This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Ulta and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

My Amazon Echo, the smart speaker, was basically talking to Amazon every three minutes,

just sending a paying to Amazon.

Even when we weren't using it, even when it was muted, it's still sending data back and forth to the company.

My TV was reporting what we were watching.

My robot vacuum was sending information back to the company and the company has actually talked about how useful that data could be.

They said, we have basically maps of people's homes.

We could tell a furniture company that they lack a coffee table and you could start targeting them with coffee table ads.

I mean, it's kind of crazy when you think about what kind of data you can get about people.

If you're in their homes, seeing what they're doing day to day because everything we have is connected to the internet.

That's New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill. She writes about how the technology that makes our lives easier is also eroding our privacy.

And what makes her reporting especially engaging is that she writes about her own experiences, experiences that are both amusing and scary.

This is so good to be talking with you because you are such a good communicator and you write about tech.

But it's not just interesting to people who are techies and geeks like me.

But to everyone because I think your secret is you live your stories, don't you?

I do like to put myself inside the kind of tech worlds to come and I feel like I'm reporting back from the other world.

It's like dystopian future.

Yeah, that's the thing you've experienced dystopian things about this brave new world that's coming or in many cases already here and we don't even know.

Yeah, I mean, I think technology brings so many benefits to our lives but there are definite downsides and the tech companies don't tend to think about those as much as maybe they should.

They keep putting out products with the promise that is going to make our lives better.

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