Big Tech Spying
Ralph welcomes the Washington Post’s technology columnist, Geoffrey Fowler, to explain all the ways your smart devices are gathering information about you, your garage door, your soap dispenser, your vacuum cleaner and even your toilet.
Geoffrey Fowler is The Washington Post’s technology columnist. Before joining the Post he spent sixteen years with the Wall Street Journal writing about consumer technology, Silicon Valley, national affairs and China.
I’m actually really excited by technology. I love it… What angers me is that we’ve allowed a couple of really big corporations—Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook— to give us (as consumers, as users of this stuff) a false choice. And the false choice is, “You can either live in a world where you have all these great conveniences, you can use this new technology… But if you want that, you have to give us all of this data. You have to allow us to surveille you. You have to allow us to watch everything your kids do so we can market to them.” And the false choice here is: if you don’t want that, you can’t have the future. You just have to go live under a rock.
Geoffrey Fowler
We looked at the 1000 most popular iPhone apps that are likely to be used by children, and found that 2/3rds of them were collecting data about children— personal information, including their location— and sending it off to the advertising industry… By the time a child reaches 13, online advertising companies hold an average of 72 million data points about them. Each kid.
Geoffrey Fowler
Big Tech Spying
As I always do, I listened to this episode on my non-traceable pre-paid phone while out on one of my bi-weekly 5 mile walks. And yes, I do use earbuds. Thank you for adding the download MP3 link to your site, I would have stopped listening if it required going through one of the "3rd party parasite apps." After hearing Mr. Fowler's terrific piece, I switched over to the long list of singles I also have on the phone. You're not going to believe this, but I SWEAR it's true, the VERY FIRST tune which played was "Every Breath you Take" by "The Police." For those not familiar with the song, its lyrics begin:
Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you
Every single day
And every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you
Oh, can't you see
You belong to me?
How my poor heart aches
With every step you take?
Every move you make
And every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I'll be watching you
Could be Alexa's theme song, don't you think?
For those who would like to be able to access a huge array of digital media, music and much more, without having concerns about your privacy, get on the web and search "Usenet" and/or "Binary Newsgroups." Been using it for decades, never a problem.
I look forward to every episode of the Radio Hour, and appreciate the longer version available on your page.
Thanks,
Long time listener
Olympia, WA
Like Klassik I feel I'm avoiding most of these issues by running free and open source software (and flushing my own toilet): Linux, GNU, BSD, that sort of thing. In fact, you all are too, since Google, Amazon, Apple, all of them, don't start from scratch but base their products on a large substrate of free software developed by independent developers. Except in your case you've got that layer of nasty in between doing what we can't fully know.
That said, I love you bringing up these topics and think Jeffery Fowler is writing in just the right place to address where most people are with their technology. And yet I can't avoid the thought that these pains are all of the kind Richard Stallman had in mind way back in 1984 when he started the Free Software Foundation.
The FSF and others in that space have come a long way in their ability to bring non-programmers into their movement or to use Free Software directly, and yet there's still this massive gap such that I'd feel glib telling you that you just need to replace MacOS or Windows on you computer with GNU/Linux, use the f-droid app store which examines source for malfeasance like spying (actually, if you've got Android, that's not that hard a step), or replace your phone's operating system with postmarketOS (in progress) from this wonderful German programmer who wants to give the world a path to a ten year lifespan for phones. How can tech. enthusiasts like me who, I have to admit, lack social and political organizing skills combine with people like you to help bridge the gap to where we can trust the software we run?