6 podcasts

A spin-off of the popular British comedy quiz show QI, No Such Thing as a Fish is hosted by the QI elves (the minions who research all the bizarre facts spouted by former host Stephen Fry and current host Sandi Toksvig) and it will have you looking like the cleverest person in the room (or on Houseparty). You probably don’t need to know that the Earl of Sandwich did not, in fact, invent the sandwich and that its first filling included wine, or that Belgian fishermen used to fish from horseback, but you’ll feel pretty smug showing up your friends with your wealth of entertaining knowledge. At least, I do.

What’s the first thing you would do if you discovered that your dad wrote a dreadful erotic novel? Read it to your friends, of course. Friends Jamie Morton, James Cooper and Alice Levine unpack Jamie’s dad’s R-rated book, Belinda Blinked, about a group of salesmen (selling pots and pans… hawt) with hilarious commentary. You’d think Jamie must have stumbled across the aforementioned book by accident, but his dad actually sent it to him to read! It’s undoubtedly the worst and best moment of his life – My Dad Wrote A Porno has been downloaded more than 200 million times.

Set to become a Hulu limited series starring Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon, The Dropout is about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her company, Theranos. Hosted by Rebecca Jarvis, ABC’s chief business, economics and technology correspondent, the sixpart investigative podcast charts Elizabeth’s trajectory from being the youngest self-made female billionaire – and being compared to Steve Jobs – to losing it all in the blink of an eye. She’s now facing up to 20 years in prison. Part of a three-year investigation, The Dropout shares never-before- heard deposition tapes as well as interviews of former Theranos staff and family members.

You won’t find any dead bodies in this true crime podcast. Instead, you’ll hear the story of Anna Delvey (real name Anna Sorokin), who conned New York’s high society into thinking she was a multimillionaire heiress. Journalist Vicky Baker and playwright Chloe Moss combine investigative journalism and dramatisations of her swindles to create an intriguing story about how much one person could get away with – and what ultimately caused her downfall. She racked up massive bills and got her friends to cover her. In total, the magazine intern from Russia stole about $275 000, but strangely, at times you find yourself sympathising with her.

We all have a right to privacy; in fact, South Africa’s Constitution fiercely upholds that. But with the rise of social media, the law is struggling to keep up. The Protection of Personal Information Act 2013 (PoPI) tries to ensure the protection of your private and personal data.

But what happens when we freely give it away without knowing it? Let’s be honest: most of us don’t actually read through the terms and conditions of the apps we download.

With 1,5 billion users, Gmail dominates all other email services. But most-used doesn’t always equate to most trustworthy. How confident are you about entrusting your most private information to them? Can they read your emails? The short answer is yes – but that’s not such a bad thing.

In 2018, when The Wall Street Journal reported that third-party developers could read your emails, access your Google Calendar, Google Contacts and the personal information on your Google profile, there was a flurry of panic. While this is partly true, the fact is that if a company outside Google can read

your emails, you probably gave them permission to do so at some point or another. Thankfully, you can also remove their access. Here’s how:

1. Go to myaccount.google.com.

2. Select the tab ‘Security’.

3. Scroll down to ‘Third-party apps with account access’ and click ‘Manage third-party access’.

4. There you will find all the third-party apps you have given permission to access your Gmail account (probably without even knowing it).

5. If you feel uncomfortable with any of these apps, click on the name and select ‘Remove access’.

So why does Gmail read your emails? According to Suzanne Frey, director of Security, Trust and Privacy at Google Cloud, there are no humans at Google reading your emails. That happens only in ‘very specific cases where you ask us to and give consent, or when we need to for security purposes, such as investigating a bug or abuse’. The only ‘reading’ being done is by Gmail’s automated systems.

As creepy as that may sound, this is a good thing. Your emails are being analysed for any illegal activity, spam, phishing attempts or malware. Google’s automated systems will immediately move this content into your spam folder to protect you and your devices. For the less tech-savvy, this is a huge perk.

The downside is that Google also prioritises advertising that’s ‘perfectly tailored’ to you (which does seem a bit ‘Big Brother-y’). By scanning your email content, Gmail picks up on keywords such as ‘travel’, ‘wedding’ or ‘books & literature’. These keywords are shared with other apps that make use of your Google account, like YouTube. That’s why the YouTube ads you see are frighteningly pertinent to your job, hobbies or your plans for the year.

If you feel uncomfortable about your apps knowing this much about you, there is a way to opt out:

1. Go to myaccount.google.com.

2. Select the tab ‘Data & personalization’.

3. Scroll down to ‘Ad personalization’ and click ‘Go to ad settings’.

4. There you will find all the keywords and interests that Google has collected about you. There will be a statement that says ‘Ad personalization is ON’.

5. If you don’t like personalised ads, click the button next to ‘Ad personalization is ON’ to turn off personalisation.

6. Confirm by clicking ‘Turn off’ on the pop-up box.

Cambridge Analytica sparked ‘The Great Privacy Awakening’ in 2018 when a former employee came forward and told the world about the company’s involvement in the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016 whereby the data of 50 million Facebook users was harvested. Yet, none of this was technically against the rules: there was no data breach, no passwords were stolen and there was no hacking. Facebook simply worked the way Facebook works, and Cambridge Analytica just happened to find a way to take advantage of their loose privacy policies.

Cambridge Analytica was hired in 2016 by Trump’s campaign to create ads aimed at potential voters based on the information they revealed about themselves on Facebook. The company got to work by creating a personality quiz that users could play on Facebook. In exchange for playing the game, Cambridge Analytica requested access to users’ profiles – just like any other Facebook game. But users never guessed that their data, along with their Facebook friends’ data, would become weapons in political warfare.

