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Reviews: Ethics in an Age of Surveillance: Personal Information and Virtual Identities, Adam Henschke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Does it matter that intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the United Kingdom collect massive amounts of metadata on their citizens? Does it matter that much of what they collect are merely phone call records, rather than the calls themselves? Advocates of the intelligence agencies argue that such data are at once innocuous and highly valuable: they invade no one’s privacy (or if they do, only minimally so), yet they are crucial in building an understanding of terrorist networks and as such are necessary for national security. Nevertheless, groups such as Amnesty International and Privacy International have pushed back against these practices, taking GCHQ to the European Court of Human Rights for illegal breaches of privacy. The collection and use of metadata is not limited to government intelligence agencies, however. Private companies and agencies involved in retail, social media, politics, medicine, and criminal justice regularly collect vast quantities of seemingly trivial data to build a picture of who we are and how we live. Recall the now infamous example of the teenager whose pregnancy was discovered and inadvertently revealed to her parents by Target’s big data analysis unit, as reported by Charles Duhigg in the New York Times in February . Here, too, we face a similar question to that raised by the work of the intelligence agencies: How should we approach the surveillance of seemingly trivial data that can be aggregated to reveal deeply personal and private information? We may not care who sees which moisturizer we buy or which vitamins we are taking, but we might well care who knows if we are pregnant. In Ethics in an Age of Surveillance, Adam Henschke has produced a philosophically sophisticated examination of this type of surveillance and the ethical issues that it raises. The field of surveillance has tended until now to be explored only at the applied level, but with this work Henschke pushes the debate back to ontological basics, asking what are data, how do we form perceptions, and what is information? In so doing, he has produced a work that is applicable to diverse areas of surveillance and big data collection in both the public and private sectors. The work is divided into three parts. The first deals with questions of privacy and