Trafficking Data

From TikTok and Fortnite to Grindr and Facebook, Aynne Kokas delivers an urgent look into the technology firms that gather our data, and how the Chinese government is capitalizing on this data flow for political gain.

In Trafficking Data, Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens, putting US national security at risk. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley’s disruption fetish, and Wall Street’s addiction to growth have fueled China’s technological goldrush. In turn, American complacency yields an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives.