Your Phone Is Watching You: Privacy, Surveillance, and the Law with Prof. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

About this episode

The episode discusses the implications of surveillance technology on privacy and the law with Professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson.

Every time you turn on your phone, you're building a case against yourself. You just don't know it yet. Your Ring camera. Your Google searches. Your Alexa. Your 23andMe DNA. Your fitness tracker. The apps running silently in the background. Every one of these generates data, and every one of them can be accessed by police and prosecutors with a warrant. And warrants, it turns out, are easy to get. In this episode of Good Is In The Details, Gwendolyn Dolske and Rudy Salo sit down with Professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson — Professor of Law at George Washington University, national expert on surveillance technology and the Fourth Amendment, former public defender, and author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance (NYU Press, 2026) — for one of the most urgent conversations we've ever had on this show. The central problem Professor Ferguson identifies is one that should concern every person who owns a smartphone: technology has outpaced the law by a generation. The Fourth Amendment, designed to protect against unreasonable search and seizure, was written for a world that could not have imagined the Panopticon we've voluntarily built around…

People in this episode

Hosts: Gwendolyn Dolske, Rudy Salo

Guest: Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Topics covered

• privacy
• surveillance
• law
• technology
• Fourth Amendment
• self-surveillance

Keywords

• smartphone
• data privacy
• surveillance technology
• Fourth Amendment
• law enforcement
• self-surveillance
• digital rights

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: George Washington University, NYU Press

Books & works: Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance

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