the Web: Surveillance Is Reborn

‘Big Data,’ by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI  Published: June 10, 2013 New York Times

Google does it. Amazon does it. Walmart does it. And, as news reports last week made clear, the United States government does it.

Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

BIG DATA

A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

By Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier

242 pages. Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. US $27.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger - Rob Judges

Does what? Uses “big data” analysis of the swelling flood of data that is being generated and stored about virtually every aspect of our lives to identify patterns of behavior and make correlations and predictive assessments.

Amazon uses customer data to give us recommendations based on our previous purchases. Google uses our search data and other information it collects to sell ads and to fuel a host of other services and products.

The National Security Agency, a news article in The Guardian revealed last week, is collecting the phone records of millions of American customers of Verizon — “indiscriminately and in bulk” and “regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing” — under a secret court order. Under another surveillance program called Prism, The Guardian and The Washington Post reported, the agency has been collecting data from e-mails, audio and video chats, photos, documents and logins, from leading Internet companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Apple, to track foreign targets.

Why spread such a huge net in search of a handful of terrorist suspects? Why vacuum up data so indiscriminately? “If you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack,” Jeremy Bash, chief of staff to Leon E. Panetta, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and defense secretary, said on Friday.

In “Big Data,” their illuminating and very timely book, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and Kenneth Cukier, the data editor for The Economist, argue that the nature of surveillance has changed.

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