We are entering a new state of global hypersurveillance. As we increasingly resort to technology for our work and play, our electronic activity leaves behind digital footprints that can be used to track our movements. In our cars, telephones, even our coffee machines, tiny computers communicating wirelessly via the Internet can serve as miniature witnesses, forming powerful networks whose emergent behaviour can be very complex, intelligent, and invasive. The question is: how much of an infringement on privacy are they?

Exposing the invasion of our privacy from CCTVs to blogs, The Spy in the Coffee Machine explores what—if anything—we can do to prevent it from disappearing forever in the digital age, and provides readers with a much needed wake-up call to the benefits and dangers of this new technology.

Kieron O’Hara is Senior Research Fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and is currently involved in the Office of Science and Technology’s Cybertrust and Crime Prevention initiative.

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and is President of the British Computer Society.

"Shadbolt and O'Hara have kick-started a new debate about what we mean by privacy." The Sunday Times

”Timely and balanced, their book The Spy in the Coffee Machine is a scary treatise about the way technology has eroded privacy and continues to do so ...The chief lesson of this excellent and potent short book is that we have to learn how to live with these actualities.” A. C. Grayling, The New Scientist

"This book will give anyone concerned about the growing number of CCTV cameras in our streets or the way young people expose their secrets on Facebook a sound appreciation of the wider issues.  It will also arm them with a better ability to judge the trade-offs that we are asked to make on a daily basis between public and private." BBC Focus Magazine