None of Your Damn Business

Lawrence Cappello, None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age (2019)

From Sarah Igo (author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America): “Tracing a century of debates on topics from national security to reproductive rights, None of Your Damn Business offers a lively, instructive account of Americans’ ambivalent (and often muddled) thinking about privacy”

The Rise of Big Data Policing

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement (2019)

STARRED Kirkus Review: “In an important book that goes to the heart of issues at the forefront of contemporary life, Ferguson examines how police departments are now using supposedly ‘objective’data-driven surveillance technologies to work more effectively in a budget-cutting era and to avoid claims of racial bias. In this engaging, well-written narrative, based on studies and…

Smart Surveillance

Ric Simmons, Smart Surveillance: How to Interpret the Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century (2019)

From the book description: “Simmons takes a broad look at the effect of new technologies and privacy, arguing that advances in technology can enhance our privacy and our security at the same time. This book will appeal to academics and students in the field of law, criminology, and political science, and will be of interest to…

Protecting Student Data Privacy

Linnette Attai, Protecting Student Data Privacy: Classroom Fundamentals (2019)

From Serena Sacks (Chief Information Officer, Fulton County Schools; 2019 Woman of the Year, Woman in IT Awards): “Ms Attai’s new book on student data privacy is an essential read for every educator. She effectively provides context for the concerns, an educator’s perspective, practical technical knowledge and relevant solutions in accessible language. As the CIO…

On The End of Privacy

Richard E. Miller, On the End of Privacy: Dissolving Boundaries in a Screen-Centric World (2019)

From Doug Hesse (University of Denver): “This brilliant book asks profoundly disturbing questions. How might we read and write, think and live when never-disappearing textual selves circulate wildly? How might we teach and learn when screens—and their embodied knowledges, half-truths, and malevolencies—are utterly ubiquitous, endlessly connectable? Miller lucidly stories his way toward answers, braiding narratives…

Protecting Personal Information

Andrea Monti and Raymond Wacks, Protecting Personal Information: The Right to Privacy Reconsidered (2019)

From the book description: “The concept of privacy has long been confused and incoherent. The right to privacy has been applied promiscuously to an alarmingly wide-ranging assortment of issues including free speech, political consent, abortion, contraception, sexual preference, noise, discrimination, and pornography. The conventional definition of privacy, and attempts to evolve a ‘privacy-as-a-fence’ approach, are…

Camera Power

Mary D. Fan, Camera Power: Proof, Policing, Privacy, and Audiovisual Big Data (2019)

Chris Slobogin (Milton Underwood Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University and author of Privacy at Risk): “Are police-worn body cameras a panacea for the problem of police violence and abuse? Or are they simply another intrusion into privacy that only rarely definitively tells us the full truth about police-citizen interactions? Relying on numerous interviews, close scrutiny of…

Of Privacy and Power

Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security (2019)

From Peter Swire (Georgia Institute of Technology): “This book persuasively argues that substate actors, including interior ministries and data protection officials, form international networks to accomplish internationally what they cannot win domestically. The clearest value of the book comes from its diverse case studies. The discussion of the 2000 Safe Harbor for commercial transfers of…

Tools and Weapons

Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age (2019)

From Tim Wu (author of The Curse of Bigness): “Tools and Weapons reads like a techno-legal thriller, yet offers a thorough and eye-opening account of the major tech controversies of the last decade, from NSA spying through AI ethics and the US-China standoff. Brad Smith, a believer that “great power brings great responsibility” makes it evident that the…