Elizabeth chats with public policy expert Vass Bednar about surveillance capitalism. Taking a few Canadian examples, they talk about how tech companies collect and use data about their users, how privacy policy might be a red herring and how incentive structures in the tech industry contribute to the system of surveillance capitalism.

Additional Resources:

• Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is the key text. There are also a lot of summaries of the book in blog posts, podcasts, and videos. One of my favourite short reviews of the concept comes from the Fortune Magazine YouTube channel, found here.
• Check out Vass's newsletter, Regs to Riches - of particular interest to this conversation are her pieces on Laying down the Loblaw and Loblaw media.
• Vass also wrote a piece in the Globe and Mail: Loblaw’s points economy for private-health data follows Big Tech’s playbook.
• In the episode Vass mentioned a weather app - check out The Weather Network's description of their "precise location forecast" which includes information about user privacy.
• Vass also mentions that Facebook offers information about why you might see certain ads. Find out more here.
• Not sure what the bread memories of 2017 Elizabeth is talking about? Here’s the wiki.
• Also, wondering about GDPR? It’s Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in May 2018. Find out more.
• Vass mentions the Shopify breakup with Mail Chimp, which happened in November 2019. Since this episode originally aired, the two have gotten back together.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.