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 witho...
Mar 13, 2019•25 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus take a look at an increasingly popular online privacy tool--that has some serious trust issues of its own. We’re talking about VPNs, or virtual private networks, and why the average user might have a very hard time figuring out which one to trust. The hosts will also look at privacy blunder number one billion from our friends at Facebook. This one involves two factor authentication, a feature to ostensibly help keep your account safer that turn...
Mar 06, 2019•28 min
On today’s show, host April Glaser looks at the continuing battle between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commision. Earlier this week, the SEC asked a judge to hold Musk in contempt for tweets he’s made about Tesla’s performance. The SEC says Musk violated a settlement he reached with the commission last year, which required him to have his tweets reviewed before sending them. Then, Will Oremus speaks with journalist Casey Newton about an investigation he published this week...
Feb 27, 2019•29 min
On today’s show, host Will Oremus looks at the fallout from Amazon’s announcement last week that they’re abandoning plans for a new headquarters in New York City. Some celebrated it as a victory; others mourned a missed opportunity; still others were mad that Amazon took its ball and went home, rather than negotiating a fairer deal. Then, April Glaser talks with Faine Greenwood from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, where she focuses on the role of drones and data intensive foreign aid projec...
Feb 20, 2019•28 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus talk about the implications from last week’s bizarre, but also serious, showdown between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and American Media INC, the owner of the Trump-friendly National Enquirer. Bezos claimed the Enquirer was blackmailing him by threatening to release private and quite racy photos between him and the woman he was having an affair with. Bezos stood up to the alleged extortion by publishing his account of the situation, complete with thre...
Feb 13, 2019•27 min
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Feb 06, 2019•41 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus discuss a rather terrifying security flaw from Apple, a company that prides itself on keeping information well-protected. A bug was found in the video chat app Facetime that let snoops listen in on someone by calling them on FaceTime, even if the call wasn’t answered. Then, the hosts are joined by Franklin Foer, a staff writer for the Atlantic, former editor in chief of The New Republic, and author of a book about what he calls “the existential...
Jan 30, 2019•32 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus discuss news news that the french government has fined Google close to $57 million for violating the new European privacy laws that went into effect in 2018. This comes as news that the Federal Trade Commision here in the US is considering levying a record-breaking fine against Facebook for violations to their users privacy following the Cambridge Analytica mess. Corporate fines may well be a theme this year following the great clean up after t...
Jan 23, 2019•39 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus discuss news that PG&E, California’s main power provider, plans to file for bankruptcy due to the billions in liability it faces stemming from the deadly wildfires last year. Allegations have been made that PG&E’s power lines and equipment aided in the fires and the company did not adequately address the hazards beforehand. As the home to some of the world most powerful tech companies, California’s economy last year surpassed the UK, bu...
Jan 16, 2019•49 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus discuss startling new revelations about some of the major phone carriers. The story broke this week in Motherboard titled “I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone.” It details how T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to customers location data to shady characters like landlords and collection agencies. And speaking of phones, could we finally be witnessing an end to the iPhone’s dominance of the technology industry? ...
Jan 09, 2019•41 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus introduce some of their favorite interviews from 2018. We have highlights from our conversations with journalist Taylor Lorenz about teen YouTube stars, former head of Facebook’s Newsfeed Adam Mosseri about real-world violence in places like Myanmar, the founder of Data for Black Lives Yeshimabeit Milner on how tech companies might share their data for social justice efforts, author Naomi Klein on cryptocurrency in Puerto Rico following the dea...
Jan 02, 2019•47 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus will talk reader mail! The hosts take a look at some of your questions and comments from the year, in particular about how your relationship to technology and social media has changed in a year that has been tumultuous for tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Then, they’ll talk about cybersecurity, hacks, and the sometimes bizarre legal battles that ensue after a big data theft. They’re be joined by Josephine Wolff, a professor of...
Dec 26, 2018•32 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus will 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 they’ll welcome Renée DiResta, an expert on cybersecurity and online misinformation. DiResta 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, and why it may be just the beginning of a new era of global...
Dec 19, 2018•32 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus discuss the latest round of “Tech CEO Goes to Washington.” On Tuesday morning, that CEO was Google’s Sundar Pichai, who appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and was asked about data privacy, location tracking, Google’s plans in China, and of course, Republicans’ favorite tech topic: conservative bias. We’ll talk about what we learned from this hearing as well as what we wish Congress might’ve asked the Google CEO. Then April speaks wit...
Dec 12, 2018•45 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus discuss the news that Tumblr will soon be banning all adult content on its site -- this in response to some instances of child pornography that got it suspended from Apple’s App Store. Hundreds of thousands of Tumblr users are upset, and the plan appears to be backfiring. Then we’re excited to bring you a pair of interviews today, with two people who have emerged as leading critics of Facebook—one from the outside, and one from within, right be...
Dec 05, 2018•41 min
On today’s show, hosts April Glaser and Will Oremus discuss the ongoing fallout at Facebook over the company’s decision to hire a conservative PR firm to surface opposition research in order to attack Facebook’s nonprofit critics by highlighting their funding ties to the liberal financier George Soros, playing into an untrue and anti-Semitic popular right wing trope. As internal and external turmoil continues to rile major American technology companies, their employee are organizing for serious ...
Nov 28, 2018•37 min
On today’s show, host Will Oremus will discuss the fallout from last week’s New York Times expose about Facebook with the company’s former Security Chief Alex Stamos. The Times story was headlined “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Leaned Out in Crisis.” Stamos has been at the center of this story both as a critic and an advocate. The story has revolved partly around reports that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg stifled or downplayed his revelations that their platform was still...
Nov 21, 2018•44 min
On today’s show, host Will Oremus will talk about the employee uprising at Google, and the changes that it and other tech companies have made to their sexual harassment policies in response. Joining him is Caroline O’Donovan, senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News, who was there to cover the employee walkouts in person and has continued to report on the fallout from them. And then, a story that has been making headlines for months, and finally reached its culmination this week with a big a...
Nov 14, 2018•41 min
Will Oremus and April Glaser are bringing you a special episode of If Then, all about the midterm elections and the role of Silicon Valley and online media in our beloved democratic process. We’re going to start with a roundtable with two extra tech journalists, Kevin Roose from the New York Times and Paris Martineau of Wired who have been reporting on issues of online speech, misinformation, and election interference this year. Then we’ll have an interview with one of the country’s top experts ...
Nov 05, 2018•57 min
On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser look further into the presidential election in Brazil and how tech has played a role. On Sunday, the far right candidate Jair Bolsanaro was elected President, and many have attributed his victory to misinformation that spread like wildfire through WhatsApp in the months leading up to the election. And it’s time again for more gadgets. Apple unveiled a new series of gizmos on Tuesday in Brooklyn: there were big changes to the iPad, Macbook Air,...
Oct 31, 2018•43 min
On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser discuss Elon Musk’s other , other project with their Slate colleague Henry Grabar. Not space travel, not electric cars, but the Boring Company, which is working on a tunneling project in Los Angeles that would bring a new type of transportation to an area plagued by traffic. Musk announced over the weekend that the first tunnel will be open to the public later this year. They’ll also dig into never-ending battle to rid Facebook of disinformati...
Oct 24, 2018•33 min
On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser discuss the continuing saga that is Facebook’s effort to fix itself--ideally, without breaking everything else. On Friday, the company finally released more information about the huge hack that it announced last month, which affected nearly 30 million people. They’ll talk about what was stolen, and why it matters. Then, April and Will are joined by Senator Mark Warner, from Virginia, the top democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, condu...
Oct 17, 2018•38 min
On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser discuss the latest data spill in Silicon Valley: It’s Google this time. And it’s time to talk gadgets again. This week Facebook announced its second foray into the hardware space with the Portal and Portal Plus—essentially a smart display for making video calls, equipped with an AI camera and Amazon Alexa. Meanwhile, Google launched a new smart display called the Google Home Hub, a new tablet that shares a name with the hosts’ employer, and a ...
Oct 10, 2018•42 min
On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser talk about the announcement that Amazon would raise the minimum wage for its US workers to 15 dollars an hour. While Jeff Bezos may be receiving praise for the move this week, another enigmatic tech CEO is facing retribution. Elon Musk has agreed to settle with the SEC following tweets he made about potentially taking the company private and will step down from Tesla’s board. Net neutrality is also back in the news: California Governor Jerry B...
Oct 03, 2018•54 min
On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser talk about the recent announcement that Instagram’s founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, would be leaving the company - at least in part due to clashes with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the company’s future. They also discuss tech talks on capitol hill this week between the justice department and federal and state law enforcement on political bias, antitrust, and privacy on social media -- as well as a hearing in the Senate scheduled ...
Sep 26, 2018•40 min
On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser talk about a literal moonshot. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has announced the first private customer who is signed up for a trip around earth’s moon, possibly as early as 2023—and he’ll be bringing some surprising passengers. Meanwhile,the Justice Department is investigating Musk’s other company, Tesla, over an ill-advised tweet. Next, Will and April discuss a new Twitter feature that brings back the classic, reverse-chronological timeline. The hosts ...
Sep 19, 2018•43 min
Technology continues to change the way we live and work. Which is why The Secret History of The Future—the new technology show from Slate and The Economists—is digging through the past to find lessons for our future. Subscribe to Secret History of the Future via Apple Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , Stitcher , or Google Play . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Sep 16, 2018•44 min
We have a special bonus If Then! On Wednesday afternoon Apple held its big annual event full of new and expensive gadgets. We wanted to help you make sense of what happened, and what it means. Host Will Oremus is joined by journalist and Slate contributor Christina Bonnington, who covers emerging technology and consumer technology. They talk through new phones, new watches, and all the things Apple is taking away from their original products. Stories discussed on the show: Slate: Why Apple’s Not...
Sep 13, 2018•24 min
On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser discuss California’s landmark decision to eliminate cash bail for defendants in criminal cases--and the controversial algorithmic “risk assessment” system that will partially replace it. They also hash out a fresh debate over who gets to fact-check the news that appears in your Facebook feed following an outcry in media circles on Tuesday, after Facebook flagged a story in the liberal outlet ThinkProgress as “false”--all because the conservati...
Sep 12, 2018•44 min
On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser are joined once again by their Slate colleague Mark Joseph Stern to make sense of a what a Kavanaugh-court might mean for the internet going forward. They are also joined by music and technology writer David Turner, who pens the weekly newsletter Penny Fractions , which is all about the economics and culture of music streaming. They’ll talk to him about how streaming works for artists and if there’s anything they can do to push back against th...
Sep 05, 2018•41 min
