This book is so full of information, I had to read it in small increments. It read more like a textbook or reference piece to me. I was wishing it had been written more conversationally than lecture format. That being said, there is a wealth of well researched and documented information in The Identity Trade. I actually learned quite a bit and clarified some of the things mentioned recently in the media. I think it's a book that belongs on any library reference shelf. It was well worth the read.
I received my copy through NetGalley under no obligation.

This book I expect will remain a university reference rather than alerting the public to privacy issues online. The public don't want to read paragraphs from seventeen to twenty-nine lines long, which I met during the early pages. I would also have made the introduction more packed with salutary facts than discussion. For that reason I am dropping a star, but the author has clearly engaged in a great deal of reference and careful writing.

The first section looks at the early rise of people giving and losing their hold on personal details on the early internet, on chatrooms (issues then raised during a murder trial for instance) or beginning the selfie craze. Options were suggested by the W3 so that users could set privacy preferences on their computer.

The next section, firmly within the twenty-first century, points out that in 2009 the author met people working in online reputation management. Already the parents of the rich college age people were paying to have their online identities scrubbed of anything that might reduce their chances of college admission or hiring. (Some people today still haven't caught on and plaster drinking photos all over Facebook and then wonder why they don't get hired.) Search engines were also turning up issues that troubled potential political candidates, and scrubbing them would not be easy. ORM is now a well-funded industry.

New terms use old words to help us understand them quickly. Like digital footprint, digital doppelganger, Google handshake, burying negative content under positive content. We also learn something of SEO and how Google reduces visibility of anyone trying to game the system with false external links. Shortly after that I found another 29 line paragraph and my eyes just glazed over, I'm afraid. Maybe a graph would have helped. I would have broken the paragraph halfway, between Laura Portwood-Stacer's remarks and Patrick Ambron's counter argument.

The author goes on to refer to Safiya Umoja Noble's work, which I've previously read, on the images and impressions given of African-American women online in search results. I recommend her book - 'Algorithms of Oppression', title not in the text.

After that we are encouraged to build our own images on line, with again mixes of new and old terms; virtual store-front, digital hygiene. Another 29 line paragraph. A business handbook would have put the whole chapter into a bulleted list, three graphs and a cartoon. Different approaches for different folks.

A main point the author makes is that creepy and unpleasant, maybe unethical, habits like scanning entire mails and headers and photos by corporate giants, even those items we just store, not share, is happening and is so ubiquitous now, that we think there is nothing to be done about it.

Later she gets on to Big Data, by means of which the giants 'monetise' the actions of browsers, customers or not. Well, in this house, my husband Googled something for the first time and within the hour it was offered to him by Amazon. Proof that the giants sell data, if not necessarily to one another then to data brokers who warehouse the material and sell it on fast. Data brokers, another new - old term. However, I didn't see supermarkets pushing pregnancy goods at women who didn't know yet that they were expecting, mentioned here. A lot of the details which I have read in books such as 'The Black Box Society' by Frank Pasquale weren't presented. The author does reference that book, so maybe she didn't want to repeat it, but I think that concrete examples like Target and the expectant teen mother should have been used instead of mostly abstract discussion about the general concept. Examples prove the point and stick in the mind.

As well as social theorists and reputation managers, I am pleased that the author spoke to computer professionals, such as an app developer. Self-tracking is one such bribe the firms offer. I appreciate the author's point that even if firms were obliged to compensate people for their data, they would only be interested in compensating people likely to spend the most.

Not included (that I saw): ad blockers, cookie cleaners and malware cleaners, all of which I use; VPNs and Tor; the certainty that people accessing free adult sites and pirate sites are downloading keyloggers at once. Whatever about ads containing malware on your webpage, you don't want to let the bad guys put malware on your computer and steal your credit card details. Nor the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook was selling personal data to firms that were using bots to influence votes around the world for money; and while the book may have been prepared before that was exposed, it does put the concepts into proportion. As does the EU's new GDPR. And China's social media monitoring to rate citizens' good standing for social privileges. That's the trouble with writing about the infosector; it moves so fast.

Notes P227 - 272 in my e-ARC. I counted 122 names which I could be sure were female. I saw no charts or illustrations but there may be some in the final text.
The author is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. This book will chiefly be of interest to scholars, sociologists and those working up new theories about our computer age.

Draper's book is thoughtful and thoroughly researched, but too scholarly in tone to appeal to a general audience. Readers working in--or at least well-versed in--technology, online privacy, social media privacy, and more, will find this an interesting text.

Ever wonder what happens to the information that you put online? Because I know I do. I'm almost constantly thinking about if I should be using this app, or giving another one these permissions, and this book really worked to minimize my fears. Though it does read a little like a textbook, and I couldn't really get into it until about the half way point, I did really enjoy it when I was finished.

