Tech: What Self-surveillance Means For You And Our Society
1A
NPR
4.3 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Technologies we rely on every day generate a massive amount of information about what we do, where we go, what we like, and who we are. That data can make life very convenient — your rideshare app knows where you want go before you enter an address, you only see ads for products you’re already interested in buying, videos on subjects you enjoy are already auto-populated in your feed.
But at what cost? What’s the tradeoff?
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a professor of law at the George Washington University School of Law and a national surveillance expert. He says that the rise of the self-surveillance state has big ramifications for Americans’ personal freedoms and America’s democratic values.
We sit down with him to talk about how are data is being used against us and about his books, “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Imagine you and your partner go out for a drink on a Friday night. |
| 0:11.2 | You wind up having a big argument, and so you go home early, and you go to bed alone. |
| 0:16.4 | The next morning, you wake up to the news that they were murdered overnight, their body left |
| 0:21.4 | in a nearby field, and you're the authority's prime suspect. |
| 0:25.6 | In previous eras, you might have struggled to prove your innocence, but in the information |
| 0:30.5 | age, help arrives from a high-tech witness. |
| 0:35.4 | Prosecutors say downloaded data, showed Doug barely moved in the hours they believed |
| 0:41.2 | Nicole was killed and left in the field. |
| 0:44.9 | Is that based on the data that you obtained directly from Fitbit? |
| 0:49.3 | Yes, it is. |
| 0:50.2 | Everything that I could view directly on the device and lined up with what had previously been stated. |
| 0:56.3 | In 2016, police cleared Doug D.Tree during the investigation into the murder of his late girlfriend, Nicole Vanderheiden. |
| 1:03.8 | That's because data recorded by his Fitbit proved that at the time investigators believed she was killed, he was asleep. |
| 1:10.5 | DTree's wearable tech didn't just |
| 1:12.1 | keep track of his health. It saved his life in a different way. Technology is changing our lives, |
| 1:18.5 | and how it's changing how our lives are policed is no exception. Previously, unsolvable crimes |
| 1:24.0 | can be unraveled thanks to data science, facial recognition software, social media monitoring, and more. |
| 1:30.5 | I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A podcast. Today, what does this level of data collection and surveillance mean for our personal freedoms and our democracy? |
| 1:39.8 | I'll answer that question and more right after this short break. Stay with us. Welcome back to the |
| 1:49.2 | OneA podcast. Let's get into the conversation and meet our guest. Joining us in studio is Andrew |
| 1:54.8 | Guthrie Ferguson. He's a professor at the George Washington School of Law here in D.C. and the author of |
| 2:00.7 | the recent book, |
... |
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