This episode is brought to you by Audible, where you can get a free audiobook of your choice

and support this show by signing up at audiblepodcast.com slash best. Now, welcome to the award-winning

Best of the Left podcast with clips today from Papa Ganda from Bitch Media, the telemarketing program,

Democracy Now, Humorous Coors, last week tonight with John Oliver and activism from the

Electronic Frontier Foundation.

We used to go to stores to buy software in boxes and hardware. And all of a sudden, these

companies that I was writing about, like my space and Facebook, they weren't selling you

anything. You didn't pay them. They were trying to monetize your data. And so I came to this

sort of surprising conclusion that there was a different business model in this industry.

And of course, we've all sort of learned what that model is, right? If you're not paying for it,

you're not the customer. You're the product being sold. That's Julia Anguin. She's an investigative

reporter with ProPublica. And in a talk she gave last year at a big technology conference,

she took on this interesting idea. She asked, is privacy becoming a luxury good?

As a society, our mainstream ideas about what privacy means are changing. What we think of as

privacy is shifting in a huge and often quiet way because of the internet. We see outbursts

about this change all the time. Little small stuff, mostly about how we shape our identities online.

You know, like, oh my god, I can't believe my mom is on Facebook and can see photos of me at parties.

I don't have any privacy. Or like, it's so weird and gross that people put photos of themselves

on first dates online. Don't they have any privacy? Social media makes us shape our lives into very

public personas. Everyone has a different approach to what they include in that public image of

themselves. And you know, we're very conscious these days of what we put out as part of our

public identity, what we post and share. And what parts of ourselves we don't make so public.

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