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Season 1, CHATROOM 6 You’re Being Tracked: Pandemic Capitalism Disaster brings change. We discuss surveillance and public health during Covid-19. These days, it’s not only governments capturing raw data about us. A public health vacuum left by governments over decades is being filled by tech companies, which have stepped up surveillance, says Martin French, a sociologist and surveillance expert at the University of Concordia in Montreal. Time Markers (mins: sec) 00:09 – news clips 1:23 – overview of episode 3:23 – links between public health, epidemiology and surveillance 4:16 – differences between surveillance and epidemiology 6:00 – how do contact tracing apps work? 8:33 – dangers of contact tracing apps 8:50 – what is surveillance capitalism? 12:08 – apps cement power by getting more people online 14:07 – what is disaster capitalism? 16:38 – disaster capitalism during COVID-19 17:25 – lack of public health investment in India 18:00 – links between surveillance and bias 19:00 – epidemiology and its unintended consequences Guests Martin French Resources Transcript Reading Suggestions Share Episode Twitter Facebook WhatsApp  Sign up for updates   EMAIL Reading List Zuboff, S. (2018). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for the future at the new frontier of power. Profile Books. Klein, N. (2008). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Penguin Books. French, M., Guta, A., Gagnon, M., Mykhalovskiy, E., Roberts, S. L., Goh, S., McClelland, A., & McKelvey, F. (2020). Corporate contact tracing as a pandemic response. Critical Public Health, 0(0), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2020.1829549  Leith, D. and Farrell, S. 2020. Contact tracing app privacy: What data is shared by Europe’s GAEN contact tracing apps. Testing Apps for COVID-19 Tracing (TACT), https://down.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/tact/. Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic COVID-19 and the Rise of Participatory SIGINT:An Examination of the Rise in Government Surveillance Through Mobile Applications https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305912 Surveillance in an Era of Pandemic and Protest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=wJ_jvdAP-7U