The Bottom Line

New technology: Are we trading our privacy for convenience?

How the same devices we happily carry in our pockets are being weaponised against us.

It is the age-old debate that accompanies all new advancements in technology: We love to adopt the latest tech, and we do not think too much about the consequences for our safety and privacy.

Facial recognition is great to unlock a phone, but it is also being used by security agencies to pick us out of the crowd.

The internet still holds the promise to make our lives easier and knowledge more accessible. But it comes with the price of selling ourselves to “surveillance capitalism”.

The biggest companies in the world thrive on tracking our behaviour – what we are searching for, where we buy our things, and where we go. They bundle and sell that information to other companies.

And the more our lives become digitised, the greater the risk of hacking and blackmail becomes.

In this episode, Steve Clemons hosts a panel of technologists and scientists to discuss technology and how dystopian our future is becoming.

Guests:
– Ina Fried – chief technology correspondent for Axios

– Professor Hold Thorp – editor, Science magazine

– Larry Irving – inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame