What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - Your Social Media Photos Are Helping to Build the Surveillance State
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2019
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s show, April Glaser kicks things off by talking about Facebook’s long-overdue crackdown on anti-vaccination groups. The social media platform announced it will stop allowing advertisements that peddle misinformation about vaccines, and they’ll make anti-vaxxer groups and pages harder to find. What took them so long?
Then Will Oremus talks to Olivia Solon, Editor of Tech Investigations at NBC, about facial recognition technology, and how some companies are collecting online photos without getting explicit permission from photographers or subjects.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future. |
| 0:04.7 | I'm April Glazer. |
| 0:05.7 | And I'm Will Oremas. |
| 0:11.6 | Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then. |
| 0:15.3 | We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. |
| 0:21.7 | We are recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 12th. |
| 0:25.5 | On today's show, I'm going to talk about some changes that Facebook implemented last week |
| 0:30.9 | regarding how misinformation, particularly medical misinformation, misinformation about |
| 0:35.9 | the anti-vaccination movement, spreads on the |
| 0:38.6 | social network, where for years, anti-vax activists have built thriving, sprawling online communities |
| 0:44.3 | with tens of thousands of participants that have only grown and grown. And it seems like just |
| 0:50.0 | now the company is really taking the threat of this type of spread of misinformation very |
| 0:55.1 | seriously. I'll be talking about that and kind of what it means that Facebook is taking it |
| 1:00.0 | seriously now. And then my co-host, Will, is going to be interviewing Olivia Salon from NBC |
| 1:05.5 | about a recent investigation she did on how facial recognition companies might be using your image without your |
| 1:12.4 | consent. And the important thing to note here is that facial recognition isn't just something |
| 1:16.4 | that Facebook might be doing without your consent sometimes, or maybe you gave consent not knowingly |
| 1:21.6 | in some sort of terms of service agreement, but it's also something that is creeping more and more |
| 1:26.5 | into the physical world as companies that have security cameras, you know, mounted in rooms and in stores, start to install facial recognition technology into those cameras as well and use it in all kinds of unforeseen ways, perhaps to remember you when you walk in or to pull up other data that they can find on you by knowing who you are |
| 1:45.4 | by analyzing your face. He'll get into that with Olivia and it should be a super interesting |
| 1:49.6 | conversation. And also one more thing for people who are in a much colder place than I am. |
| 1:55.0 | If you are in the D.C. area on March 20th, Future Tense will be hosting a happy hour event in D.C. on law enforcement and genetic genealogy. |
... |
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