BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

Hello, I'm Matthew Price.

This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.

Every day we ask one big question about one big story.

Today why would your mattress spy on you?

We've all got our own conspiracy theories about who's listening to us through

the internet, whether Facebook and Google control our lives. But these aren't necessarily

conspiracies.

The woman that we spoke to for this episode, Shoshana Zuboff, has been investigating it for years,

and she's got a really interesting theory as to why it's all happening, how we ended up giving the

internet giants permission to spy on us, what connects political scandals like

Cambridge Analytica to the everyday use of Alexa and Google Maps. Shushana calls it surveillance

capitalism. Once the economy ran just on trading goods or labour, now she argues it trades information about how we behave

and crucially how we actually might behave in the future. She's seriously worried

about it and she's got me worried about it too.

Just about everything now that has the word smart in front of it or any service that has the word personalized in front of it is essentially

an interface into these supply chains.

So most of what you touch or you engage with in any way that is internet enabled, smart or personalized, is part of an ecosystem where there are now businesses that specialize in just being a front end.

In other words, they're interfacing with your experience, they're translating it into data, and they're sending that into these pipelines, into these supply chains.

This could be your mattress. I write about a mattress that has sensors in it that people buy because the sensors pick up what your body is doing while you're tossing and turning at night and it conforms the mattress to your body so

ostensibly you have a better night's sleep. Well it turns out the mattress and its

sensors are also picking up the audio signals in your bedroom.

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