Technology Pill Podcast

This week we talk to Ina Sander from Cardiff University about how to talk to people about privacy, drawing on her research looking at how to teach 'critical data literacy' in schools.

While being the world’s largest provider of aid, Europe also exports surveillance around the world by training police, providing surveillance tech and building widescale databases. While the benefits for European arms and security companies is clear, how this helps those it’s supposed to is less obvious.

We sat down with investigative journalist Giacomo to talk more about the impact of this financial flow to security forces and surveillance.

Hundreds of companies around the world which develop and sell surveillance tech used to spy on people, making everything from malware used by governments to hack into phones to mass internet surveillance tools to monitor nationwide internet traffic. Italy is one of the main producers.

We spoke to investigative journalists Lorenzo and Riccardo from IRPI Media who have been digging into these companies.

The migration crisis in 2015 brutally exposed the divisions in Europe. People who fled war and make it to Europe are being met with violence and intrusive surveillance at the border at the hands of state authorities.

We sat down with Natalie & Sergio from the Border Violence Monitoring Network to learn more about the situation at Europe’s borders.

This week talk to Franz Wild from the Bureau of Investigative Journalists to discuss how the UK became a haven for the private intelligence industry and how corporate spies have been allowed to run wild.

This week's episode is a grab bag of Clearview updates - from our latest campaign to their latest fine.

This week we're taking a look at NSO Group - a tech firm that sells a hacking capability to governments around the world - and government hacking more generally.

In 2020, two weeks before the UK headed into the first nationwide lockdown, we published a podcast about a marketing company being given access to hospital maternity wards. Now, almost 2 years to the day, we're coming back to you with an update about how companies operating data broking services, as Bounty did, are causing headaches for brands using personal data for targeted advertising.

In this episode we look forward at the rest of 2022 and make our predictions about what to look out for in the year ahead. 

This episode we look back at the predictions we made about 2021, What turned out to be true? What turned out better than we could have hoped? What turned out worse? 

Merry Christmas. We hope you enjoy your day tomorrow. This week we're bringing you tips for how to spot and deal with things that worry you about the gifts you or your kids may recieve tomorrow.

Today we're launching our Data Interception Environment for everyone to use. We've used it to research everything from low cost phones, to menstruation apps, and now we’re making it available so that you can do your own research on how your apps use your data.

This week we talk to Daniel Magson, who has been campaigning to stop diet ad companies from targeting people with eating disorders, and Eva Blum-Dumontet, who wrote PI's recent report on the data collected by diet companies.

This week we talk to Juan Diego from Fundación Karisma - one of our  partners based in Colombia - about the use of technology in the response to the Covid pandemic and their report "Useless and Dangerous: A Critical Exploration of Covid Applications and Their Human Rights Impacts in Colombia".

This week we talk to Massimo Marelli, Head of the Data Protection Office at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), to discuss the use of data by humanitarian organisations in light of the serious concerns around data left behind in the US's withdrawal from Afghanistan and the risks presented by humanitarian agencies' increasing collection and use of data. 

This week we take a look at travel during the pandemic - we chat to staff about where they've been, what it was like, and most importantly: how they got there.