Don’t Give Surveillance for Christmas

Paris Marx is joined by Chris Gilliard to discuss the ethics of tech media recommending surveillance devices, aspects of “smart” technologies you might not have considered, and why we should think twice about surrounding ourselves with cameras and microphones.

Chris Gilliard is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. Follow Chris on Twitter at @hypervisible.

• Chris wrote about the history of home surveillance, and the concept of luxury surveillance with David Golumbia.
• Caroline Haskins went in-depth on what Ring does to communities.
• Health apps and fitness trackers help rich people but don’t do much for poor people.
• The New York Times thinks the Theranos scandal soured the media on Silicon Valley. (We don’t buy it.)
• US Infrastructure Bill will require monitoring systems for drunk driving in new vehicles as early as 2026.
• Amazon has worked to kill or undermine privacy legislation across 25 US states.
• In 2019, video circulated of a man talking to someone’s 8-year-old daughter after he hacked the Ring camera in her bedroom.
• In the US, wage theft matches all other property theft combined, but the media sensationalizes shoplifting while ignoring wage theft.
• Chris recommended people read Simone Brown’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.
• The Wirecutter Union is asking people not to visit the website from November 25-29.

• The Threat of Data Colonialism w/ Ulises A. Mejias & Nick Couldry
• Data Vampires: Going Hyperscale (Episode 1)
• No Tech for Apartheid w/ Mohammad Khatami & Gabi Schubiner
• What the TikTok Ban Reveals About US Tech Policy w/ Jacob Silverman