Surveillance by Algorithm: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/surveillance_by.html

Bruce Schneier is one of industry leaders in information security and more specifically cryptographer. He is a very very intelligent individual and you will become smarter reading his works, guaranteed. In this particular blog post he takes some quotes made by the NSA and Google to task, in regards to how they handle people’s personal data.

The TL;DR version is:

The NSA version of the term ‘collect’:

“So, think of that friend of yours who has thousands of books in his house. According to the NSA, he's not actually "collecting" books. He's doing something else with them, and the only books he can claim to have "collected" are the ones he's actually read.”

Google says it’s algorithms, that read your email, is like your dog
“To wit: when you're watched by a dog, you know that what you're doing will go no further than the dog. The dog can't remember the details of what you've done. The dog can't tell anyone else. When you're watched by a computer, that's not true. “

This post first appeared on Exploring Information Security.