Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

The Internet gave us access to everything, but it also gave everything access to us.

Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.

You can have Google or you can have privacy but you can’t have both.

An Internet service provider reasonably needs to know your name and address. But it's hard to imagine why a provider would need to collect your Internet browsing habits other than to sell your data.

Call it a hunch, but I sense that many of us are not entirely comfortable with a world in which every single thing we buy creates a cloud of data. I'd like to have an option to not have a record of how much I tipped, or what I bought at 1:08 A.M. at a corner market in New York City.

In the Internet age, it is inevitable that corporations and government agencies will have access to detailed information about people's lives.

What I would love to see is art that explicitly addresses not personal intimacies but anonymous intimacies: the vast collections of facts about you and me that now exist in giant server banks.

It's remarkably easy to dig up enormous amounts of information about individuals, without their consent.

Ultimately there's a dirty secret about the Internet, which is nothing disappears. All these companies have all your information. They have your search history.

I call up Amazon. It seems to me they do a major thing wrong, right. I mean, they protect me against the loss of a $50 liability I have of something on my credit card, but they do nothing to protect me against somebody who is watching to see what books I'm interested in, what new perversions I've developed.

There is a difference between the stuff that people put online themselves, like pictures and their trips and flights and meals they've eaten, than the stuff that they don't realize is also going into foreign computers. Like, for example, copies of your emails or every single online search you ever do, 'cause all that is being recorded as well.

We are all victims of data mining…. We are in a data mining culture…. Americans do not place a high value on the privacy of their communications and will give up that right for modest benefit.

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

The sheer amount of information captured from the average Google user makes this company a particularly big threat.

It's interesting - what are you willing to give up in terms of your privacy for access to other people? For access to things you think you desperately need. Ultimately, it's that old saying, isn't it? If the service is free, then the product is you. The thing being sold is you. There's a product for sale in you and your data.

Everyone knows, or should know, that everything we type on our computers or say into our cell phones is being disseminated throughout the datasphere. And most of it is recorded and parsed by big data servers. Why do you think Gmail and Facebook are free? You think they're corporate gifts? We pay with our data.

Is it OK for Amazon to know every word of every book you've read? Are you comfortable with that? Maybe you are. Is it OK to let everybody know you eat Corn Flakes? OK, but then there are certain products you might not want people to know that you're using.

You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.

Google is omniscient of what people search for and do. Facebook has over a billion subscribers, meaning Mark Zuckerberg has personal information about one in every seven people on Earth. U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia are at the top of that list.

In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?

Anyone who steps back for a minute and observes our modern digital world might conclude that we have destroyed our privacy in exchange for convenience and false security.

My privacy concerns have to do with the world, other people, technology intruding upon us - what Talmudic scholars once called 'the unwanted gaze.' Here I see major issues and concerns as society evolves, and I've written often on the subject.

What's really going on is, on your iPhone, you have 200 apps, and they're all collecting a little data on you. Twitter knows a certain thing, Foursquare knows something else, my Fitbit app knows something else, my Waze app knows something else.

People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.