Every day, we leave behind along trail of personal information simply by living in the modern world. We click Web pages, flip channels, drive through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Companies like Yahoo! and Google are harvesting an average of 2,500 details about each of us every month. Who is looking at all this data? And what are they doing with it? That's what the journalist Stephen Baker explores in this book, and his answers are both surprising and unsettling. A new math intelligentsia is devising ways to dissect our every move and predict, with stunning accuracy, what we will do next. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior - what we buy, how we vote, whom we love - without our even realizing it. In this tour-de-force of original reporting and analysis, Baker provides a vivid introduction to a world we're all entering - and the people who control it. The Numerati have infiltrated every realm of human affairs, profiling us as workers, shoppers, patients, voters, potential terrorists - even lovers. They're digging through e-mails and phone records to calculate how much each employee adds to the bottom line, They're analyzing our purchases to see whether we're on a budget, on a diet, or on the lam. And they're zeroing in on our political values to try to swing us in a tight election. This is one of the most ambitious undertakings of the twenty-first century, and the implications are vast. We might find ourselves defined and boxed in by formulas. The Numerati shows how a powerful new endeavor - the mathematical modeling of humanity - will transform every aspect of our lives.