Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion

Blown to Bits, Second Edition is the brilliant, plain-English guide to digital technology, how it’s changing the world, and what you need to know to survive in tomorrow’s digital world. A best-seller when it was first published in 2010, the issues it addresses are more crucial than ever. Now, its expert authors have thoroughly updated Blown to Bits to demystify the social, political, and personal issues everyone is talking about: from social media and big data to fake news, cyberattacks, and privacy. Both authoritative and accessible, this guide doesn’t just reveal the workings of the technologies that are central to your life: it also illuminates the policy decisions citizens need to make about these technologies… because you can try to ignore them, but they won’t ignore you!

Blown to Bits, Second Edition answers questions like:

• Who owns all that data about you? What (if anything) do they owe you?
• How private is your medical information?
• Is it possible to send a truly secure message? How close can you come?
• How do you figure out who to trust for accurate news these days?
• What should you know about free speech on the Internet?
• Who’s watching you, what do they know about you, and what can they do with that knowledge?
• Do you have to say goodbye forever to privacy -- and even to your personal identity?
• How can you protect yourself against out-of-control technologies -- and the powerful organizations that wield them?