Beginning in 1997, internet safety has been a rising concern. After many, and I mean many, hacks of internet companies including apple and most recently facebook, a ton of people's important and sensitive information have bee leaked, and it's really changed the way that the internet works, and how we use it. Privacy policies are increasingly difficult to understand, which seems like it's on purpose.

I've seen that this book has a low rating on review websites, and the only reason I can see that to my understanding, is because of how it reads. I wasn't exaggerating that I couldn't get into it until I was half way through, but from that point on it was smooth sailing, and I couldn't put it down. If you're interested in learning about how the internet has been growing in the last twenty years, and at the same time internet security, than you need to pick up this book. I would also love to have a copy for my bookshelf. It's packed full of vital information, and I'm really glad I did, finally, get into it. I would also like to say that there are tips to lock down your internet personality.

Thanks for reading!
(Radioactivebookreviews.wordpress.com)

Not quite what I expected. I thought it was going to unlock the secrets and tricks that magic computers use to figure out how a teenage girl is pregnant based on buying 7 things from Target. Or how I can speak the word ‘shoes’ within range of any cell phone or computer and suddenly all the online ads I see are for shoes.

Most of this book seems to be the history of the internet and the niche companies that ran beside it offering services protecting people’s privacy. The internet would change, and these companies would change. Rinse and repeat.

I realize non-fiction isn’t going to have spaceships suddenly attacking in chapter 13, but this was pretty dry stuff. There was no real sense of friction. No conspiracies, or great evils like with books about the food giants. Companies were finding ways to pay to get information about internet users, which was used to advertise to them. This has been happening for decades, even before the internet. Companies sold contact information to other companies, who would then call these people and try to sell them things.

In today’s world, TMI is the norm. We’re putting it out there by the pile and we’re doing it voluntarily. Is the college kid who just posted 8 pictures of him drinking and smoking pot concerned about his email address being sold to several companies who will send him junk email? Probably not.

If anything, there were some tips in there for keeping your online persona clean and free of anything that can came back to bit you in the future. But honestly, it was all pretty common sense stuff. If you posted pics or a confession of yourself doing a crime, you could be arrested. I’ll have to keep that in mind the next time I’m doing a B&E on Facebook Live.

I suppose what I was really looking for, especially with a title like ‘The Identity Game’ was the methods people use to steal identities, and how to avoid that. If that was in this book somewhere, I completely missed it.

Privacy is a commodity that can be bought and sold like any other product. The truth of the matter is - if you're not paying for a product, then you are the product - nothing can be truer. The recent scandals surrounding the big technology companies lack of regard for users privacy, I'm looking at you Facebook, have alerted many people to the issue of privacy and resulted in new European guidelines known as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) which are yet to be evaluated in terms of whether they have had any success whatsoever in offering protection against those who hold our information. I enjoyed Nora A. Draper's discussion and analysis of the relationship between online visibility and privacy, and there are plenty of statistics to get your head around. Draper also addresses the future and the possibility of encountering serious problems if we continue to share our information with those who cannot be trusted to keep it safe.

This is indeed a thought-provoking read, but Draper fails to analyse an important deeply enough and doesn't add her opinion to the narrative either. We do, however, get some of her interviews with multiple niche tech companies that reveal what they think about privacy. Unfortunately, The Identity Trade reads a little like a research thesis and is very dry in parts, so some people may find it difficult to get through. That said, I did enjoy reading it and learned a lot of intriguing information that I haven't come across previously. The bottom line is that in capitalistic societies such as the UK, businesses are always looking for new ways to make money, and selling privacy is viewed as a way to make quick, easy money but is a controversial topic which will likely occupy the minds of many internet users for decades to come. Be careful what you share online people!

Many thanks to NYU Press for an ARC.

Reading like a research paper, The Identity Trade is full of studies and stats. This makes it difficult to read and boring. While full of information, it's lacking voice. You can't just let the facts and studies of others speak for you. Provide your own interpretation and thoughts on the topic. In the end, what could have been an interesting read about where our connected lives are leading ended up being too bland or mechanical to push through.

No one escapes effect of social media in todays world. It liberates you, gives you a wide canvas and continuous flow of data and connectivity which one can cherish.
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But their us dark side to it. Your personal data which you willingly or unwillingly share might be used for marketing, changing public opinion and a lot of other capitalistic uses, which are hard to imagine.
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But data forms your online identity which can be very fragile to atacks and costly to maintain. .
Employers, your future spouse, your audience, your friends; believe your online identity, even if it is fake and manipulated.
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Author discusses in depth how this debate on privacy started with rise of internet and how data is becoming next oil. Various pioneers in field of online privacy are discussed and various new concepts and definitions of privacy that are changing every 5 years.
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There is peep into future, various calamities possible due to identify theft but also idea that owner may earn by partially sharing his identity on sites like mebay.
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Afterall online identity trade is hard to control, leave aside eliminating it.
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Book is deep and wide with in depth details which may become heavy for non technical reader. But very nice book for any person who wants to gain expertise in field of online data privacy management.

