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What happens when a naive intern is granted unfettered access to people's most private thoughts and actions? Young Stephen Thorpe lands a coveted internship at Ubatoo, an Internet empire that provides its users with popular online services, from a search engine and shopping to e-mail and 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 the ever-growing number of people unfairly targeted in the name of national security. But nothing is as it seems. Suspicious individuals--do-gooders, voyeurs, government agents, and radicals--surface, doing all they can to access the mass of desires and vulnerabilities gleaned from scouring Ubatoo's wealth of intimate information. Entry into Ubatoo's vaults of personal data need not require technical wizardry--simply knowing how to manipulate a well-intentioned intern may be enough.
Set in today's cutting-edge data mining industry, The Silicon Jungle is a cautionary tale of data mining's promise and peril, and how others can use our online activities for political and personal gain just as easily as for marketing and humanitarian purposes. A timely thriller, The Silicon Jungle raises serious ethical questions about today's technological innovations and how our most confidential activities and minute details can be routinely pieced together into rich profiles that reveal our habits, goals, and secret desires--all ready to be exploited in ways beyond our wildest imaginations.
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
Anonymous
Posted August 10, 2011
I never had any idea that this is what Google does or could do. This is an eye opener and a fun story. Makes you think and then it makes you think again. It's only categorized under fiction because it hasn't happened yet.
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Overview
What happens when a naive intern is granted unfettered access to people's most private thoughts and actions? Young Stephen Thorpe lands a coveted internship at Ubatoo, an Internet empire that provides its users with popular online services, from a search engine and shopping to e-mail and 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 the ever-growing number ...