Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author of Happier at Home and The Happiness Project I’ll never use Google in the same way again.” Her own (often very funny) attempts to maintain her online privacy demonstrate the ubiquity of the dragnet-and the near impossibility of evading it. “In this thought-provoking, highly accessible exploration of the issues around personal data-gathering, Julia Angwin provides a startling account of how we’re all being tracked, watched, studied, and sorted. Bruce Schneier, author of Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive This is an authoritative account of why we should care about privacy and how we can protect ourselves.”

Julia Angwin’s command of the technology is sure, her writing is clear, and her arguments are compelling. “ Dragnet Nation is an impressive picture of the new world of electronic surveillance-from Google to the NSA. Her book is a cautionary tale for all of us, with profound implications for our values, our society, and our very selves. Appalled at such a prospect, Angwin conducts a series of experiments to try to protect herself, ranging from quitting Google to carrying a “burner” phone, showing how difficult it is for an average citizen to resist the dragnets’ reach. In a world where we can be watched in our own homes, where we can no longer keep secrets, and where we can be impersonated, financially manipulated, or even placed in a police lineup, Angwin argues that the greatest long-term danger is that we start to internalize the surveillance and censor our words and thoughts, until we lose the very freedom that makes us unique individuals. In Dragnet Nation, Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal reports from the front lines of America’s surveillance economy, a revelatory and unsettling look at how the government, private companies, and even criminals use technology to indiscriminately sweep up vast amounts of our personal data.

And the federal government, we recently learned, has been conducting a massive data-gathering surveillance operation across the Internet and on our phone lines. Our smartphones and cars transmit our location, enabling us to know what’s in the neighborhood but also enabling others to track us.

We see online ads from websites we’ve visited, long after we’ve moved on to other interests.

Dragnet nation