The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance

by Aram Sinnreich, Jesse Gilbert

How data surveillance, digital forensics, and generative AI pose new long-term threats and opportunities—and how we can use them to make better decisions in the face of technological uncertainty.

In The Secret Life of Data , Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert explore the many unpredictable, and often surprising, ways in which data surveillance, AI, and the constant presence of algorithms impact our culture and society in the age of global networks. The authors build on this basic no matter what form data takes, and what purpose we think it’s being used for, data will always have a secret life. How this data will be used, by other people in other times and places, has profound implications for every aspect of our lives—from our intimate relationships to our professional lives to our political systems.

With the secret uses of data in mind, Sinnreich and Gilbert interview dozens of experts to explore a broad range of scenarios and contexts—from the playful to the profound to the problematic. Unlike most books about data and society that focus on the short-term effects of our immense data usage, The Secret Life of Data focuses primarily on the long-term consequences of humanity’s recent rush toward digitizing, storing, and analyzing every piece of data about ourselves and the world we live in. The authors advocate for “slow fixes” regarding our relationship to data, such as creating new laws and regulations, ethics and aesthetics, and models of production for our data-fied society.

Cutting through the hype and hopelessness that so often inform discussions of data and society, The Secret Life of Data clearly and straightforwardly demonstrates how readers can play an active part in shaping how digital technology influences their lives and the world at large.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Politics

312 pages, Hardcover

Published April 30, 2024

About the author

Dr. Aram Sinnreich is a media professor, author, and musician. He currently serves as chair of Communication Studies at American University’s School of Communication.

Sinnreich’s work focuses on the collision of culture, law and technology, with an emphasis on subjects such as emerging media and music.

He is the author of five books, Mashed Up (2010), The Piracy Crusade (2013), The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property (2019), A Second Chance for Yesterday (2023; written with Rachel Hope Cleves as R.A. Sinn), and The Secret Life of Data (2024; written with Jesse Gilbert).

He has also written for publications including The New York Times, Billboard, Wired, The Daily Beast, and Rolling Stone. In prior incarnations, Sinnreich worked at Rutgers University, NYU Steinhardt, OMD Ignition Factory, Radar Research, and Jupiter Research.

As a musician, Sinnreich plays bass, percussion, and guitar. As a composer in styles such as jazz, reggae, and soul, he has been a finalist in the John Lennon Songwriting Competition (2014) and the Bernard/Ebb Songwriting Award (2020). His song "It's Never Easy, Si," performed with his group Dunia & Aram, reached #2 on the World Independent Music radio charts in 2023.

Reviews

[Gabi · Rating 5 out of 5]

tldr: so many cool ass facts about data propagation and tech in general, also filled me with dread at many points, but most importantly encouraged me to hold all at once the awe and the dread and the sense of agency in a technological climate that usually only focuses on a hollow version of the first two emotions.


i want to recommend this book to all my coworkers, who will laugh at now-dated ai terms (i laughed a little) or nebulous conjectures that are now very accurately named and implemented into our daily workflows, because i know that, like myself before reading, the future of data privacy (the lack thereof) fills them with paralyzing dread. i want to recommend this book to everyone else in my life as well, most of whom fall into a similar camp, or the inverse apathy towards data privacy, or frequently ping-pong between both (ily youtube algorithm). the authors do a pretty good job (imo) of seeking out diverse voices in data, and it’s a credit to the book’s point about the vast proliferation and contextualization (and self-reproducing nature) of data. coming into it as someone who was already paranoid, it made me feel less tin-foil-hat and more grounded in my place as an individual within cultural/algorithmic process that make up our current society. i’m still not redownloading ig tho yall can keep that one

[julia jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75✨ very insightful & terrifying lol. Audiobooked this & it was a bit difficult to get through as the narrator sounded like a teleprompter come to life but alas I persisted since data tracking etc isn’t a realm I’m very familiar with! I’m glad I did as I certainly feel more enlightened & will continue to think about data critically. Some things weren’t new to me (ie Snowden or social media’s impact on people’s lives) but others were fascinating. As the secret life of data and AI continue to infiltrate our world, I want to make an effort to seek out this kind of information & I encourage others to do the same!

[Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt the first half of the book was better in explaining the context... And the second half less engaging as it sought to propose methods to address the issues. But I can see their point that awareness of these secret lives of data ought to make us think twice about what we share and how!

[William Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK, these ruminations are likely to get way too long so let's start with the important stuff—the reason that you really should read this book:

From page 95: “According to one recent study by a multinational team of computer science professors, 77 percent of all IoT devices connected to the internet can be physically located and individually identified just by sampling and analyzing traffic on the open internet--no hacking necessary. It also means that each of us (yes, even you!) is probably leaking all kinds of very personal information to unaccountable third parties every single day as we go about our professional and personal lives.”

