W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0393244816, English, 400 pages, 2015, USA

One of the most striking paradoxes of our time resides in our smartphones. Our everyday use of these iconic and progressively factotum apparatuses records at various levels every activity we do in space and time, with the unbelievable outcome that, on a mass scale, we’re happy about that and willfully give up our intimate privacy to be allowed to continue using them. It’s nothing new, but we’re still turning our head to what is behind. There are battles going on to conquer the most strategic parts of the big data we produce, in the huge business called “DaaS” (data as a service). Data and Goliath is a book about these battles, written by an acknowledged security expert, who has not given up on opposing the total surveillance paradigm. He thoughtfully couples a lucid analysis deducted from plenty of facts and sources with suggestions. Schneier’s privacy advocacy clarifies the overwhelming confusion in the current post-Snowden revelation period, sorting out the wrong approach to national securities and the inflated scale of control. His passionate approach doesn’t prevent him from imagining alternative scenarios, where new types of business models replace the current privacy in exchange for free services model. On the other side, an important part of the book is dedicated to advice, from breaking up the NSA into more specialized agencies, to teaching users why they need to stop sharing so much personal and intimate details and how. Being encouraged by a major expert in the field is the best argument for privacy one can ask for.