Rating: 
Summary: Fairly good treatment of an important subject
Review: As a veteran of the technology industry, Simson Garfinkel brings an insider's understanding of how personal data is collected and managed to his book Database Nation. He seems to be genuinely concerned about where the unregulated use of information technology may be leading us as a society, and has chosen to write his book in an easily accessible style in order to present his views to as wide an audience as possible. Database Nation succeeds overall. The author provides historical context and anecdotes for each topic within the book, helping bring the subject of privacy to life. Indeed, the book contains many interesting, useful and compelling passages. Among these are discussions of identity theft, credit reporting, and direct marketing. Thematically, I tend to agree with the author that a core problem has been the failure of our government to properly regulate the collection and use of consumer data in the private sector. Citing many real-world examples, Garfinkel succeeds in proving that today we have far more to fear from private industry than from government (although significant problems remain with the way our government handles information, and the current war on terrorism could make things matters much worse). In particular, the chapter on "Kooks and Terrorists", written prior to September 11, was remarkably prescient. Garfinkel suggests that we might be best served by tightly controlling and monitoring the instruments of destruction rather than tracking every citizen -- because even if such tracking was possible, Garfinkel points out that no such predictive system could ever be infallible. It would be interesting to learn more about his thoughts on this subject today. However, I was disappointed with the book on several counts. First, despite the repeated use of the word 'privacy', Garfinkel never really develops a theory of privacy: what it is, why we should care about it, and how citizens might be able to simultaneously enjoy the benefits of an information-rich world while living in a society that values and protects its citizens' privacy. Second, I was a bit surprised that the book barely addressed the issue of workplace privacy, which has been a highly contentious and important area for workers for a number of years. Third, while Garfinkel often proposes relatively simple but brilliantly conceived laws to secure our privacy rights, at other times he suggests the implementation of additional layers of technology in order to solve problems having to do with technology; this inconstancy left me puzzled. Fourth, as others have pointed out, there is little information provided about how individuals can take action to protect themselves. Despite these minor flaws, I recommend Database Nation as a fairly good starting point for learning about the important subject of privacy.
Rating: 
Summary: Rapidly increasing technologies invade our rights to privacy
Review: As we embark on the 21st century, advances in technology endanger our privacy in ways never before imagined. Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, by Simson Garfinkel is the compelling account of how invasive technologies will affect our lives in the coming years. It's a timely, far-reaching, entertaining, and thought-provoking look at the serious threats to privacy facing us today.
Garfinkel's book does cover a lot of familiar ground, making the issue of privacy more personal to the average person. For example, he describes how cell phone networks can be used to track preferences and physical movement. He also goes into significant detail about advanced identification technologies, including retina scans and DNA analysis, that can be used to identify and track individuals, but those technologies only serve as a lead-in to the issue Garfinkel seems to regard as the most serious: medical privacy.
Chapter 6 provides strong details of the Medical Information Bureau. The MIB collects medical information entered on insurance forms and into personal records and sells that information to companies that need to set insurance premiums for applicants. What gives the MIB the right to collect that information? Garfinkel reveals that patients give them that permission when they consent to receive treatment.
At the end of Database Nation, Garfinkel calls on our nation's leaders and government to establish an executive agency charged with enforcing existing privacy laws and acting as an ombudsman for individual privacy. The new medical privacy standards the White House offered in early 2000 go part of the way to solving some of the problems Garfinkel describes, but in all I believe his solution is far to weak to result in meaningful privacy reform, nor will it be able to keep up with the ever changing technology.
Database Nation continues the growing tradition of books that cast technology in its social context. And as a doctoral student in leadership and technology, I find it heartening to read a book that so thoroughly examines technology's role in society.
Rating:
Summary: A challenge to your complacency.
Review: Garfinkel cover a wide variety of territory here, and you may not feel that all areas are an issue for you. The territory includes significant breaches, credit reports, health records & insurance forms, as well as direct marketing lists and practices. Garfinkel stresses that the issues are not just privacy-related, but also data integrity - - bad enough that others have access to the truth about your history, but mistakes in the data quickly get replicated throughout the business world. You may not have a problem, for instance, with insurance companies asking you to allow them to share information, if you feel it increases the efficiency of the market. You may not have a problem with targeted marketing, which is built on customer profiles. However, after reading this book you'll have a better sense of the issues. One anecdote was very effective, I thought, in challenging complacency on these issues. I have heard a number of people say their privacy won't be violated because their lives are too boring. Garfinkel tells a story that demonstrates how people who have too little to do will glom on information just because the information is there, whether or not it has practical value. He has a story about an office web camera focusing on the coffee pot; the camera is there so those coming downstairs to get coffee can manage their expectations and will know in advance whether or not they will have to make a fresh pot. Yet this picture of this innocent coffee pot gets heavy web traffic every day, from people who have nothing better to do than look at a coffee pot. So, being boring is not sufficient protection against the idly curious; less so against those with malicious intent.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but lacks other side of the story...
