From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Coming up this hour, surveillance and privacy.

How do you balance convenience, security, and the discomforting feeling know certainty that you're being watched?

If people are asked to give up their privacy, they better get more security in return.

And then I basically turned my phone

into something similar to an ankle bracelet.

So everyone, well, including the FBI,

would know where I was at any given moment.

The sort of wishful thinking is if you do this fairly simple thing,

you will not have to do the hard work of protecting your privacy or protecting your data.

So does it matter if Google knows that you're gay?

Well, I don't know. Do they have any homophobic engineers with access to that database?

The Internet is a giant copy machine.

Anything you put on the Internet can be copied and sit around.

You just hope you have nice friends.

An hour on privacy, or the lack thereof, coming up.

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