The Silicon Jungle

Shumeet Baluja is a senior staff research scientist at Google. He was formerly the chief technology officer of Jamdat Mobile and chief scientist at Lycos. He holds a PhD in computer science and has served as an adjunct faculty member in both the computer science department and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

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