🎧 Technically Optimistic Podcast: Season Two

The second season is all about your data. Who’s taking it? What are they doing with it? And how can you gain back some control?

🎧 Episode 1: How your behavior became the world's biggest resource
What privacy tradeoffs are we making when we engage with personalized apps, recommendations, and always-connected smart devices?

🎧 Episode 2: How to save social media
Raffi talks to prominent critics of existing social media — and the people actively reimagining it, with truly private messaging, hyperlocal communities, and renewed sense of control over our own social data.

🎧 Episode 3: Your data, your vote
In the US, candidates from both parties frequently use data to try and better understand voters, in hopes of swaying them on election day. But how, exactly, is voter information being acquired, analyzed, and employed to influence voters?

🎧 Episode 4: Digital surveillance and reproductive rights
Digital surveillance is becoming increasingly threatening to the reproductive rights of women and pregnant people in America after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Behavioral data collected from apps can be used to catalog — and criminalize — our health care choices.

🎧 Episode 5: Policed by our data
New technologies, such as facial recognition, are being used by law enforcement to identify, locate, and convict people. Powered by data gathered from across the internet, these imperfect programs can sometimes get it wrong, resulting in wrongful arrests. Are these surveillance systems making us safer, or just the opposite?

🎧 Episode 6: Who's watching the kids?
Whether we like it or not, the kids are online — and they’re being tracked just like the rest of us. Who’s after their data, and why?

🎧 Episode 7: The India episode — tech and data in the Global South
We explore how the data economy has changed life on the ground in South Asia — and for tech workers in the US. What does the future of caste look like for the South Asian diaspora, and in the tech world at large?

🎧 Episode 8: What's next for data
Raffi talks to experts about how we can understand — and help shape — the future of data, exploring new policy, digging into the concept of “digital doubles,” and assessing how data collection might play a role in coalition-building and reform.