Hey, listeners, a quick note before our show. So of course, just hours after we left the studio on Tuesday afternoon, the New York Times broke a front page story about yet another Facebook breach of trust. This time, it turns out that Facebook was granting other large tech companies special access to users' private data, that included lists of all their friends, even in some cases,

their private messages. This was done as part of partnerships that integrated Facebook into

those companies' products, for instance, a tool that let Spotify users message their Facebook

friends from within Spotify. This week's episode is actually our last news show before the holidays,

although stay tuned because we have a couple great holiday episodes coming up with some of our favorite interviews from the year,

questions from listeners. But you can be sure we will address this in the new year as part

of our ongoing coverage of the social media reckoning we've all been a part of.

Music Welcome to If Then, The Show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm Will Oremus.

And I'm April Blazer.

Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then.

We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tent,

a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America.

We're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 18th.

On today's show, we'll talk about how Taylor Swift used face recognition

to surveil the crowd at a recent concert,

and whether that's smart, scary, or both.

Then we'll welcome to the show Renee DeResta.

She's an expert on cybersecurity and online misinformation.

DeResta is the lead author of a new report to the Senate Intelligence Committee on exactly

how Russian operatives weaponized social media in the 2016 election, the scope of those operations,

and why it may be just the beginning of a new era of what she calls global information warfare.

...