Now, more than ever, as we work from home, gather with friends on social media, shop for groceries online, it feels like this tsunami of digital dependence and loss of personal privacy will wash over everything. That once these companies (and n

"We can find anybody within three square meters"

Apr 13th, 2020 1h 57m

This argument about efficiency feels like it has seeped into every aspect of our society. We give up more and more of ourselves to tech companies because we want to use our time as efficiently as possible. We structure our economy in such a way

"This Will Change Everything"

Mar 31st, 2020 31m 54s

This week’s episode of Everything They Know was supposed to be about a hypothetical dark future, where we’ve done nothing to rein in Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, where algorithmic prediction has gotten to 100% and has created perfect e

"Is Twitter the same as what you do?"

Mar 17th, 2020 1h 4m

In previous episodes we’ve looked at this issue of tech dominance from several angles. We’ve seen how they gather data, what they can do with it, how they make money from it, and how social media allows them to muddy the water and shape the nar

"I sold. I'm out. I don't want anyone to remember I was doing that."

Mar 10th, 2020 1h 7m

When I got on Facebook in 8th grade, it was worth somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million. By the time I was a junior in college, studying abroad in Senegal and forced to have a much more limited Internet experience, it was worth $50 billion.

“How much do they really know?”

Mar 3rd, 2020 39m 31s

We hear “data breach” or “data leak” or “they’re gathering our data” and don’t stop to consider what that really means. We’ve accepted that there’s nothing really we can do about it anyway, so why fuss? “Does it really matter? Who cares! Well,

“Extraordinary Levels of Specificity”

Feb 25th, 2020 41m 43s

We seem to have collectively accepted that we’re going to keep playing this rigged game of data harvesting because the playing of the game itself placates us, giving us just enough of that beautiful dopamine-serotonin-oxytocin combo to get us t

“All Your Data Are Belong To Us”

Feb 18th, 2020 47m 6s

We hear the words “they have your data,” or “they’re selling your data,” or “they’re keeping my data” and we think of it as some ethereal thing that has no merit to our lives. The results of this theft are hidden from us, and in many cases, on

“While We Were Looking Over There”

Feb 11th, 2020 1h 14m

Think about where we were technologically just 10 years ago, when everybody was really excited about our utopian tech-driven future. Netflix used to mail you DVDs, now they spend $15 billion a year feeding their content algorithms. Google used

“Don’t Be Evil”

Feb 4th, 2020 43m 40s

Before Big Tech was the bad guy, we all had dreams of a digital utopia brought about by the democratizing power of the Internet. What happened? I spoke to Judy Estrin about her decades of experience as an innovator in Silicon Valley, and what s

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This is Everything They Know

Jan 23rd, 2020 2m 46s

What happens to society when human beings are reduced to data points? What happens when our behavior, our movements, our relationships, and our obsessions are all tracked with near perfect precision? What happens when that information is indexe

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