Vass Bednar is a public policy expert who chats with Elizabeth about the idea of surveillance capitalism. Talking about a few Canadian examples, they talk about how tech companies collect and use data from their users, how privacy policy might be a red herring and how incentive structures in the tech industry contribute to the system of surveillance capitalism.
Additional Resources:
Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is the key text. There are also a lot of summaries of the book in blog posts, podcasts, and videos. One of my favourite short reviews of the concept comes from the Fortune Magazine YouTube channel, found here.
Check out Vass's newsletter, Regs to Riches - of particular interest to this conversation are her pieces on Laying down the Loblaw and Loblaw media.
Vass also wrote a piece in the Globe and Mail: Loblaw’s points economy for private-health data follows Big Tech’s playbook.
In the episode Vass mentioned a weather app - check out The Weather Network's description of their "precise location forecast" which includes information about user privacy.
Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.