Workplace Surveillance

Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Ralph welcomes professor Karen Levy, who talks to us about how regulations aimed at making trucking safer have been turned into a tool of corporate surveillance as chronicled in her book “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance.” And on the opposite side of the tech spectrum, high school senior, Logan Lane joins to tell us how she and her friends have liberated themselves from their iPhones and social media by forming a group they call “The Luddite Club.”

Karen Levy is an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, associate member of the faculty at Cornell Law School, and field faculty in Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies, and Data Science. Her new book is Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance.

I think we’re actually all aligned in our interests. Truckers don’t want to die on the road any more than the rest of us do. So, if safety is really the motivation for the electronic logging device, it feels as though we might all be able to get behind legislation and regulation that helps address the root causes of this fatigue.

Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance

Logan Lane is a high school senior in Brooklyn and the founder of the Luddite Club.

It felt like when I became a Luddite, I started off on this reading journey. We’re all on our individual reading journeys. I saw mine starting with Anaïs Nin’s Collages, and it was amazing, and it was something I didn’t think I could have interacted with so much and been so passionate about if I had been on the phone. And from then onwards I started doing this reading challenge. Every year I would set a goal— so my first year I read 50 books, the second year 95 books… It felt like the friends I’d lost on social media; I’d picked up those friends in the authors I was reading.

Logan Lane

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