Tim Wu Quotes

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

Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.

Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user.

Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.

I am not a fan of Facebook or Twitter. They both allow too much information to be available and they make privacy a thing of the past.

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 am completely opposed to the concept of big data.

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.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.

People are starting to be very skeptical of the Facebook algorithm and all kinds of data surveillance.

To trust so much in our devices and sync everyone's device up - we tell people where we are, what we buy and where we shop, who we talk to - and that goes somewhere. The ghost of information technology out there, and one of the points... of the manga and anime was trusting in technology.

You know, it's so funny that the internet's become a series of traps where you do sort of innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference, I like this thing, and then therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.

People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we've learned about them.

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.

The Orwellian vision was about state-sponsored surveillance. Now it's not just the state, it's your nosy neighbor, your ex-spouse and people who want to spam you.

The more Zuckerberg knows about you, the more media he will be able to bring you.

Everything we do in the digital realm - from surfing the Web to sending an e-mail to conducting a credit card transaction to, yes, making a phone call - creates a data trail. And if that trail exists, chances are someone is using it - or will be soon enough.

If Google decided at any point to publish my search history, or your search history, or anyone's search history, there's a litany of things they could idea police you about, and if it was published, you would be publicly shamed. Everyone would be publicly shamed. But we trust Google, and we trust the people that run that company.

Supercookies are legal, but I don't think they should be.

I'm worried about privacy - the companies out there gathering data on us, the stuff we do on Twitter, the publicly scrapeable stuff on Facebook. It's amazing how much data there is out there on us. I'm worried that it can be abused and will be abused.

I think a lot of stuff like people's emails getting hacked or that an email you sent is stored on a hard drive somewhere, that kind of stuff worries me a little bit. It's a weird thought that someone else could get into my information that easily. That stuff's pretty scary.

We tend to assume that data is either private or public, either owned by one person or shared by many. In fact there's more to it than that, above and beyond the upsetting reality that private data is now anything but.

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.

Making use of human weaknesses in intelligence work is a logical matter. It keeps coming up, and of course you try to look at all the aspects that interest you in a human being.