The Hank Show: The Incredible Story of How We Lost Our Privacy

I was born in 1961, so a little more than half of my life was pre-internet (for me, the internet really began in 1995, when a new piece of software called Netscape was introduced). I remember how amazing email was before spammers got going, how fun the early "world-wide web" was, and how interesting and informative various bloggers were before Facebook, Twitter, and Google showed up and took over. There weren't ad blockers in the late 90s, because there weren't many ads. I remember how furious we web surfers got when it was revealed that websites had these things called "cookies" that were sent to your browser, so they could track your history. What an invasion of privacy!

Those concerns seem quaint now. My daughter was born in 1994, and she has really not known any time when she couldn't go online. She also knows that she has no privacy, and she goes on the internet with the expectation that everything she emails, posts on social media, and buys is seen and logged by someone or something. McKenzie Funk's book, The Hank Show, is a biography of the man he holds responsible for first exploiting the financial potential of Big Data.

"Hank" is Hank Asher, a brilliant yet very troubled man. He was born in 1951 on a farm in Indiana. His father was an abusive alcoholic. Hank early on showed signs of genius: he dropped out of high school, and

He applied for work at a local factory and scored so high on its basic employment test that his new bosses asked him to take the more difficult draftsman's test. He taught himself trigonometry in a week and aced that test, too. (p. 25)

He worked for a house painting company in Ft. Lauderdale, and he soon figured out how to streamline the process so that his crew could paint a house or condo tower in less time than any other. He started his own company, Asher Painting, and it soon became the largest painting company in Florida. He got his pilot's license and bought an Aerostar. He sold the painting company and decided to smuggle pot out of Belize. (I'm not making this up.)

Asher saw a computer demonstrated in an IBM showroom, and was immediately attracted to its potential. His overarching talent was his ability to find patterns in huge sets of data, and he immediately saw how a computer could help him. At the time the problem with crunching large amounts of data was in the basic design of computers: they had to take a piece of data in the computer's memory, send it to the central processing unit (CPU), perform calculations on it, and then send it back to memory for output. Computer scientists were trying to speed up the process by increasing the CPU speed, but there was a bottleneck in passing the data back and forth. Asher's insight was to set up many processors running in parallel so that the time spent sending data to and from memory was drastically reduced.

Once he had his computing system set up, he needed to feed it data. He knew that driver's license data was publicly available in Florida, so he negotiated a sweet deal to access ALL of it. He also acquired car insurance histories, home and business addresses, employment histories. Armed with all this, he started his first company, Database Technologies, in the early 90s. He quickly realized he could compile a fairly accurate profile of an individual, and he offered his company's products to law enforcement for practically nothing. (By this time, he was out of the smuggling business, and he devoted the rest of his life to helping LE track down child predators, terrorists, etc.)

Throughout all of this, Asher showed signs of instability, berating employees mercilessly and then turning around displaying enormous generosity. He sold Database Technologies and started another successful data mining project, Seisint. Once again, though, his erratic behavior prevented him from being a good manager, and the board bought him out. He drank heavily and had many girlfriends whom he took to his various estates in the Caribbean and the US.

He ended up dying in his sleep in 2013. By then, his database included all of the data in the credit agencies Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. He also worked on developing facial recognition, using photos from driver's licenses. He was the first to illustrate to companies how valuable user data is. Thanks to him, practically every move we make is tracked, every purchase we make is logged, and every website we visit is noted (as well as how long we stay there).

Funk closes the book with some horror stories of innocent people getting arrested for crimes they never committed, due to imperfect facial recognition. One man, a veteran and security guard, spent years trying to clear his name. He lost his job and was bankrupted.

Communist China's "Social Credit Score" system is well known - it tracks what kinds of things its citizens read, if they pay their bills promptly, and who their friends are. If a person is associated with the "wrong kind" of people, he will find difficulty placing train or airplane reservations, buying a car, and completing other basic tasks. Funk makes a good case that, while we do not live in a social ranking system as overt as China's, we're pretty close. The Hank Show is a warning that as we give up more and more personal data in exchange for "free" services from Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other megacorporations, we put our freedom in peril.