Privacy

Today

Owen Matthews

Owen Matthews, Bijan Omrani, Andrew Hankinson, Laurie Penny & Andrew Watts

29 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Owen Matthews says that Venice’s residents never stop complaining (1:11); Bijan Omrani reads his church notebook (7:33); Andrew Hankinson reviews Tiffany Jenkins’s Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life (13:54); as 28 Years Later is released, Laurie Penny explains the politics behind Alex Garland’s film franchise (18:25); and, Andrew Watts provides his notes on Angel Delight (25:09).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Tuesday

Andrew Hankinson

Is nothing private any more?

A few years ago, when I taught at university, a student who lived with their parents told me they had argued with their mother about what they described as ‘queer identity’. The student had secretly recorded the argument and wondered what I thought about them using it for a piece of writing. I think their assumption was that because I’m a journalist I would embrace the idea. I did not. How did the UK become a place where young people think it’s permissible to record a relative at home and make that recording public? Why has privacy been so easily discarded, and why have people welcomed its demise so they

Wednesday

Silkie Carlo

Has your local shop blacklisted you?

Britain’s obsession with surveillance is reaching new heights. Several of the UK’s largest retailers have quietly installed facial recognition checkpoints on their doorways and inside their shops. It means that automated identity checks are taking place on our high streets without customers even being aware of it. You won’t be informed if your photo is taken and added to a watchlist, and no police report is required The cameras look like any other CCTV cameras, except they take a biometric scan of every customer’s face, like at a passport e-gate. The facial recognition scans are then compared against a private database run by the software company Facewatch. The database is

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The authoritarianism of British Transport Police

When our freedoms are being taken away we are like the proverbial frog boiled alive in water where the temperature is slowly brought to boiling point. Who batted an eyelid in June when it was reported that rail companies are drawing up plans to abolish paper rail tickets and have us all travel with e-tickets instead? Who picked up on today’s story that explains one of the reasons why the police are so keen to switch us to e-ticketing? Lucy D’Orsi, chief constable of the British Transport Police, says her force wants access to data from passengers’ mobile phones and bank cards so that it can track us around the

Tuesday

Tom Morgan

Is Elon Musk right to use Signal over WhatsApp?

Elon Musk has a habit of sparking fires on Twitter. His latest suggestion to ‘Use Signal’ might have confused a few people – what is it, and why should I ‘use’ it? Signal is, in short, a messaging app for people who are concerned about privacy: once-upon-a-time a concern of small group of techies, but now something that most people have good grounds to start taking seriously. Signal is one of the first messaging apps that claims to hold absolutely zero data about you Whenever you interact with anything – or anyone – online, some data is being passed round the internet; and some of that data can be personally