Book Review - The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick

Edward Snowden's revelations weren't really revelations to me, because I assumed the government and others were spying on me, but it still made me think about Internet privacy and what I could do to make it harder for others to see what I'm doing.

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data is a nonfiction reference guide to maintaining privacy in a world of technology. It's available in all formats: eBooks, Audiobooks, and those paper things your grandparents used to read.

The Good

Information. This book is chuck full of information both on how your privacy is in danger and steps you can take to protect your privacy.

Ray Porter. Ray Porter is a great narrator who is easy to understand and puts such emotion in his performance that you feel every emotion the author is trying to convey.

The Bad

Reads Like a Reference Manual. This isn't a story but a reference manual that has stories to illustrate the points. The stories are really interesting, and the information is really good, but to read it cover to cover is not the most interesting thing to read. Also, technology is always changing, so some of the information was out of date before the book was published.

Focuses ONLY on Perfect Invisibility. This book focuses on perfect invisibility and how to achieve it through very extreme measures. Most people don't need that nor could they maintain it. It would be helpful to have more practical tips for a moderate amount of privacy you can achieve.

What I Would Like to Have Seen

I wish this had been more interesting, but I'm not sure how to do that and still be a valuable reference manual. I also wish the author had given more levels of privacy and security. His point was absolute invisibility, which is impossible and requires extreme measures that are all for not if you make even one slip up.

Overall

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data is an interesting book with a lot of good information on privacy and how much others are really watching you. There are many good tips for improving privacy, but being a book it won't be as up to date as a website could be, and many of the steps are too extreme for most people and most situations. I give it 3.5 out of 5 eReaders.