Also on that page and the next: “Amazon may or may not make a small profit selling you a smart speaker for $29.99, but from the company's perspective, the real economic benefit comes after you've opened the box and plugged in the device. Not only does the voice-activated Alexa search engine make it easier for customers to buy more products and stream more content directly from Amazon, but the device drastically increases the amount of personal data the company can collect and analyze, . . .” Smart appliances from Google, Apple, and Meta do pretty much the same thing for the same reasons, . . . ”

But perhaps all you do is to send private emails to friends. That's safe enough, right? Well, on page 156 we come across this little fact: “[I]n 2022, Amazon decided to stop including details about online purchases in the confirmation emails it sent customers, not because the information was irrelevant, but because it was too relevant—to the company's competitors. Google had been automatically scanning Gmail users' inboxes to profile their purchasing habits based on these automated messages, and Amazon didn't want to keep sharing such valuable information for free.”

Still stubbornly think that your activities are only your business? Try this example from page 198 on for size: “Do you have a General Motors car with OnStar, the company's subscription-based mobile services platform? You might be paying for features such as turn-by-turn navigation, roadside assistance, and remote key fob, but as it turns out, you're also providing data to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other law enforcement organizations, so they can track your location in real time. . . .” Not so draconian in my opinion, but still of potential concern, is that such tracking is used “not only [by] law enforcement; the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used an app called SafeGraph . . . to track millions of Americans without telling them, in part to assess whether and where people were complying with COVID-19 curfews.”

This ends the only really important part of my thoughts on The Secret Life of Data. Sinnreich and Gilbert have given us 240 pages of text full of concrete examples of many ways that our online activities can impact us in ways that we never imagined or intended. Oh, though I haven't taken up even more space by quoting what they tell us of computer-printed paper and digital photos taken with our smart phones, there are some shocking revelations where those are concerned. The authors take care not to sound like alarmists, but to ignore what they have to say is akin to the proverbial ostrich hiding its head in the sand. If I have managed to convince you to read the book, stop here, or read on if you have nothing more pressing at the moment.

Hopefully I have established the book's importance, but how interesting is it to read? At this point, I must insert my favorite quotation from author, editor and critic Edmund Wilson: “No two people ever read the same book” so my reactions may be far afield from those of anyone else. Nevertheless, I find the book to have been very well written, especially for having had two authors. Their collaboration has resulted in a seamless, tight, and perhaps provocative narrative. On the other hand, they are writing to a serious and highly literate audience, and a measure of dedication is required for the general reader to remain focused throughout the entire text. The book is intended to be educational and informative, not entertaining. In this light, be prepared to be introduced to quite an impressive list of new terminology such as technosocial landscape, deanonymization, affective computing, algospeak, fractal stack, generative adversarial network, etc. This book is a goldmine for finding neologisms generated by the cyberworld we all inhabit (even though writing the previous sentence did give my spell-checker fits).

I'll wrap up these thoughts and impressions by criticizing a single type of grammatical usage (though the type is repeated quite a few times), and this will be totally irrelevant to the vast majority of people who may stumble across these words. Before I even identify it, let me stress that I know full well that language is a social and cultural artifact and that, as such, it is subject to continual evolution. I also know that the prescriptive grammar rules that we were taught until recent decades were largely based on Latin grammar and that their creators held the erroneous belief that English was a bastardized descendant of Latin and should therefore adhere to its grammatical structure. I even understand some of the sociological reasons behind the current usage. Despite this knowledge, I remain aghast at the use of a plural pronoun which refers to a singular antecedent and I shall continue to futilely criticize its use as long as I am able to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard as it were). Here are examples of the usage to which I am referring:

“[A] hacker might intercept personal data from a user's [singular] device and use it to open a credit card or bank account in their [plural] name.” Why not say “users' devices,” making the antecedent plural to agree with the plural pronoun “their” later in the sentence? That was from page 106 by the way. There's another egregious example on page 139 where we read, “[P]hysiognomy . . . held that the measurable features of a person's body [singular] could be seen as a guide to their [plural] moral character.” One more example from page 154 reads, “Sometimes these efforts are subtle and calculated, like a judo practitioner using an opponent's [singular] greater weight against them [plural].” Regardless of their current social acceptance, these are all examples of a pronoun-antecedent agreement error, and I shall continue to identify them as such.

Actually, the repeated departure from that particular prescriptive grammar rule has no measurable impact on my rating of the book. The significance, importance, and timeliness of the subject matter rate, I feel, five stars. The missing star (since I give it only four) indicates that the reader is required to maintain a rather highly concentrated and directed focus on the text in order to truly comprehend it. The book is certainly worth the effort, but effort is also certainly required (or maybe my own brain is just slowing down).

