Episode
Your Phone Is Watching You: Privacy, Surveillance, and the Law with Prof. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson
- Podcast
- Good Is In The Details
- Published
- Mar 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2697
- Processing state
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Summary
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 ourselves. In Philosophy of Law, Political Theory, and Philosophical accounts of Ethical Uses of Technology, themes concerning autonomy, public good, and individual rights vs the rights of the state underscore this contemporary topic. What we get into in this episode: Why smart devices are surveillance devices and what that means for how you think about every gadget in your home. How apps, Ring cameras, AI, Google searches, and DNA databases like 23andMe are already being used as evidence in criminal prosecutions What "probable cause" means in a world where law enforcement can access months of your…