Category Archives: Books (PSA)

Hideyuki Matsumi, Dara Hallinan, Diana Dimitrova, Eleni Kosta and Paul De Hert: Data Protection and Privacy, Volume 15: In Transitional Times (2024)

This book covers a range of topics, including: data protection risks in European retail banks; data protection, privacy legislation, and litigation in China; synthetic data generation as a privacy-preserving technique for the training of machine learning models; effectiveness of privacy consent dialogues; legal analysis of the role of individuals in data protection law; and the…

Özgür Heval Çınar and Aysem Diker Vanberg: The Right to Privacy Revisited: Different International Perspectives (2024)

The right to privacy is one of the rights enshrined in international human rights law. It has been a topic of interest for both academic and non-academic audiences around the world. However, with the increasing digitalisation of modern life, protecting one’s privacy has become more complicated. Both state and non-state organizations make frequent interventions in…

Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert: The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance (2024)

From Jonathan Sterne, Professor of Culture and Technology, McGill University: “At once fascinating and terrifying, The Secret Life of Data offers a kaleidoscopic view of the industries and technologies that collect, mine, churn, and trade our data, and what to do about them.” From Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies, The University of Virginia: “I…

James B. Rule, Taking Privacy Seriously: How to Create the Rights We Need While We Still Have Something to Protect (2024)

From David Murakami Wood, Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa: “This book is direct, impatient (in the best way possible), and urgent. It doesn’t waste time summarizing all the things we already know about privacy in the United States, but instead asks, What is to be done? We need a book like this.”

Carissa Véliz, The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance (2024)

This book is intended to contribute to a better understanding of privacy from a philosophical point of view — what it is, what is at stake in its loss, and how it relates to other rights and values. The five parts that compose this book respond to five basic questions about privacy: Where does privacy…

Byron Tau, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State (2024)

From Jack Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard Law School: “Byron Tau’s extraordinary book recounts in engrossing detail how the U.S. government exploits massive loopholes in U.S. surveillance law to purchase in vast digital bazaars the intimate personal data that Americans unwittingly spew from their phones, cars, and computers every minute of every day.…

Hilke Schellmann, The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now (2024)

From Eliza Griswold, author of Amity and Prosperity: “In The Algorithm, Hilke Schellmann has done the impossible: she has rendered the baffling ‘Wild West’ of AI immensely readable and approachable. Schellmann gives us the dark and hidden history of tech innovation and the marketplace through the stories of those whose lives have been smashed by…

Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society (2024)

From Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: “The Ordinal Society will enter the pantheon, both as a work of cross-cutting social theory and as a clear-eyed reflection on the stakes of digital technology. Marshalling an astonishing range of theoretical and empirical knowledge to build their argument, Fourcade and Healy compellingly demonstrate just how integral measurement…

Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI (2024)

From Mark Lemley, Stanford University: “A delightfully wide-ranging and eminently readable exploration of how laws, norms, technology, and our own thinking guide our behavior, and how we should think about it.” From Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor, Institute for Advanced Study: “Balancing individual freedoms and the common good is ever more critical in the…

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (2024)

From Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker: “As artificial intelligence proliferates, more and more hinges on our ability to articulate our own value. We seem to be on the cusp of a world in which workers of all kinds—teachers, doctors, writers, photographers, lawyers, coders, clerks, and more—will be replaced with, or to some degree sidelined by,…