Julia Angwin Quotes & Sayings

In a culture where people judge each other as much by their digital footprints as by their real-life personalities, it's an act of faith to opt out of sharing your data. — Julia Angwin

Before this regime started, I had a reasonably long password - about eleven characters long, if I recall correctly. But the constant pressure to make a new password has steadily degraded my ingenuity. In 2012 I gave up and just made each password into the month that the e-mail reminder arrived. So when the March e-mail password reset reminder arrived, I changed my password to March2012! (with the requisite exclamation point to satisfy the symbol police). In June, I changed it to 2012June?, and on like that. I had dropped to nine easily guessable characters. — Julia Angwin

in Chicago, which has installed a multimillion-dollar surveillance program with more than eight thousand cameras, the Urban Institute found that the cameras contributed to a 12 percent drop in crime in Humboldt Park but provided no statistically significant decline in crime in West Garfield Park. And — Julia Angwin

the prices seem to reflect how far Staples believes the user lives from a competitor's store. Staples confirmed that it varies prices by a number of factors but declined to be specific. — Julia Angwin

The Transparent Society: — Julia Angwin

Dragnets that indiscriminately sweep up personal data fall squarely into the gray area between what is legal and what is socially acceptable. — Julia Angwin

In 1989, roughly one in fifty East Germans between the ages of eighteen and eighty worked for the Stasi in some capacity. — Julia Angwin

Gathering that much information gives them power over everybody. — Julia Angwin

Pseudonymity is key to our online privacy. — Julia Angwin

Highly-automated tools and techniques cannot be easily applied to the much more difficult problem of detecting and preempting a terrorist attack, and success in doing so may not be possible at all. — Julia Angwin

Some research suggests that collecting vast amounts of data simply can't predict rare events like terrorism. A 2006 paper by Jeff Jonas, an IBM research scientist, and Jim Harper, the director of information policy at the Cato Institute, concluded that terrorism events aren't common enough to lend themselves to large-scale computer data mining. — Julia Angwin

did highlight the case of Najibullah Zazi. In 2009, Zazi was arrested just days before he and friends were allegedly planning to carry out a suicide bombing in the New York City subway. According to Alexander, Zazi was swept up in a dragnet called "Operation High-Rise." The — Julia Angwin

Location is also predictive. Researchers at Microsoft found that location data can be used to predict fairly accurately where people will be located in the future. — Julia Angwin

And SpiderOak passed the mud-puddle test. — Julia Angwin

speculated that cameras are effective only when they are actively monitored by law enforcement agents, who act quickly upon the information obtained by the cameras. — Julia Angwin

Unlike consumers' shopping habits and financial fraud, terrorism does not occur with enough frequency to enable the creation of valid predictive models," Jonas — Julia Angwin

Dragnets that scoop up information indiscriminately about everyone in their path used to be rare; police — Julia Angwin

So far, I was mostly using tools from people I knew or tools that were well established. I knew and trusted the technologists at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who made the HTTPS Everywhere software. Little Snitch was a well-known program. Similarly, 1Password was well established. — Julia Angwin

Is mass surveillance worth it when its fiercest advocates can only say that it "contributed to our understanding" of cases "at the margins"? — Julia Angwin

it is not clear that the government needed dragnets to catch Zazi. If Zazi was e-mailing with terrorists under surveillance, a search warrant would have sufficed to capture his communications. Similarly, — Julia Angwin

Privacy and pollution are similar problems. Both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource--whether it is land, water, or information. Both suffer from difficult attribution. It is not easy to identify a single pollutant or a single piece of data that caused harm. Rather, the harm often comes from an accumulation of pollutants, or an assemblage of data. And the harm of both pollution and privacy is collective. No one person bears the burden of all pollution; all of society suffers when the air is dirty and the water undrinkable. Similarly, we all suffer when we live in fear that our data will be used against us by companies trying to exploit us or police officers sweeping us into a lineup. (212-213) — Julia Angwin

Of course, the largest of the dragnets appear to be those operated by the U.S. government. In — Julia Angwin