Image by Anant Nath Sharma via Flickr
with Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader Radio Hour on Dec. 17, 2022
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
Ralph Nader Radio Hour on Substack
See also:
Your kids’ apps are spying on them, by Geoffrey A. Fowler
Tour Amazon’s dream home, where every appliance is also a spy, by Geoffrey Fowler
From the archives:
Will Griffin: Dismantling General Dynamics With The Mapping Project
Will Griffin: Origins of the Modern Surveillance State
The New Corporate Dictators – Super-Rich and Super-Immune, by Ralph Nader
Chris Hedges: The Fight to Free Knowledge
Kristinn Hrafnsson: Pegasus Spyware Leaks Show Nobody is Safe From Surveillance!
Navigating the Digital Commons on Our Own Terms, by Kenn Orphan
Dandelion Salad 
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It’s time for the Ghouls who rule to be outed.
What are their real motives for spying on innocent people?
Is it a monetary thing?
Is it a form of voyeurism?
Don’t they have better things to do?
Are they paranoid control freaks?
C’mon Folks, fess up.
The real Tech damage is and has been happening in Health and Human Services which has been on going for over 40 years for the poor, disabled, elderly. Electronic surveillance is now mandated for all Medicaid Home Community Based Care where both the recipients and their employees/direct care workers are surveilled and tracked in order to receive care and payment.
No other population in the US is forced to do this except for prisoners in the prison home based surveillance program.
Thanks for the additional information, sumitra. Just dreadful.
Medicaid HCBS care providers are paid slave wages so it gives the Med/Tech Industrial Complex an excuse for surveillance due to that proverbial boogieman “fraud”.