Facebook Spy

What do Facebook, your cell phone, and your bank have in common? They're all spying on you. Every posting on a social network, every text message, and every bank transaction you make creates a digital trail. Direct marketing companies, private investigators, police, and intelligence agencies analyze that trail to construct detailed personal, financial, and social profiles. If your profile reveals that you have unprotected wealth, or the wrong friends, buying habits, or financial transactions, you may never know until you're sued or police seize your assets or arrest you. The Lifeboat Strategy (2011) shows you exactly what you need to do to counter these unprecedented threats to wealth and privacy. It documents the largely unseen global surveillance infrastructure and reveals hundreds of completely legal strategies to deal with it: private investments, opportunities, and strategies inside and outside the United States. And, it's written in language you can understand and put to work to protect yourself and your family.

It's a Silicon Valley Bonfire of the Vanities. What's it like inside the next Google? Or Facebook? Or Apple? No, even better, what's it like to launch the next Google, Facebook, or Apple? And then have the guys who launched the original Google, Facebook, and Apple decide you are public enemy number one. In this laugh-out-loud-funny novel, a global band of rebel hackers and underemployed "surgeon-class" coders load beyond-state-of-the-art capabilities, including working eyes, ears, GPS, spy software, and a wiseass personality, into a bunch of old Furby toys, rechristened "Grumbys," network them together, sell millions, go public, become rich and famous, change the world (for better or worse), and make sometime allies, sometime enemies of not only the biggest names in tech (though the Woz seems to actually want to help) but Congress, Goldman Sachs, the CIA, Microsoft, Oakley, and Mossad, not to mention the NCAA, the NBA, and the NFL. (Grumbys are shrewd handicappers.) Andy Kessler morphed from a super-successful millionaire, hi-tech hedge fund honcho (cashing out moments before the tech wreck) into a New York Times best-selling author with nonfiction triumphs such as Running Money and Wall Street Meat. The Wall Street Journal said, "He gets it all down with Jack Kerouac-like authenticity." Now Kessler goes beyond yesterday's news to a novel of tomorrow (or maybe ten minutes from now) that tells more than any newshound could about the new true global elite, the newborn aristocracy of tech: brilliant, bold, and leading us where no man has gone before, but also spoiled, petulant, cutthroat conspiratorial, and willing to do just about anything to preserve their precarious position to keep from being replaced by the next big thing. Underlying a hilarious adventure that rockets from Silicon Valley to the Concrete Canyons of New York, from the new industrial heartland of Shanghai to the ancient fortunes of Europe's greatest and most secretive families are some serious questions about democracy, capitalism and competition, privacy, and what happens when we decide our machines are smarter than we are and that's OK. Like a modern-day Jules Verne, ultimately Kessler is throwing down a challenge to each and every hero-in-his-own-mind hacker: the proto-Jobs, the would-be-Gates, the wannabe Zuckerberg: Can it be done? Is Grumby the future? And who will get us there first? Praise for Andy Kessler's Books "He gets it all down with Jack Kerouac-like authenticity." --William Tucker, Wall Street Journal "Deliciously naughty. . . I finished it in a gulp, perfectly astonished." --Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short and The Blind Side "So engaging, and the stories come so fast." --Paul Brown, New York Times "A joyful read, full of sass and irreverence." --Rich Karlgaard, Forbes "Sarcastic, cynical, and sometimes hung over." --Kerry Hannon, USA Today "A born storyteller." --Jay Palmer, Barron's "A hoot." --Jim Cramer, CNBC