Sometimes it is appaling to know how companies can profit from selling privacy. On the other hand, it is grateful to know as well that these companies are only doing this because of the noble purpose of protecting the privacy of individual persons (in legal terms). This book presents the ideas really well.

We are obsessed with privacy. Or rather, we obsess about privacy while sitting idling by as it is nibbled away. In The Identity Trade, Nora Draper examines the companies trying to cash in on this anxiety, offering small bits of protection for what remains of privacy. They are a cynical response to a sea change in life with tech.

Privacy is one of those negative rights, like freedom from unreasonable search. It is not something you can exercise on your own, leverage in the performance of your life, or influence others with - like, say freedom of speech, press or religion. Privacy is forever under attack and in need of defense after you learn it has been abused, ignored or removed. About the only thing you can do with privacy is lose it.

An entire industry has grown around failing privacy. There are reputation management services, anonymizers, search engine results manipulators, cryptography services – all playing on fear. Fear starts early, as students worry about getting into universities when their social media posts are checked. There is job application worry, promotion worry, bullying, harassment, ID theft, targeted ads, doxxing and hacking. It’s all about fear, and you are supposed to pay to alleviate some of it. They are all small, weak patches on a massive problem. But the book is not about how crazy this all is. The book is a survey of these services, how they differ from each other and why, according to their founders. As if they were legitimate and beneficial.

It is a dry catalog of a book. There are precious few human stories, and just one image -a couple of screen captures from a commercial. But the worst thing is that Draper seems largely unaffected by it. She has no opinion or analysis of the services, the morality of their operations, or how perverted it makes our society. She is just a neutral observer, unmoved, apparently, with no ideas of her own.

But the truly annoying thing about The Identity Trade is that Draper seems to assume the privacy state of affairs is acceptable as is and just needs nurturing and clarifying as we layer on more such faux fixes. She never takes the position or challenges her interviewees that this is all morally if not legally wrong.

I realize this is “just” a book review, but let me tell you what I think, reinforced by reading this book. There should be a non-profit data warehouse that links to all the personal data there is. The owners of the data are the named individuals of the world. They all offer their data for rent in five levels: copper, bronze, silver, gold and platinum. Copper provides basic data like name address, family, email and such. Bronze layers in employment history, academic record and previous addresses. Higher levels add credit card purchases, health records, social media posts and geotracking from mobiles and health trackers. Individuals can make available for rent as little or as much as they want using these universal layers.

If a company wants to create demographics or psychographics, it can rent a million accounts for a week or a month or a year. The individuals get the rent. But the customer can’t sell that personal data to anyone else. Just like you can’t sell your e-book to a friend, even though it’s in your account, you can see it on the screen and you paid for it in full.

The most amazing abuse of this kind is credit scoring, which has become not only acceptable, but necessary. The ratings agencies collect data on everyone without their knowledge or consent, and companies can look at it if they’re subscribers. You were not able to see your own record of your own financial transactions until a law passed forcing them to make it available free at least once a year. Same goes for your health records; you have no right to even see them, let alone possess them, despite their being totally intimate details of your private and personal condition. This makes a total farce of the right to privacy. So the very fundamentals of privacy need to be straightened out.

And none of this can take place until and unless there is a law that says no company can sell anyone’s personal data without agreement and compensation. Because everything else is theft or extortion. And always has been. It’s time we acknowledged that.

This would have made The Identity Trade a much more worthwhile read. But Draper doesn’t go anywhere near it or any other consideration.

David Wineberg

If you're not paying for an (online) product, you're the product. Every day we make choices that influence our online visibility, reputation, and identity. The Identity Trade examines the relationship between online visibility and privacy, and the politics of identity and self-presentation in the digital age. Author Nora A. Draper interviewed entrepreneurs and industry representatives on their products and services, the way existing (online) identities can be strengthened or destroyed.

Draper investigated the ever-moving world of reputation influencers, anonymizers, search engine optimization (SEO), and the impact of algorithms. Some businesses failed, some morphed into other ventures, few survived the span of two decades that's covered in this book. Can ethics and business live alongside? Who owns my data? Who buys and sells it? Do we really care about privacy? A series of niche players are showcased in depth, where I would expect more well-known brands and consumer-oriented tech companies.