Essentials Of Means of Control

How far would you go to disappear? In today's connected world, disappearing is nearly impossible. Your entire digital footprint and physical movements are tracked, collected, bought and sold without your knowledge or consent. No matter how careful you are about your online privacy, your data is constantly being swept up into vast troves maintained by companies you've never heard of, and purchased by entities you'd never expect.

This astonishing expose peers behind the curtain of our surveillance society to reveal a ubiquitous yet invisible marketplace where your data is the commodity for sale. Driven by the relentless march of technology, and fueled by vast sums of private and public money, vast interconnected networks of companies secretly work together to monitor our every online move and physical location. From our phones, computers, cars, homes and more, wireless signals and metadata clues are harvested to infer intimate details about our lives, often without our awareness or permission.

Worst of all, this pervasive data collection has grown far beyond just advertising or corporate uses. Powerful players in government, military and intelligence have recognized how valuable access to these immense databases could be for their own secret purposes. Through murky legal loopholes and covert deals with private enablers, they've found ways to infiltrate and commandeer the very infrastructure built to track us as consumers. Now these same networks engineered to monitor the population for marketing are being quietly repurposed as tools of mass surveillance.

Told through real case studies, exclusive sources and buried documents, this immersive account depicts both the scope of the sophisticated surveillance machinery that's grown up around us, but also the characters behind the curtain who've helped enable it. From data brokers and location aggregators to ad-tech giants and covert contractors, follow the exposing trail of breadcrumbs to understand how America's largest corporations became delivery mechanisms for espionage. Learn too about the ingenious cybersleuths and tech pioneers battling on the frontlines to curb these threats, along with those caught in the crosshairs defending our right to privacy itself.

With privacy rapidly eroding and digital tracking poised only to grow more invasive and insidious, this alarming expose shines a light on threats we must address now before oversight is lost forever. Depicting a cyber arms race pushing all humanity towards exposure, this urgent wakeup call demands that we wake up before technology's privileges become too profitable for those in power to relinquish, and anonymity becomes reserved only for those clever enough to disappear.