Review: Good book, especially for someone living on the other side of the world... From European point of view, such privacy violations are something unbelievable. Garfinkel's book simply shows us the hazards of modern technology, and convinces us that our European privacy protecting laws are a good thing, despite sometimes being used to cover bribery or theft.
Sometimes `Database Nation' seemed so naïve, but to understand it, we must notice it was written few months before attack on WTC. Now we can see how governments are trying to know everything about everybody and the only reason for that is protecting us from terrorism. Nice idea, but Garfinkel has already predicted it - he wrote that a big terrorist attack would happen, even if we maximize security and privacy violations cannot stop really bad people.
As I wrote before - I have never been in the States, so sometimes I was reading this book as some kind of `weird guide to the USA'. Some of described pitfalls can be seen in Europe as well, but usually we do not expect our medical records to be seen by anybody... maybe because in most European countries medical insurance is run mainly by the government. And here is the point, where this book lacks some kind of perspective. What do you think is better: having your medical record sold, or die because funds of some emergency stations are so low, that only one ambulance in fifty-thousand-people-city is on duty? Is it better to protect privacy, or to highlight crooks? The highly illegal under Polish law so-called `Jachnicki list' was a list of people who cheated and deceived a lot of honest citizens. Giving detailed information including name, adress, birthdate and PESEL (unique number every Pole is assigned at birth) about those people, the creators have broken Personal Data Protection Act, and were forced by government officials to stop publishing that list. This is the other side of fighting for permanent privacy - and Garfinkel doesn't write anything about it...
Rating: 
Summary: Unrelenting Pessimism
Review: In Database Nation, Simson Garfinkel uses Orwellian prose and dark prophecies to dramatize an important but dry subject (how much the government should regulate the use of medical records and consumer purchasing records). Garfinkel portrays our world as a hopeless technical dystopia where insurance companies rip you off, telemarketers bother you at dinnertime, terrorists run free and the average person is powerless to do anything about it. The book's unrelenting pessimism makes it unbalanced and ultimately hurts the author's credibility. For example, instead of giving a nod to the progress being made by pro-privacy agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the state Consumer Protection Boards, Garfinkel dwells on abuses by the FBI and "faceless" corporations. I'd skip this one unless you need another reason to be mad at insurance companies.
Rating: 
Summary: lacks global perspective, highly misleading
Review: Overall, a well done expose on the troubling problem of invasive personal data collection, a problem of the infant information age. Garfinkel asserts that "technology is not privacy neutral," a true and alarming revelation in the computer age where data collection ability accelerates at a rate defined by Moore's law. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the increasingly important subject of privacy. As other reviewers have pointed out, while Garfinkel does an excellent job exposing the problem, the book comes up short in terms a practical self-defense strategy. His primary prescription for the problem is tough privacy legislation. While I certainly would not oppose this, I think this is unlikely anytime in the near future, especially in our new post 9.11 world, a subject of which he wrote in the chapter entitled "Kooks and Terrorists" prior to this event. Individuals should read this book to increase their awareness of the problem, and devise their own practical privacy self defense measures.
Rating: 
Summary: The Contents of this Book is Chilling!
Review: Simson Garfinkel has written Database Nation to present a comprehensive assessment of the direction technological advances are taking that have already threatened the privacy of American citizens. Threats to our privacy hit home - they threaten our liberties to voice opposing views, to mount peaceful protests, to buy and sell, to move about freely without big brother watching us, and to live our lives as we please without undue snooping by others. The book serves as an indictment of the Federal Government, law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, private companies, and others who have gained too much control over the lives of people. Garfinkel provides a historical perspective of technological developments and demonstrates how easily we have gone down the road of information gathering. Readers will learn that their privacy is lost when information about them is being collected and sometimes sold, stolen, and put to use by others for a variety of purposes. The contents of this book is chilling. Are threats of crime and terrorism justification for power grabs and the surrendering of our civil liberties? Garfinkel provides case studies to demonstrate the impact technology has had upon our personal freedoms. He provides revelations about various uses and abuses of barcoding, fingerprinting, audio and video surveillance systems, Webcamming, wiretapping, credit reporting, medical record management, confidentiality, and more. Readers will learn how the lives of average American citizens can be turned upside down when errors creep into IRS tax records and credit bureau reports. People are human and humans make errors unintentionally, they steal information, and they deliberately tamper with information for a variety of criminal reasons. Readers would be shocked to learn that they themselves may have been the victims of undue scrutiny! This book should serve as a wake-up call for American citizens to become more knowledgeable about widespread information gathering efforts and the potential for harm that could result from its illegal and unethical use. This is must reading for any person who is concerned about the direction America is taking - and for those persons who don't care but should be more concerned about where we are heading!
