Review by Choice Review
Eagle (CEO, Jana; adjunct, Harvard and Northeastern) and Greene (freelance journalist) believe that engineers with access to big data can make the world a better place. Although Eagle has authored dozens of academic papers over the past decade, in this book, the authors explicitly choose to focus on corporate projects rather than academic work. The result is a volume that is as dehumanizing as the term social engineering and as lacking in rigor as a trade magazine. Much of the information provided is anecdotal or conjectural: "company X is doing Y, which might solve problem Z." Privacy concerns can cause public relations problems, but those might be overcome by providing incentives. The book is organized around four granularity levels: individual, community, national, and global. However, the presentation repeats common material across all four levels, such as the use of call data records and certain corporate projects. People not already familiar with the extent of their "digital exhaust" may find the book enlightening, as might people who do not know that disparate data sets can be combined to uncover hidden relationships. But readers looking to understand the dark side of big data (its use by marketers, criminals, and malevolent governments) will find few insights here. Summing Up: Optional. General readers. --Christopher Vickery, Queens College of CUNY
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
