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•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, but it’s c...
Jan 16, 2019•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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? Last...
Jan 09, 2019•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast 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•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 disinformatio...
Oct 24, 2018•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sep 16, 2018•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 the...
Sep 05, 2018•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser discuss reports that big tech companies are lobbying in favor of a national privacy law. They’ll talk about what their motivations are. (Hint: It’s not just altruism or civic duty.) The hosts are also joined by Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon, a social network that’s becoming an increasingly popular alternative to Twitter. Rochko likes to say that you can join Mastodon if you want social networking without the Nazis and white supremacist...
Aug 29, 2018•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser talk about a new Russian hacking report--this time, targeting conservatives. And it’s been a busy news week (as always) for Facebook, with reports on massive changes to its ad targeting and a heretofore secret plan to rate the credibility of its own users. Then, April is joined by Ryan Gallagher, a U.K. based investigative journalist at the Intercept, where he reports on digital security and state surveillance. Earlier this month Ryan broke a ...
Aug 22, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser talk about how Google has been tracking and storing your location—even after you’ve asked it not to. Then they review some of the disturbing security news out of DEF CON, the annual hacker conference in Las Vegas, including a demonstration in which an 11-year-old managed to hack a voting machine in minutes. The hosts are joined by Dana Hull, a reporter for Bloomberg News, who covers the electric-car company Tesla and the space transportation c...
Aug 15, 2018•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser discuss why a bunch of the big tech platforms—Facebook, YouTube, Apple—are suddenly banning the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his media empire Infowars. They also talk about the latest Wells Fargo foreclosure scandal where a computer glitch led to hundreds of wrongful foreclosures. The hosts are then joined by William Sommer, tech reporter with the Daily Beast who follows QAnon and other right-wing conspiracy theories closely. H...
Aug 08, 2018•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser talk talk about a new study that suggests the internet might not have played the crucial role in Trump’s election victory that we tend to assume. And then: flying cars! And self-driving cars. The hosts are joined by Justin Erlich, the new VP of policy at Voyage, an self-driving vehicle company in Silicon Valley. Before that, he was head of policy for autonomous vehicles and urban aviation at Uber. The hosts discuss when these “cars” will hit t...
Aug 01, 2018•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser talk about what’s happening new with the proposed $3.9 billion dollar merger between Sinclair, the largest television station owner in the country and also happens to have an overt tilt in favor of Trump, and Tribune media. Thanks to an unexpected announcement from the FCC last week, that merger may be doomed. The hosts are also joined by Claire Wardle, the executive director of First Draft, a nonprofit news literacy and fact-checking outfit w...
Jul 25, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
