Joanne McNally is back on the investigative trail…. and with the Avril / Melissa theory no longer giving her sleepless nights, she’s keen to find a new story to get her teeth into.
Top of her list, after some deliberation is a story from the late 90’s… about a soft toy, the Furby, which took over the world and became the no.1 gift for Christmas. But Joanne has found headlines that claim the toy was banned, suspected of being a spy, linked to international espionage… there couldn’t be any truth to it… could there?
Joanne McNally is back on the investigative trail…. and with the Avril / Melissa theory no longer giving her sleepless nights, she’s keen to find a new story to get her teeth into.
Top of her list, after some deliberation is a story from the late 90’s… about a soft toy, the Furby, which took over the world and became the no.1 gift for Christmas. But Joanne has found headlines that claim the toy was banned, suspected of being a spy, linked to international espionage… there couldn’t be any truth to it… could there?
So far in the series, Joanne has been getting more and more concerned about the amount of listening and surveillance which is all around her. And to make matters WORSE, her producers then take her to visit the worlds biggest listening station - on a hillside in North Yorkshire. Intrigued and terrified in equal measure - Joanne starts to wonder why it even exists, and why America was so worried about Furbys when they have an entire fleet of listening devices in the UK!
Joanne then speaks to her pal Roisin Conaty and together they conduct an experiment to find out if their mobile phones really listen to conversations. Picking a random topic which they've never discussed before, they go in deep, and then wait to see if their phones start sending bespoke adverts. And the results are surprising.
With so much concern, Joanne then calls on a tech expert Jake Moore to clean up her social media... fix her privacy settings, and generally help her stay safe online. Jake spots some issues within Joanne's apps, uncovers a scam she recently fell for, and then, inexplicably, helps Joanne access the dark web...
The series is produced by What's The Story for BBC Sounds.