Audiobooks by Joseph Turow

The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet

Your voice as biometric data, and how marketers are using it to manipulate you The first in-depth examination of the voice intelligence industry, The Voice Catchers exposes how artificial intelligence is enabling personalized marketing and discrimination through voice analysis. Amazon and Google have numerous patents pertaining to voice profiling, and even now their smart speakers are extracting and using voice prints for identification and more. Customer service centers are already approaching every caller based on what they conclude a caller's voice reveals about that person's emotions, sentiments, and personality, often in real time. In fact, many scientists believe that a person's weight, height, age, and race, not to mention any illnesses they may have, can also be identified from the sound of that individual's voice. Ultimately not only marketers, but also politicians and governments, may use voice profiling to infer personal characteristics for selfish interests and not for the benefit of a citizen or of society as a whole. Leading communications scholar Joseph Turow places the voice intelligence industry in historical perspective, explores its contemporary developments, and offers a clarion call for regulating this rising surveillance regime.

Joseph Turow (Author), Joe Hempel (Narrator)

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The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power

By one expert's prediction, within twenty years half of Americans will have body implants that tell retailers how they feel about specific products as they browse their local stores. The notion may be outlandish, but it reflects executives' drive to understand shoppers in the aisles with the same obsessive detail that they track us online. In fact, a hidden surveillance revolution is already taking place inside brick-and-mortar stores, where Americans still do most of their buying. Drawing on his interviews with retail executives, analysis of trade publications, and experiences at insider industry meetings, advertising and digital studies expert Joseph Turow pulls back the curtain on these trends, showing how a new hyper-competitive generation of merchants-including Macy's, Target, and Walmart-is already using data mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics to change the way we buy, undermine our privacy, and define our reputations.

Joseph Turow (Author), Rob Grgach (Narrator)

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