Elise Hu opens by acknowledging the familiar digital privacy warnings most people have already heard: read the terms of service, watch what you share, be careful what you click. But she signals that today's guest, AI ethicist Jen Golbeck, believes the problem runs far deeper than individual behavior. Golbeck herself gets a brief preview moment, hinting at the scale and intimacy of tracking — from web clicks to patient portals to private forums. Hu then frames Golbeck's work as years spent mapping the mechanisms by which governments and corporations extract data, profit from it, and use it to entrench their own power, before naming the concept that will anchor the entire talk: data colonialism.

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Jen Golbeck opens her talk with a cascade of concrete examples designed to make the abstract feel viscerally personal. There are over 100,000 automated license plate reading cameras across the US ^{[1] — Jen Golbeck "Over 100,000 automated license plate readers in the US capture make, model, color, and bumper stickers — meaning removing your plate won't …" 04:02 Play} — and they don't just capture your plate. They log your car's make, model, color, and distinguishing marks like dents and bumper stickers, meaning removing your plate changes nothing. These networks have already been used by law enforcement stalkers to track victims, by governments to monitor protest attendance at civil rights and gun rights demonstrations, and by families to trace women who fled states after self-administering abortions. Your car itself records your acceleration, braking, and speed, which is sold to data brokers and on to insurance companies to adjust your rates. Your phone tracks not just your app activity but every physical space you enter and the identities of people nearby. Online, every click, every search, and every fraction of a second of attention is logged, and trackers follow you across sites into patient portals and private forums. Golbeck's organizing principle emerges clearly: if technology makes something possible and it's profitable, companies will do it regardless of ethics — and the result is surveillance-based pricing already reshaping what you pay for flights and clothes, now moving offline into physical stores.

Having laid out the surveillance landscape, Golbeck reaches for an explanatory framework: colonialism ^{[1] — Jen Golbeck "Corporations and governments extract data from people the same way colonial powers extracted land and resources — concentrating it for prof…" 08:15 Play} . When powerful entities extract private property, resources, and value from people — concentrating it for themselves and using it to perpetuate the system — that is colonialism. America's colonial era may be over, but a new version has emerged, not from foreign powers but from tech companies and government agencies. Data colonialism describes when governments and corporations extract data from people to generate profits and exert control — and Golbeck illustrates this with three sharp case studies ^{[2] — Jen Golbeck "Airlines sell your flight records to border control. Clearview AI scrapes your face from social media for immigration enforcement. Cambridg…" 08:48 Play} . Airlines Reporting Corporation, a data broker owned by the major US airlines, sells passenger flight records to Customs and Border Protection. Clearview AI scraped faces from social media without consent and sells facial recognition access to immigration officials. Cambridge Analytica used stolen Facebook data to build psychological profiles of millions of Americans, selling those profiles to political campaigns that deployed them in micro-targeted manipulative Facebook ads. And the system is self-reinforcing: the companies take their profits and lobby the same politicians to keep it in place.

The talk reaches its philosophical core as Golbeck argues that data colonialism isn't merely a privacy violation — it's a structural threat to democratic governance ^{[1] — Jen Golbeck "Data colonialism doesn't just feel bad — it systematically dismantles constitutional rights. Profiling chills free speech. Monitoring assoc…" 09:56 Play} . Democracy requires that power reside with the people and that government operate by consent; a surveillance system fundamentally subverts both. She then walks through the Bill of Rights methodically. Freedom of speech is chilled when anonymity is destroyed and profiling makes expression risky. Freedom of association erodes when every interaction, communication, and relationship is tracked. The right to due process disappears when opaque, unaccountable algorithms make consequential decisions using extracted data. And protection from unreasonable search and seizure is rendered hollow when digital life is continuously monitored, data-mined, and monetized without any judicial oversight. Golbeck closes this section with a note of strategic optimism: this is one of the rare issues that can genuinely unite left and right, because data colonialism threatens values claimed by both — limited government, personal responsibility, private property, civil rights, consent, and equality.

After diagnosing the problem, Golbeck turns to agency. She opens with two recent wins ^{[1] — Jen Golbeck "Ring canceled its plan to share doorbell footage with Flock Safety's law enforcement network after customer backlash. Kroger dropped camera…" 11:33 Play} : Ring announced a partnership with Flock Safety that would have funneled home doorbell footage into a law enforcement license plate camera network — customers pushed back and Ring canceled it. Kroger planned to test camera-enabled price displays on store shelves — boycott threats and a Congressional investigation killed the project. These aren't trivial corporate pivots; they demonstrate that public pressure, consistently applied, can halt surveillance expansion. Golbeck's advice is both practical and vivid: watch for surveillance creep, resist the convenience framing companies use to soften it, and make yourself a persistent, difficult customer. The goal isn't just protecting your own data — it's making corporate surveillance economically and reputationally costly.

Individual consumer pressure is necessary but not sufficient. Golbeck argues the fight must move into local democratic institutions — city councils, county boards, and even homeowners associations. She urges listeners to investigate whether their local governments have contracts with surveillance companies, to demand transparency and cancellation of those contracts, and to oppose data center permits that consume land, water, and power. She is realistic about the timeline: elected officials typically won't respond the first or second time. But persistence matters, and the ultimate enforcement mechanism is the ballot box. Removing unresponsive officials is a democratic act that data colonialism itself is designed to undermine — which is precisely why it matters.

At the federal level, Golbeck identifies the data broker loophole as the single most important near-term target for reform ^{[1] — Jen Golbeck "FISA expressly bans bulk data collection on US citizens, but the government simply buys it from private companies instead — no warrant, no …" 13:20 Play} . FISA — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — expressly prohibits the US government from conducting bulk data collection on American citizens. But agencies like the FBI have found a workaround: simply purchase the same data from private brokers, who collected it without consent, for a few dollars, with no court order and no probable cause. This isn't a theoretical exploit — it's current practice. Congress had a chance to close this loophole during FISA reauthorization, but the amendment failed on a tie vote; the following year, it wasn't even permitted to reach the floor. Golbeck frames this as colonialism actively subverting democratic reform. The ask is concrete: contact your representatives and tell them to close the data broker loophole.

The talk's closing is both a moral argument and a rallying cry ^{[1] — Jen Golbeck "The founders said it is our right and duty to throw off oppressive systems — and Golbeck argues that applies to tech companies and governme…" 14:35 Play} . Golbeck reaches back to the founding of the United States and the principle that when a system of government — including one embodied in corporations — becomes oppressive, it is citizens' right and duty to resist and dismantle it. She applies this directly to the current moment: our data is ours, it is valuable and powerful, and the act of extraction is an act of dispossession. Under data colonialism, citizens are being exploited in ways that diminish the very rights and protections that define American democracy. The emotion she names is anger — but the message is not despair. Today, she says, is the day to commit to joining the fight to dismantle data colonialism, return data power to the people, and secure the future of democratic governance.

Elise Hu closes the main content by attributing the talk to Jen Golbeck at TED Democracy Philadelphia in 2026 and pointing listeners to ted.com/curationguidelines for transparency on TED's editorial process. She lists the production team — Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, Tansyka Sangmarnival, and others — and directs listeners to podcasts.ted.com. The episode then runs post-roll sponsor advertisements: LifeLock, which promotes its identity theft monitoring service and alerts with up to 30% off the first year at lifelock.com/podcast; a Beef It's What's For Dinner spot emphasizing beef's nutritional profile as part of wellness; and Aura, which pitches comprehensive data protection including data broker removal, VPN, antivirus, dark web monitoring, and up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, with a free trial at aura.com/safety.