We all claim to want privacy online, but that desire is rarely reflected in our online behavior. In a story that originally aired in January, OTM producer Sarah Abdurrahman looks into the futile attempts we make to protect our digital identities.

Johannes Brahms - Violin Concerto op.77 in D Major

One way the Iranian government has been trying to ensure a smooth election is by slowing down the internet to a nearly unusable speed. This is in addition to blocking Iranians from Facebook, Twitter, and thousands of international news sites. Brooke talks to an Nariman Gharib, an Iranian expatriate who connects with people still in Iran to help them find workarounds to the Iranian “filternet.”

Next week, Iran is holding its first presidential election since the one in 2009 that sparked the protests in the street known as the Green Revolution. The Iranian government is hoping to avoid a repeat of what it saw in 2009, in part by restricting the free flow of information in the country. Bob speaks to Golnaz Esfandiari, a senior correspondent for Radio Free Europe and editor of the Persian Letters blog, about what the Iranian media landscape is looking like in the run up to the election.

Journalist Paul Lukas runs a website called Uni Watch, which has a fairly active cadre of commenters, including at least one relentless troll. To his surprise, when Lukas asked the troll for an interview, the troll agreed. Bob talks to Lukas about his six year relationship with his website's most persistent, most creative troll.

What if your email service could tell you, before you even press send, just how aggressive or angry your email is? In an interview from September of last year, Bob talks to Josh Merchant, CTO and co-founder of Lymbix, a Canadian software company whose program ToneCheck promises emotional spell-check for overheated emailers. 

JD Samson & Men - Life's Half Price

Creating an interesting comment space can take a lot of time and energy. In an interview from December, 2011, Bob speaks to The Atlantic senior editor and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates about his approach to internet comments and his own heavily moderated comment section.

OTM producer Doug Anderson fires up Grindr and meets up with another guy for a casual, anonymous...interview.

Fred Astaire - I'm Putting All My Eggs In One Basket

Grindr is a phone app that allows gay men to find other users based on their proximity. Brooke speaks with Jaime Woo, author of Meet Grindr: How One App changed the Way We Connect about the app's effect on our understanding of privacy.

Brooke talks to Grindr founder Joel Simkhai about what inspired the app and how it manages to make money.

Over the past year, the Pabst brewing company, which makes Old Milwaukee, has honed the "soft sell" to a sharp edge, reminiscent of the brothers Bert and Harry Piel. They have been filming spots starring Will Ferrell that only air in select markets. But these spots have an advantage the Piel commercials didn't - internet virality.

China's surveillance of Skype is not particularly surprising. What is surprising is that Skype owner Microsoft is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, an anti-internet censorship and pro-privacy organization. Bob speaks to Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT's Center for Civic Media, about the Global Network Initiative and its apparent shortcomings.

Four Tet - Pinnacles

We all claim to want privacy online, but that desire is rarely reflected in our online behavior. OTM producer Sarah Abdurrahman looks into the futile attempts we make to protect our digital identities.

Johannes Brahms - Violin Concerto op.77 in D Major

The United States once led the world in internet speed and infrastructure. Now, according to one estimate, it ranks at about 29. Brooke talks to David Cay Johnston, journalist and author of The Fine Print: How big companies use plain english to rob you blind, who says that companies continue to raise prices and engage in lobbying efforts to rewrite regulation, while avoiding necessary upgrades to infrastructure that would speed up America's internet.

Menahan Street Band - The Crossing

The website Buzzfeed is a compendium of internet clickbait – a picture of an 800 pound shark, Mitt Romney looking goofy on a jet ski, 11 Ways To Get Inspired Right Now. But while the content may be trivial, but the website is quite lucrative, so much so that it's begun to hire actual journalists. Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo decided to try to figure out how the site is able to produce such great content.

This week, Comcast, the largest provider of cable and internet in the country, started charging for broadband using a tiered data plan - much like wireless carriers currently do. This move is not likely to affect many people right now, but as The New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter tells Brooke, Comcast might be preparing its subscribers for the future of internet pricing.

Most of us think nothing of putting our lives in the cloud; photos in Flickr, videos on YouTube, most everything on Facebook.  But what about when those services abruptly go away, taking all of our collective contributions with them?  Well Jason Scott operates on the assumption that everything online will one day disappear.  He explains to Bob why he and the Archive Team are dedicated to saving user-generated content for posterity.

This week, two class action lawsuits were filed by privacy advocates against Google, because under their new privacy policy, the company can pool user data collected from all of its web services into one place. Software researcher Tom Henderson reacted in a different way: he decided to stop using all of Google's services. Bob speaks with Tom about how he “divorced Google.”

Daniel Rossen - Up On High