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will most likely be used by bounty hunters tracking down bail
     jumpers. Eventually, though, it will be sold for other uses and given to the government.
     Already the FBI has a database of 52 million faces, and facial recognition software
     that’s pretty good. The Dubai police are integrating custom facial recognition software
     with Google Glass to automatically identify suspects. With enough cameras in a city,
     police officers will be able to follow cars and people around without ever leaving
     their desks.
    This is mass surveillance, impossible without computers, networks, and automation.
     It’s not “follow that car”; it’s “follow every car.” Police could always tail a suspect,
     but with an urban mesh of cameras, license plate scanners, and facial recognition
     software, they can tail everyone—suspect or not.
    Similarly, putting a device called a pen register on a suspect’s land line to record
     the phone numbers he calls used to be both time-consuming and expensive. But now that
     the FBI can demand that data from the phone companies’ databases, it can acquire that
     information about everybody in the US. And it has.
    In 2008, the company Waze (acquired by Google in 2013) introduced a new navigation
     system for smartphones. The idea was that by tracking the movements of cars that used
     Waze, the company could infer real-time traffic data and route people to the fastest
     roads. We’d all like to avoid traffic jams. In fact, all of society, not just Waze’s
     customers, benefits whenpeople are steered away from traffic jams so they don’t add to them. But are we aware
     of how much data we’re giving away?
    For the first time in history, governments and corporations have the ability to conduct
     mass surveillance on entire populations. They can do it with our Internet use, our
     communications, our financial transactions, our movements . . . everything. Even the
     East Germans couldn’t follow everybody all of the time. Now it’s easy.
    HIDDEN SURVEILLANCE
    If you’re reading this book on a Kindle, Amazon knows. Amazon knows when you started
     reading and how fast you read. The company knows if you’re reading straight through,
     or if you read just a few pages every day. It knows if you skip ahead to the end,
     go back and reread a section, or linger on a page—or if you give up and don’t finish
     the book. If you highlight any passages, Amazon knows about that, too. There’s no
     light that flashes, no box that pops up, to warn you that your Kindle is sending Amazon
     data about your reading habits. It just happens, quietly and constantly.
    We tolerate a level of electronic surveillance online that we would never allow in
     the physical world, because it’s not obvious or advertised. It’s one thing for a clerk
     to ask to see an ID card, or a tollbooth camera to photograph a license plate, or
     an ATM to ask for a card and a PIN. All of these actions generate surveillance records—the
     first case may require the clerk to copy or otherwise capture the data on the ID card—but
     at least they’re overt. We know they’re happening.
    Most electronic surveillance doesn’t happen that way. It’s covert. We read newspapers
     online, not realizing that the articles we read are recorded. We browse online stores,
     not realizing that both the things we buy and the things we look at and decide not
     to buy are being monitored. We use electronic payment systems, not thinking about
     how they’re keeping a record of our purchases. We carry our cell phones with us, not
     understanding that they’re constantly tracking our location.
    Buzzfeed is an entertainment website that collects an enormous amount of information
     about its users. Much of the data comes from traditional Internet tracking, but Buzzfeed
     also has a lot of fun quizzes, some of which ask very personal questions. One of them—“How
     Privileged Are You?”—asksabout financial details, job stability, recreational