Data love : the seduction and betrayal of digital technologies / Roberto Simanowski.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Intelligence services, government administrations, businesses, and a growing majority of the population are hooked on the idea that big data can reveal patterns and correlations in everyday life. Initiated by software engineers and carried out through algorithms, the mining of big data has sparked a silent revolution. But algorithmic analysis and data mining are not simply byproducts of media development or the logical consequences of computation. They are the radicalization of the Enlightenment's quest for knowledge and progress. Data Love argues that the "cold civil war" of big data is taking place not among citizens or between the citizen and government but within each of us.

Roberto Simanowski elaborates on the changes data love has brought to the human condition while exploring the entanglements of those who--out of stinginess, convenience, ignorance, narcissism, or passion--contribute to the amassing of ever more data about their lives, leading to the statistical evaluation and individual profiling of their selves. Writing from a philosophical standpoint, Simanowski illustrates the social implications of technological development and retrieves the concepts, events, and cultural artifacts of past centuries to help decode the programming of our present.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This slim volume explores the connections among data, privacy, and the legal and philosophical implications of the use of data addressed through a European viewpoint while discussing American issues in-depth. Privacy and data collection techniques affect the policies created by governments and corporations--as we have become a society obsessed with data and tracking ourselves, which allows corporations and governments to track us. The more feedback we get from smart devices, the more we do online, the more information governments and corporations have about us. Through all of this data integration, Simanowski describes how our love of instant feedback has led to privacy taking a back seat to data, which has become a commodity. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. --Jamie Aschenbach, Southern Connecticut State University