Baluja The Silicon Jungle

A Novel of Deception, Power, and Internet Intrigue
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3814-1
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

A suspenseful story about the dangers of unknowingly revealing our most intimate thoughts and actions online

What happens when a naive intern is granted unfettered access to people's most private thoughts and actions? Stephen Thorpe lands a coveted internship at Ubatoo, an Internet empire that provides its users with popular online services, from a search engine and e-mail, to social networking. When Stephen’s boss asks him to work on a project with the American Coalition for Civil Liberties, Stephen innocently obliges, believing he is mining Ubatoo’s vast databases to protect people unfairly targeted in the name of national security. But nothing is as it seems. Suspicious individuals surface, doing all they can to access Ubatoo’s wealth of confidential information. This need not require technical wizardry—simply knowing how to manipulate a well-intentioned intern may be enough.

The Silicon Jungle is a cautionary fictional tale of data mining’s promise and peril. Baluja raises ethical questions about contemporary technological innovations, and how minute details can be routinely pieced together into rich profiles that reveal our habits, goals, and secret desires—all ready to be exploited.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baluja, Shumeet

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Informatik
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Daten / Datenbanken Data Mining

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface xi

Endings 1

Anklets 3

Anthropologists in the Midst 10

Mollycoddle 13

Touchpoints 19

Checking In 26

Working 9 to 4 28

Predicting the Future and 38 Needles 33

Contact 39

Two Geeks in a Pod 47

An Understatement 53

Euphoria and Diet Pills 61

To Better Days 70

Marathon 75

The Life and Soul of an Intern 81

Candid Cameras 85

Episodes 89

Liberal Food and Even More Liberal Activism 92

Subjects 100

Newsworthy 105

Patience 110

Hypergrowth 113

Little Pink Houses 117

Truth, Lies, and Algorithms 122

Negotiations and Herding Cats 129

The JENNY Discovery 133

I Dream of JENNY 138

A Five-Step Program: Hallucinations and Archetypes 143

Over-Deliver 150

A Life Changed in Four Phone Calls 154

Giving Thanks 160

A Drive through the Country 166

Control 171

A Tale of Two Tenures 178

Prelude to Pie 183

The Yuri Effect 188

Apple Pie 195

Thoughts Like Butterflies 201

Core-Relations 207

Collide 212

Control, Revisited 220

Fables of the Deconstruction 223

Control, Foregone 232

Foundations 236

One Way 241

Sebastin's Friends 244

A Tinker by Any Other Name 251

When It Rains 262

I Am a Heartbeat 267

What I Did This Summer 273

A Permanent Position 280

For Adam 284

Faith 288

Counting by Two 291

Disconnect 298

Sahim 304

Epilogue: Beginnings 309

Acknowledgments 313

Know More 315

Privacy Policy of a Few Organizations 317

References 319

Über Autor(innen)

Shumeet Baluja is a senior staff research scientist at Google and the inventor of over 100 patents in algorithms, data mining, privacy, and artificial intelligence.