Listening Technology and Privacy

“When you read parts of the applications, it’s really clear that this is spyware and a surveillance system meant to serve you up to advertisers,” says Jamie Court, the president of Consumer Watchdog, “The companies”, Mr. Court added, are “basically going to be finding out what our home life is like in qualitative ways.” Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times, “Hey Alexa, What Can You Hear? And What Will You Do With It?”, March 31, 2018.

If you have any digital assistants, have you thought about how it could be recording everything you say, and not just when you say the key words, such as “hey, Alexa”, to start the assistant? Although Amazon and Google deny impinging on your privacy, and they may not…at this time…, but the potential is still there.

Let’s take Facebook and its use of your data. When it first started way back in 2004 or thereabouts, it was promoted as keeping your data private first and you authorized it to divulge your details and posts to certain selected friends and family members. In other words, it started out as a more private connection. But at some point in the past, probably when Facebook was thinking of going public, Mark Zuckerberg started to push the idea that what people really wanted to do was display everything to the whole world, so the settings began to shift towards displaying as much of what you post and do to the world. So now your energy had to be devoted to periodically checking that your private settings were still set to your level of privacy rather Facebook’s default levels, which was practically show everything. Instead of deciding what you wanted to display, you spent time working to keep things private. And you had to periodically review your settings in case Facebook changed them back to more transparency.

After a period of time, you really had to work on making sure your settings were set to the right levels of privacy. And the settings became more convoluted and hidden in the bowels of the system.

And then the Cambridge Analytica imbroglio came along few weeks ago. Now we learn our data were being swept up by third party applications, even if you don’t use the applications. If you were friends with someone who decided to use the application, your data would be swept up because you happened to be friends, even if you weren’t real friends. You had no say in this. And Facebook designed it this way, so that advertisers could use that data to put forth advertising in front of you. It was Facebook’s way of making money.

And there’s more. Now we learn that Facebook tracks non-users. We are still not sure how much and what kind of data were being kept, but if you were one of those who opted out of Facebook for privacy reasons, well, you are out of luck. It seems like Facebook could still track you.

And there’s still more. In about a month, Europe’s digital privacy policies will come into effect. There are some countries outside of Europe, such as Africa or Asia, that were going to come under the European digital policies because of digital agreements with Ireland (something like that). Except now, Facebook will transfer those “agreements” from Ireland to the U.S. so that those countries outside of Europe will fall under U.S. digital policies, which are not as stringent as Europe.

So instead of being concerned about their privacy, Facebook is going to move them to where the privacy is not as strict.

Now we add in the cameras and audios as well as the internet of things devices. We could face a world where everything is embedded with cameras, computer chips, and audio chips, all listening and watching. We would really have to trust companies to not invade our space. And then add in the nano technologies.

Imagine nano devices with computers, cameras, audios and batteries or energy cells flying around and seeping into the cracks of buildings and lodging themselves inside the cracks, silently listening and watching and emitting signals.  Imagine China or Russia deploying such technologies against their citizens or “perceived enemies of state” and crackdown against dissidents. Or if America went the way of the authoritarian states, we might undergo such similar invasion of privacy. We have to have really strong democracy with strong institutions and laws, as well as a society with clear ethical moorings.

Strong privacy laws would have to be spelled out, strategies designed for “firewall” protections, and technologies robustly built to combat such intrusions. Amazon, Google and Facebook all say that they promote privacy policies to protect their customers, but that is today. What if in the future, someone with unethical inclinations took over the company and abused their privilege. Enron happened. Bernie Madoff happened. The Great Recession happened.

So, what are we going to do to protect ourselves?