Reporting on Privacy Is Just Like Reporting on Climate Change

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i literally tell people that reporting on privacy is exactly like reporting on climate change, because it's apples saying, oh, you can just block aps from tracking and it's fine. Meanwhile, apple is building out like this massive target ad network behind the scenes. And coke is, it's cococola. I mean, i'm not familiar with the cococola emissions process, but i'm sure it's not great. It's just corporations of pushing responsibility on to the individual rather than ike, taking them, like, changing what they do. Id may believe that we just need to act as individuals to to effect change, when actually we need the state to step up

Paris Marx is joined by Shoshana Wodinsky to discuss how the digital infrastructure that companies have built out over the past couple decades to track everything we do in order to serve us ads places us at risk, and how that’s come into focus since the overturning of abortion rights in Roe v Wade in the United States.

Shoshana Wodinsky is a privacy reporter at Gizmodo. Follow Shoshana on Twitter at @swodinsky.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Shoshana wrote about getting an abortion in the age of surveillance and why every company is becoming an ad network. With her colleagues at Gizmodo, she also wrote about how Facebook perpetuated climate denial and killed news feed changes that would anger conservatives.
Anti-abortion groups targeted ads at people who had visited abortion clinics.
Data brokers have been selling data on people who visit abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood.

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