[Alexander Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Secret Life of Data is a part of a genre that, at this point, has been well-trodden for nearly a decade. However, despite walking many similar paths as books like We Are Data, The Costs of Connection, More than a Glitch, Artificial Unintelligence, and Atlas of AI this book provides some highly novel insights based on the last couple of years' technological data and manages to carve out some new insights.

I think this is a book that could easily introduce the uninitiated in critical data and algorithms studies to the value for these research areas, opening new questions and approaches to thinking about them. This was a highly accessible book.

That said, this text is more of a survey than a deep dive on any particular subject, and it occasionally states arguable points about how technology works as if they are well known facts. For example, it treats the internet as if it is near impossible to shut down. While this might be true for the average person, there are bits of critical infrastructure that easily can cripple large potions of the web and ecosystems of data streams for those with access to them. For example DNSSEC signing (for ensuring domain names verification), ImageMagick (for most of the rendering of the web and could render large portions of the web unreadable), AWS failing (which hosts computer clusters and API services for much of the internet, and even short term failures, as we just recently saw, have serious impacts on the web), etc. In truth, one of the failures of this genre of critical data studies, when analyzed by critical communications researchers is their over-reliance on highly simplistic understandings of how these sorts of technologies are actually built and maintained. Although, going into highly technical details can also lose some readers or can generate a sense that the book is not about helping the average person, but there are examples of how this could be done better. Examples that do so are Protocol by Alexander Galloway, A History of Fake Things on the Internet by Walter J. Scheirer, and Biomedia by Eugene Thacker. But also, even within the book, an example of how this was done well was the authors' explanation of EXIF files and this history of data that connects library metadata and surveillance apparatuses that contextualize the book. It is unfortunate that this level of technical accuracy was not maintained throughout.

This book borrows some of its stylistics from the speculative realist playbook, using speculative fiction as a method of technical futurist predictions of potential scientific/technological utopias and dystopias. This was somewhat unique to this genre of writing, and it definitely made it more fun!

[Theivanai P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Data begets data, traversing ecosystems and applications in unexpected and unplanned ways. Leads to opportunities to innovate and improve. And leading to risks and codifying bias.

Quotes:
- Whatever data’s purposes, functions or meanings may have been when it was first collected, analysed or sold, it will inevitably be used for radically different purposes in radically different context
- ‘Collective refusal’: a society wide acknowledgement that algorithmic bias is a real, pervasive and damaging problem, and that those who contribute to it should be held materially accountable for the consequences of the data system they build. it’s about tech, but it’s not about tech - it’s really about civil rights
- Governments and businesses are partnering to surveil people around the globe at an unprecedented scale

[Sophia Adair · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, the way I found this book was by going on Libby and promising myself I’d listen to the first available audiobook I saw after hitting “randomize”. I joked with my friends that I couldn’t have got a more boring random book.


Despite having very little interest in the nitty gritty of data collection, I do now. I knew that information was constantly being collected about me, but I thought I was a lot more protected than I am. Am I going to start reading terms of service now??? I feel like I really should.

The introduction is a bit long, and the last 20ish percent loses the plot a little, but the meat of this book is interesting, informative, and a little scary. It definitely drives home why we need to tackle this as a collective.

Thanks for the fun random read! Way cooler than expected.

[loreley god. · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was such a soul-suck :(

i liked how the authors navigated political minefields in a very explicit, matter-of-fact, non-inflammatory way. otherwise the rest of the writing lost me. i don’t feel like the authors built sufficient credibility, which was hammered home by several general claims not being warranted out with a footnote. i also found some of their attempts to be cutesy —> relatable —> accessible to contribute to my lack of trust. let me be clear: i am not casting doubt on whether or not they are qualified, but to a reader who popped upon a book their introduction, writing, and evidence did not instill me with the most confidence as i started reading.

all in all i enjoyed connecting it to mcc 103. i really enjoyed the chapter on individuality? which i think was chapter 6. the extent to which data percolates is always astounding to learn. the examples were plentiful.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must-read for anyone feeling overwhelmed by rapid technological changes and the political and corporate forces behind them, and the pervasive, often invisible effects of them on how we interact with our world, each other, and our own selves.

[Simon Linacre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful and eminently readable take on the pervasive nature of data in our world. Makes an off-grid cottage in the hills all the more tempting

[Jelina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened to the audiobook, I know want a physical copy to annotate

[Nolan McDermott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good but shocking how outdated some of the stuff is even tho it was published in 2022

[✶ nu · Rating 5 out of 5]

in the surveillance state, we are all cam-girls.