By collecting information on people’s favourite pages, the groups they were in and the posts they liked, Cambridge Analytica could create psychological profiles that would separate Facebook users into five different character groups: neurotic, agreeable, open, extroverted or conscientious. Users would then receive different targeted ads based on their deepest fears and hopes for the country to steer them to vote in a particular way.

‘We targeted those whose minds we thought we could change until they saw the world the way we wanted them to,’ says Brittany Kaiser, former director of business development at Cambridge Analytica.

Since then, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has added end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram Direct to try to safeguard private communications. But if you’d like to take the extra step to protect your information on Facebook, follow these steps:

1. Log onto Facebook on a computer or laptop and go to your profile.

2. Click the … button under your profile picture and name. It should appear on the right-hand side. It will drop down to ‘Timeline settings’.

3. In the left-hand contents, click on ‘Privacy’. This will show you all your privacy settings and tools.

4. Next to ‘Who can see your future posts?’ you can see your current setting. Options to choose from include ‘Only me’, which would mean

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that no one on Facebook can see your posts; ‘Specific friends’ means that everything you post, share and like will be shown only to a handful of friends you’ve selected; ‘Friends’ means that all the friends you’ve accepted on Facebook can see your posts, shares and likes. The default option is often ‘Public’ or ‘Friends of friends’, meaning that anyone on or off Facebook can see everything you post, like and share.

Having your personal information out there is extremely risky, so we recommend changing who can see your posts from ‘Public’ or ‘Friends of friends’ to any of the other options available. Now that you’ve secured your future posts, you still have to deal with past posts from before you changed your privacy settings:

1. Follow steps 1 to 3.

2. Next to ‘Limit the audience for posts you’ve shared with Friends of friends or Public?’ click ‘Limit past posts’. This will ensure that anything previously shared to the public or to friends of your friends while you were unaware of the security risks will now be made private so that only you and your Facebook friends can see them. Confirm by clicking ‘Limit past posts’.

The privacy tab allows you to further restrict your Facebook account. You can limit who can send you friend requests, if people can see your Facebook friends list and if your profile is discoverable on search engines. in that they can hold the kind of personal information you might not even share with your closest friends.

To create a profile, dating apps ask for ‘basic’ information such as your name, photos of yourself, your exact location (to geolocate singles closest to you), sexual preferences and even ask to connect with your social media accounts to find common Facebook ‘likes’ with your matches and to show off your most popular Instagram posts. You’re essentially creating a CV.

Other apps ask for more specifics like your height and weight. Grindr even asks for your STD and HIV status. And if trouble ensues with you and the law, these dating apps can hand over all the private chats, pictures and videos you’ve shared on the app. Journalist Judith Duportail exposed Tinder to The Guardian for having more than 800 pages of data on her. This included all her private chats on the app with each of her matches; her Facebook information, likes and friends; and all her Instagram uploads and data.

All this information can be (and sometimes has been) sold to third parties so they can create targeted advertising ‘tailor-made’ for you from what you share on dating apps.

‘These companies convince us that the more information we put out there, the better the match we’re going to get,’ said data privacy expert Jo O’Reilly in an interview with USA Today.

While the dating app makes money with advertisers and thirdparty companies, you could be giving away your data at no cost.

Another honeytrap includes offering users temporary premium features if they take a survey for third-party market researchers. ‘Whatever data you give to an app, it’s not just going to stay on an app,’ according to Jo. ‘The best approach is for consumers to assume that whatever data or private information they put onto an app will be sent to advertising companies.’

In 2018, Grindr was caught selling information on their users’ HIV status to third-party companies. And, since Match Group owns more than 45 dating-related apps and businesses including Tinder and OkCupid, the data you share with one dating app could be shared across the entire company. If you’re willing to accept the sketchy privacy policies, keep the following guidelines in mind:

1. It’s better to pay for a dating app – that way you have more certainty that your data isn’t being sold to keep the app ‘free’.

2. When signing up, don’t give the app unnecessary personal information like your surname, address, place of work, phone number or work email address. Avoid giving out that information in private chats too

– for your personal safety and your data security.

3. If users seem to be phishing for personal information, report and block their account.

4. Avoid connecting your social media accounts to your dating app profile

– it only makes it easier for hackers to steal your identity with all your information gathered in one place.

PANASHE: The moment you put anything on the internet, it becomes publicly accessible. No matter how private you think your profile is, you’re still giving that information to a media company.

DANIEL: Yet you’re actually safer with bigger organisations like Facebook, Google or Amazon: they need a lot more customer trust, so they’ve had to go through rigorous testing periods. With smaller websites, you have less clarity about what they do with your information and the data you give them. They haven’t been as intensely tested and it’s a lot easier to hack into those. there to keep them legally bound to privacy protection laws.

MATT: When it comes to social media apps on your phone, that’s a different story. As soon as you download them, you may recall them asking permission to use parts of your phone, like accessing your contacts or camera roll. As soon as you accept their request to use your microphone, you are technically giving them permission to listen to you. But you’ll never know if they do or not.

DANIEL: If you feel uncomfortable with it, you can always opt out. (Facebook’s facial recognition allows the app to identify you in photos uploaded to the platform. This function is used mainly to tag you in pics that you’re in.) DANIEL: Facebook uses this kind of technology to build a better application so that your experience can be better while using it. That’s their only goal. If you’re worried about your face being on the internet, I’m sorry to tell you, but it’s too late. Your face is already everywhere. If you don’t want your face on the internet, don’t use social media. The sort of app that creates filters by analysing your face was probably generated by a random developer who just thought it was cool and wanted to share it. PANASHE: I can’t see a malicious side to collecting facial IDs. In fact, it might make the world a bit safer. Facial recognition can be an asset in terms of safety.