Behind the Cloud

Thoughts are free - but they are no longer secret. Today, our data is automatically stored and analyzed by algorithms on the back of the cloud - where we ourselves can no longer look or even have control over our data. Our most private and secret information is entrusted to the internet forever and is permanently collected, stacked and linked to our digital twin with and without our consent. "Privacy is dead" as Mark Zuckerberg put it.

But how could it come to this? And if everyone knows everything: what is still private today, and are there any personal secrets at all when the "gods" on the back of the cloud know us better than our friends and family?

The second edition of the book uses a wealth of updated as well as entirely new case studies (cryptocurrencies, journalism, or digital traces of sexual preferences) to develop a typology of privacy in the history of ideas and shows the areas of life in which Big Data and artificial intelligence have already made inroads.

This book is a translation of the original German 2^nd edition Die Ruckseite der Cloud by Peter Seele & Lucas Zapf, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.