Does your phone know where you are right now?
If you’ve been wondering just how creepy the surveillance practices of internet monopolies like Google and Facebook are, don’t miss The New York Times’s startling new investigative piece “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret.”
The Times uses interactive satellite imagery to display over 235 million locations captured from more than 1.2 million anonymous smartphone users during a three-day period in 2017, and shows how this personal data is methodically sold to advertisers without most people even realizing it’s happening.
If you’re looking to dig deeper into how these predatory corporate surveillance practices not only threaten our personal privacy, but also the very foundations of our democracy, we urge you to check out media scholar Robert McChesney’s eye-opening analysis in our recent video Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. You can watch the trailer below.
“Digital Disconnect is a major contribution to the enlightenment and self-defense of citizens concerned with the state of their society and how we should act to overcome threatening social and institutional pathologies.”
– NOAM CHOMSKY
For years, Robert McChesney has been monitoring how commercial interests and the logic of capitalism have been laying waste to the democratic potential of our media system. In Digital Disconnect, he trains his sights squarely on the corporate threat to the internet.
With astonishing clarity, McChesney tells the story of how internet giants like Google and Facebook have amassed huge profits by surreptitiously collecting personal data and selling it to advertisers. He also shows how telecom monopolies like Verizon have colluded with the national security state to advance covert mass surveillance programs online. And he breaks down how the growing power of a handful of social media platforms has worked to isolate people into ideological filter bubbles and elevate fake news at the expense of real journalism.
The result is an indispensable tool for raising awareness about the contentious relationship between unchecked corporate power and the democratic need for a free and open media system.
Click here to find out how to stream Digital Disconnect or to order a DVD.
“Digital Disconnect provides a one-stop ‘zero to 60’ education in the most important topic of our times.”
– LARRY GROSS, USC
