The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy as We Know It [Paperback]

A startling exposé of how much Big Brother knows about you

We are entering a new state of global hypersurveillance. As we increasingly resort to technology for our work and play, our electronic activity leaves behind digital footprints that can be used to track our movements. In our cars, telephones, even our coffee machines, tiny computers communicating wirelessly via the Internet can serve as miniature witnesses, forming powerful networks whose emergent behaviour can be very complex, intelligent, and invasive. The question is: how much of an infringement on privacy are they? Exposing the invasion of our privacy from CCTVs to blogs, The Spy in the Coffee Machine explores what - if anything - we can do to prevent it from disappearing forever in the digital age, and provides readers with a much needed wake-up call to the benefits and dangers of this new technology.Kieron O’Hara is Senior Research Fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. He is the author or co-author of nine other books about technology, politics and society, including Inequality.com: Power, Poverty, and the Digital Divide, also published by Oneworld.

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton, UK, and was President of the British Computer Society in its 50th anniversary year 2006-2007. He is Chief Technology Officer of internet security firm Garlik, and a director of the Web Science Research Initiative. He is both a chartered psychologist and a chartered engineer, and sits on a number of UK national science and technology committees. A striking and readable book Shadbolt and O'Hara have kick-started a new debate about what we mean by privacy. Timely and balanced, their book The Spy in the Coffee Machine is a scary treatise about the way technology has eroded privacy and continues to do so … The chief lesson of this excellent and potent short book is that we have to learn how to lil“&