Protect Your Digital Privacy. Survival Skills for the Information Age

Berglund Authority Level 3

by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>

Cady, Glee Harrah, and Pat McGregor. Protect Your Digital Privacy. Survival Skills for the Information Age. Que Publishing, 2002.

Privacy in on-line activities is obviously an issue of ever-increasing importance for us all. Whether the issue is security in financial transactions, the ability to surf at will without being observed, protection against pornography for minors, or an ability to keep our computers safe from intrusions, we are all involved.

There are many books, and WWW sites, that would be useful. But an excellent overview is Cady and McGregor's work, Protect Your Digital Privacy. While there are many more recent books, this one has stood the test of time, and remains an encyclopedic introduction to a variety of threats. Too, it treats privacy not only as something to be defended, but something to which we all have an actual right. The book discusses threats coming from legislative and commercial actors as well as from illegal intrusions.

While the work treats largely with issues relating to online activities, it also covers such topics as the use of cell phones (as well as landlines), being photographed or scanned in public places, or being informed upon by one's rental car.

While the book does cover technological solutions to threats to one's privacy, like any good self-defense manual, it puts a premium upon attitude and personal behavior---things we can change quickly and easily. We can do a great deal to protect ourselves now, without resorting to firewalls or software to detect intrusions, cookies, keystroke recorders or Trojan horses, to name but a few of the methods used to violate digital privacy.
At 600+ pages in length, this work is a bit intimidating, and its wide coverage inevitably means that large parts of it will not be of interest to any one reader, at the present time, at least. But having had the work around for some months now, I find myself consulting it frequently, and think it a valuable work for any regular Internet user's library. In checking to see if there is a more recent edition, I also noted that both Powell's Books < http://www.powells.com/ > and Amazon.com < http://www.amazon.com >have many used copies available at very reasonable prices.

Jeffrey Barlow
Editor, Interface.