Rating:
Summary: Who's Watching Me Now?
Review: Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation is a frightening account of how our privacy is being infringed upon by government, industry and certain individuals. It illustrates how ordinary citizens' private information is obtained by individuals or organizations that want to exploit the data to their advantage. The information can be obtained from driver's licenses, credit card purchases, and medical records, just to name a few. The book is insightful and fast-reading. It will prompt you to take control of your life and wonder, "Who is watching me now?" Garfinkel's intent is not to scare his readers, but to inform unsuspecting citizens that an increasing percentage of our daily activities are being captured by databases across the world. Our personal privacy is threatened with the use of fingerprinting and human marking to document and identify individuals. Whereas this means of identification was created to prevent identity theft, solve crimes, and eliminate computer error, some states are now able to sell this information to private businesses because they are part of the public record. Garfinkel's research on this topic is extensive. Not unlike George Orwell's book 1984, we are also under constant surveillance. The stores we shop at, offices we work in, roads we drive on, and establishments we frequent are capturing our video images and placing them in databanks across the nation. Even surveillance satellites are able to capture minute details of a person. Our personal information is a commodity--it's what marketers use to solicit people. Chapter 11: Privacy Now! provides us with examples and ways in which we can fight back as a nation to protect our right to privacy. However, it does not provide individuals with strategies for protection. Humans have come to rely on computers and data processing at the expense of the individual. The problem is that the smallest clerical error can destroy a person's life. Garfinkel compares his book to Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, which planted the seeds for the environmental movement. Likewise, Database Nation sets the stage for the legislation and regulation of privacy in the twenty-first century. Everyone should read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Would have been better without the science fiction
Review: This book dashed the high hopes I had for it. There are many very good reasons to be concerned about the ways technology can be used to curtail our civil liberties and constrict our freedoms. I had hoped for a serious discussion laying out the problems, their current state of application and misuse, and some thoughts about how to push back. We do get some of that and to the extent this book is in this scope I like it a great deal (for example, the discussions around eternal copyrights and huge commercial databases gathering everything known about each of us or the sale of drivers license photos to commercial interests). When it is in the middle area of discussing thought crime and brain wiretapping he begins to lose me. It isn't that the issues aren't worthy of discussion, it is simply they way he discusses them has too much of a paranoid science fiction future feel. When he paints the future of conscious machines and whether they will demand civil rights or not, well, I think he spoils this book. That speculative stuff should be in a different book. For me, the inclusion of this material makes it impossible to take seriously the good stuff he does have. The weird apple spoils the barrel kind of thing. It isn't that the book isn't worth reading. It's that the serious stuff is so important that we need to focus on that and not be distracted by paranoid delusions about things that don't even exist. There is plenty to be concerned about in the databases already collected and being sold in commercial markets.
Rating:
Summary: Would have been better without the science fiction
Review: This book dashed the high hopes I had for it. There are many very good reasons to be concerned about the ways technology can be used to curtail our civil liberties and constrict our freedoms. I had hoped for a serious discussion laying out the problems, their current state of application and misuse, and some thoughts about how to push back. We do get some of that and to the extent this book is in this scope I like it a great deal (for example, the discussions around eternal copyrights and huge commercial databases gathering everything known about each of us or the sale of drivers license photos to commercial interests). When it is in the middle area of discussing thought crime and brain wiretapping he begins to lose me. It isn't that the issues aren't worthy of discussion, it is simply they way he discusses them has too much of a paranoid science fiction future feel. When he paints the future of conscious machines and whether they will demand civil rights or not, well, I think he spoils this book. That speculative stuff should be in a different book. For me, the inclusion of this material makes it impossible to take seriously the good stuff he does have. The weird apple spoils the barrel kind of thing. It isn't that the book isn't worth reading. It's that the serious stuff is so important that we need to focus on that and not be distracted by paranoid delusions about things that don't even exist. There is plenty to be concerned about in the databases already collected and being sold in commercial markets.
| 
