The older I get, the more I wonder if I’m destined to walk the streets of this bustling city with tinfoil wrapped around my head.
In the information age, I was fully prepared to give up some privacy for convenience. I know darn well that if I search once for pontoon boats on my computer that I’m going to get months of online boat advertisements shoved in my Facebook. I can accept that if I click on a video of a shark eating a kayak, I will be offered other videos of sharks eating weird things.
I get it. That’s just the nature of things online. Your clicks are you digital history and with so many applications being free, I’m willing to trade some privacy. If I look up a product online, I figure I’m fair game for targeted ads.
But that only applies to my active involvement with my phone. Lately, I’ve come to recognize that I need to pay more attention to those app permissions.
A few weeks ago during a staff meeting we were having a conversation about recording devices. More specifically, about whether a microphone plugged into a laptop provided any better quality than the existing mic in the device. It was a short conversation, probably less than two minutes in duration, and I quickly forgot about it.
But the next day I started thinking about microphones that plug into computers again, but not organically. I had to ponder them because in front of me on Facebook was an ad with a picture of a mic plugged into a laptop. I hadn’t searched for such items on my phone or computer. I had only talked about the items with my phone laying on a table nearby. That was a scary moment, but you could easily chalk it up to coincidence, which is what I chose to do.
But a few days later it happened again. My daughter was cleaning out a spare room and asked about throwing away an old printer. We talked for a while about whether the device still worked, how expensive it was to operate and how much she used it. Pretty vanilla conversation and less than five minutes in length. A couple days later, a good portion on the targeted ads that appeared on my phone were for various brands of home printers.
I told people at work about this who listened with varying degrees of belief. When an older guy says their electronic devices have ears, it tends to sound a little crazy.
But a few days after that a video of a teen girl shoving a bear to protect her dogs went viral. The newsroom staff had a discussion about whether we would protect a family dog from a bear attack.
The next day, reporter Mac Cordell’s Facebook page had suggested videos for him to watch: Dogs protecting their owners. Now, you could say “well, he watched the original video” so it showed him related content. But Cordell had never seen the bear video. The other members of the newsroom had to describe the encounter to him.
I was golfing with another friend and we started talking about a particular pairing of two musicians who went on tour. The next day, he had suggested videos pop up on his phone of those two artists playing together.
The more people I tell about eavesdropping phones, the more they recognize strange “coincidences.”
I understand we agree to permissions when we download apps, but I never thought the use of the microphone would actually be to listen in on conversations. Conspiracy theorist years ago said it would happen, but I couldn’t fathom the computing technology it would take to record, dissect and store so many conversations. But then you see the number of data centers Amazon and Google are building and you start to realize exactly what all those server farms contain.
Now let me scare you further. Think about all the convenient Alexa and Google Home speakers we have placed in our houses. Sure they tell you the temperature when you ask, but they can also listen to what your family is talking about.
Further down the rabbit hole – you have also probably given apps permission to access the camera on your phone.
Think about that the next time you take it into the bathroom.
–Chad Williamson is the Managing Editor at the Journal-Tribune.