Cameras and sensors are just about everywhere, recording your face, how you walk, where you go, your heart rate. And AI is making it easy to amass and analyze that data about all of us.
Privacy attorney Anne Toomey McKenna joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about the ubiquity of biometric surveillance and how data brokers are gathering and selling our information, including to law enforcement.
Guest:
Anne Toomey McKenna is an attorney specializing in privacy and biometric surveillance. She’s on the Advisory Board for AI Policy at the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers - USA.
Other episodes you may enjoy:
Why Worry About My Data If I Have Nothing To Hide?
New Products Collect Data From Your Brain. Where Does It Go?
Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.
Want SciFri gear? Check out our new shop!
Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-4-SCIFRI
Плейлист
Science Friday
Old creepy houses are a horror cliche, but why? Why do they freak us out? According to new research, it might have something to do with infrasound: a sound that’s below the range of human hearing, pot...
We recently got a call from a SciFri listener in Florida who has autoimmune arthritis. He told us that over the years he’d taken 10 drugs, and each out eventually stopped working. He then tried to enr...
The herbicide paraquat is so toxic it’s banned in over 70 countries. But its use in the U.S. is growing, despite known links to Parkinson’s disease. In southeastern Mississippi, an industrial plant is...
Bucket hats. Low-rise jeans. Track suits. As you might’ve noticed, Y2K fashion is in right now. People say that fashion moves in 20-year cycles, and it turns out…it does! At least according to math.
H...
A recent study simulated the extreme temperatures and pressure of the Earth’s interior by squeezing a sample between diamonds and heating it with a laser. In those simulations, researchers found that...
Just about every animal with a backbone yawns (maybe even dinosaurs), but why we do it is still something of a mystery. A SciFri listener from Texas recently spotted some research that suggests yawnin...
An upcoming resupply mission will carry tumor samples to the International Space Station for research. Experiments in microgravity have yielded shocking results: Some tumors triple in size in just 10...
Have you noticed that your newer appliances are serenading you? Many new washing machines, dishwashers, dryers, and vacuums have sonic signatures. But why? And who are the composers making music for t...
Scientists studying climate models say there’s a high chance this will be an El Niño year—and that we could be in for a “super” El Niño. The difference is indicated by sea surface temperatures in part...
In April, the crew of Artemis II got an unprecedented tour of the far side of the moon, and they brought back a proverbial shoebox full of pictures. Lunar scientist Kelsey Young stayed on Earth, and h...
When Kemi Doll was in medical school, she learned that Black women are twice as likely to die from uterine cancer as white women, and also suffer disproportionately from other uterine-related conditio...
Cameras and sensors are just about everywhere, recording your face, how you walk, where you go, your heart rate. And AI is making it easy to amass and analyze that data about all of us.
Privacy attor...
Breaking news out of eastern Oklahoma! A hole in the sky has opened. Through it, an unidentified turtle-shaped craft has descended. Alerts say that this is first contact.
So it goes in the sci-fi thr...
Beavers are having a moment, thanks to the new Pixar movie “Hoppers.” Amid some body-swapping shenanigans, the film is about humans coexisting with wildlife—particularly oversized rodents capable of r...
Deep in an active nickel mine near Sudbury, Ontario, researchers are installing and calibrating a set of sensitive detectors. They hope that the location roughly 6,800 feet underground will screen out...
Hurricane season officially begins in June. And in the event of a big storm, local and state governments often rely on help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA. But, President Trump h...
Animal neuroaudiologist Pete Scheifele joins us to answer some burning questions from SciFri listener Paul: Why can dogs and cats hear a wider range of frequencies than we do? Is it in their ears, the...
The news we hear about plastic is often alarming: We have a spoon’s worth of plastics in our brains, and there are microplastics in our hearts, lymph nodes, and bloodstreams. Plastics are ubiquitous,...
In mid-April, President Trump issued an executive order to set aside funding and loosen the bureaucratic process at the FDA to fast-track psychedelic therapy research. One obscure psychedelic got a pa...
Comparing a backyard sparrow to a fearsome velociraptor seems odd, but modern birds are indeed living dinosaurs. Scientists are finding more and more connections between the past physiology of dinos a...
Our bodily systems are rife with mutations. In fact, your DNA is mutating right now. These errors, and attempts to repair them, are a key to understanding immune function, aging, and even how heart di...
Data centers make controversial neighbors: They’re loud, they use a lot of water, and can drive electricity prices up. Following public concern and organizing efforts, Maine nearly implemented an 18-m...
The way ancient societies like the Greeks, Maya, and Khmer Empire built their cities can tell us a lot about how a place was governed. Did rulers live in ornate palaces or alongside other residents? A...
What did the universe look like before any stars turned on? Astronomers call that time the “dark ages,” and while they think it may be possible to see remnants of it in very low frequency radio signal...
To mark Earth Day, we asked you to tell us about your favorite places on the planet. You took us to the woods near Traverse City, Michigan, to a lake in Oklahoma, to Long Island Harbor where you spent...
What makes Earth special, and why are we here at all? In his book “Why Do We Exist? The Nine Realms of the Universe That Make You Possible,” astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi tackles the conditions needed...
Nearly all Americans have some type of PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals,” in their blood. The chemicals, which are linked to numerous health issues, were first regulated in drinking water at...
A new imaging technique using a particle accelerator is giving researchers an unprecedented level of detail of our organs, producing scans 100 billion times brighter than a CT scanner. Those 3D models...
In the 2010s, inventor Simone Giertz (pronounced “Yetch”) began making videos that straddled the line between practical and absurd. What if you had a robot that could feed you soup? Or a drone that co...
What are dolphins actually saying with their iconic, high-pitched whistles? Dolphin communication researcher Laela Sayigh is trying to find out. She’s been compiling a database of whistles from a pod...