Somebody's watching You

It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

Do you always feel like somebody’s watching you? Well, it’s not just a dream — it’s the 21st century.

Information is power, and there’s money to be made from gathering it. Or keeping people from taking it.

Here’s a new buzzword for you: surveillance capitalism: the marketplace for information captured often without your knowledge - or consent - and traded for dollars. This has been enabled by innovations like cloud computing and the world wide web itself.

But the reality is, trading in information isn’t new, it’s just scaled up. Think about the old gumshoe. Private investigators have been around for a long time. P.I.

Ronald Gaspard has been in the research game for a long time himself — running Acadiana Research since the early 1990s. What began as a $10/hour gig has become a full-time career. He cases cheating lovers and insurance fraudsters, serves subpoenas and conducts courthouse research or, as he puts it, “Anything else that’s legal and makes a few dollars.”

Ronald is an Abbeville native, a military vet and former auxiliary sheriff’s deputy.

So, if everyone wants your information, what do you do if you don’t want them to have it? Cybersecurity is no longer a niche service contracted by large firms with troves of sensitive data. Anyone can justify state of the art information protection to block data hacks that come in all shapes and sizes.

Hunter Thevis is COO of S1 Technology, provides that kind of protection and more. As a managed service provider, S1 can do top-to-bottom IT support and specializes in a white glove approach.

Hunter founded the company with a group of IT specialists from the Acadiana area in 2021 and it’s grown steadily. Their customer base is primarily here but as they’ve grown they’ve picked up clients in Houston and in Alaska.

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded live over lunch at Tula Tacos and Amigos in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website, itsacadiana.com.

And check out lunch table conversation about just what the world wide web knows about you with AI guru Frankie Russo.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.