I was honored to have my book, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die reviewed by Sue Halpern in The New York Review of Books. Here is an excerpt from the review.

… In other words, you are not only what you eat, you are what you are thinking about eating, and where you 've eaten, and what you think about what you ate, and who you ate it with, and what you did after dinner and before dinner and if you 'll go back to that restaurant or use that recipe again and if you are dieting and considering buying a Wi-Fi bathroom scale or getting bariatric surgery and you are all these things not only to yourself but to any number of other people, including neighbors, colleagues, friends, marketers, and National Security Agency contractors, to name just a few. According to the Oxford professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, the "data editor" of The Economist, in their recent book Big Data:

Google processes more than 24 petabytes of data per day, a volume that is thousands of times the quantity of all printed material in the US library of Congress … Facebook members click a "like" button or leave a comment nearly three billion times per day, creating a digital trail that the company can mine to learn about users' preferences.

How all this sharing adds up, in dollars, is incalculable because the social Web is very much alive, and we keep supplying more and more personal information and each bit compounds the others. Eric Siegel in his book Predictive Analytics notes that "a user 's data can be purchased for about half a cent, but the average user's value to the Internet advertising ecosystem is estimated at $1,200 per year." Just how this translates to the bottom line is in many cases unclear, though the networking company Cisco recently projected that the Internet will be worth $14.1 trillion by 2022.

For the moment, however, the crucial monetary driver is not what the Internet will be worth, it's the spread between what it costs to buy personal information (not much) and how much can be made from it…

Click here to read the full review in The New York Review of Books