So there I am minding my own business when a text message comes in from my dad. Nothing unusual there. But the message is long, rambling, kinda stream-of-consciousness, seemingly part of a conversation I wasn’t a part of. I have received messages meant for other people before, but the format of the message, and the length of it, were quite unlike my dad’s normal type of messages. So I send him a “WTF” response. A few minutes later, clarification: the phone *listened* to my dad as he held a conversation with someone else, transcribed both sides of the conversation into a single kinda gibberishy paragraph, and then decided to send that transcript to me.
At no point in the process was my dad clued in to this; the phone did it itself.
So… who else gets these transcripts? The NSA? FBI? IRS? The Russians? And as seems most likely, the Chinese?
Something to keep in mind: if your phone, or Alexa, Siri, HAL, or any other modern device *can* hear you, it *does* hear you. And sometimes it does stuff with what it hears.
Now pardon me while I wrap my cell phone in a few layers of tinfoil.
One response to “No, not *at* *all* creepifyin’ and disturbin’”
I read a comment a few months ago that ties in with this: George Orwell wasn’t imaginative enough.
In 1984 everyone was subjected to surveillance by “telescreens” operated by the oppressive government. But Orwell never dared to imagine that people would carry their telescreens with them everywhere they went, that their information would be used by the government and by thousands of unknown parties (i.e,, advertisers), and that we would willingly pay for that privilege..