If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- How do "free" everyday tools, like a popular mobile game or a cloud-based word processor, secretly monetize your personal data or even threaten your intellectual property?
- In what ways does oversharing your weekend getaway on social media, or simply taking a photo with your smartphone, act as a digital invitation for organized burglars?
- Why does connecting essential city infrastructure—from water treatment plants to prison systems—to the internet pose a catastrophic, life-threatening risk to the public?
Listen to Future Crimes — Free Audiobook
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Key Takeaways from Future Crimes
- Free online platforms like Google and Facebook do not treat you as a customer, but rather as the primary product whose personal and locational data is harvested for profit.
- Sharing seemingly harmless social media updates, such as vacation plans or photos with embedded GPS coordinates, actively helps organized criminals target and burgle your home.
- As everyday items like baby monitors and home security systems connect to the internet, they create hundreds of new, highly vulnerable entry points for global hackers to invade your privacy.
- Connecting critical public infrastructure, such as electrical grids, air traffic controls, and prison systems, to the internet exposes society to catastrophic, systemic failures without a backup plan.
- You can drastically reduce your vulnerability to cybercrime by using a limited 'guest' account for daily computer use, covering your webcam, and turning off wireless connections when not in use.
Future Crimes — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Can we safely log out after merging the “online” and “offline” worlds?
Chapter 3: Smartphones, Smart Cars, Smart Watches – but how smart are we?
Chapter 4: “Free” online comes with a very high price you’ll ultimately pay.
Chapter 5: As the internet expands rapidly, so does crime by hackers, terrorists and governments.
Chapter 6: Oversharing online puts a massive target on our backs.
Chapter 7: The internet’s best – or worst – is still ahead of us.
Chapter 8: Connecting vital infrastructure to the internet leaves us helpless in emergencies.
Chapter 9: We must never let technology outweigh our own judgment in decision-making.
Future Crimes Summary & Overview
Future Crimes (2015) lucidly explores the dangers inherent in using today’s highly interconnected web of technologies. Through carelessness or ignorance, we make huge amounts of personal information available to criminals who would love nothing more than to exploit us.
Who Should Listen to Future Crimes?
- Anyone who uses the internet on a daily basis
- People who use social media on their smartphones
- Those who believe technology will solve all our problems
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