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Episode details

Radio 4,18 Apr 2019,21 mins

Why would your mattress spy on you?

Beyond Today

Available for over a year

We all have our own conspiracy theories about who is listening to us through the internet. We probably have considered the idea that Facebook and Google control our lives – but these aren’t necessarily conspiracies. How might we have given the internet giants permission to spy on us? What connects a political scandal like Cambridge Analytica to Alexa and Google Maps? Matthew meets Shoshana Zuboff, who has been investigating this for years, to hear her theory that ties everything together. She calls it surveillance capitalism and she came to the studio to tell us why we should all be more aware of it.

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