[2][3] Angwin is the author of two non-fiction books, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (2009) and Dragnet Nation (2014).

[4][5] Julia Angwin was born in Champaign, Illinois, to university professor parents who moved to Silicon Valley in 1974 to work in the emerging personal computer industry.

[13] In 1996 she joined the San Francisco Chronicle as a technology reporter, where her coverage of the software industry included several stories of the Justice Department lawsuit against Microsoft.

[14] She also led an investigation that revealed how few Blacks and Latinos were employed in Silicon Valley companies and that many leading tech firms had been cited by the U.S. Department of Labor for affirmative action violations.

During her 13 years at the Journal, Angwin broke stories, led important investigations, and published numerous exposes into the growing tech sector.

[17] From 2010 to 2013, she led an investigative team that published the Wall Street Journal's groundbreaking "What They Know" series, which exposed how privacy was being eroded with most people completely unaware that it was happening.

[20] In April 2018, Angwin and Jeff Larson left ProPublica to found The Markup, described on their website as a "nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom" that will produce "data-centered journalism" to uncover "societal harms of technology".

[25] In the following months, Angwin was joined by a new leadership team including public radio veteran, Evelyn Larrubia as managing editor, and free speech lawyer, Nabiha Syed, as president.

[26] Since its launch, the site has published numerous investigations examining issues like data privacy, disinformation, and algorithmic bias, and the role that the internet's most powerful platforms play in facilitating those harms.

And it has developed and launched sophisticated custom forensic tools in service of investigating issues that would otherwise remain hidden, including Blacklight, a privacy inspector, and Citizen Browser, a project to inspect Facebook's algorithms.

"[31] The Washington Post's Scott Rosenberg compared Stealing MySpace to Kara Swisher's There Must be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner debacle and the quest for the digital future.