Ubiquitous surveillance to \u201cdetect your moods,\u201d \u201cpinpoint the sources of your stress,\u201d and \u201cpresent relevant information\u201d<\/p>\n
The development of new smartphone technology that constantly records your private conversations in addition to all ambient background noise in order to \u201cdetect your moods\u201d could mean the NSA might not have to bother with tapping actual phone calls at all in future.<\/p>\n
A\u00a0report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/a>\u00a0hails the era of \u201ctechnologies that emphasize listening to everything, all the time,\u201d ubiquitous surveillance aided by microphones installed on new smartphones, such as Google\u2019s Moto X, that do not run off the main battery and can, \u201ccontinually monitor their auditory environment to detect the phone owner\u2019s voice, discern what room or other setting the phone is in, or pick up other clues from background noise.\u201d<\/p>\n While the article fails to mention the nightmare privacy implications that this technology would engender, it focuses on the innumerable apparent benefits. The technology could, \u201cmake it possible for software to detect your moods, know when you are talking and not to disturb you, and perhaps someday keep a running record of everything you hear.\u201d<\/p>\n Not only would such technology prevent accidental pocket calls by recognizing muffled sounds, or put unnecessary calls on hold by recognizing the voice of its owner, It could also be used to \u201cpinpoint the sources of your stress\u201d if you are talking too quickly, or \u201cpresent relevant information\u201d in relation to your audio environment (in other words bombard you with commercials).<\/p>\n It sounds like BIg Brother and invasive Minority Report-style advertising rolled into one.<\/p>\n Chris Schmandt, director of the speech and mobility group at MIT\u2019s Media Lab, relates how \u201cone of his grad students once recorded two years\u2019 worth of all the sounds he was exposed to\u2013capturing every conversation. While the speech-to-text conversions were rough, they were good enough that he could perform a keyword search and recover the actual recording of a months-old conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n Isn\u2019t it enough that the NSA can already read every email we send, snoop on every private Facebook message and eavesdrop on every Skype call? Now we\u2019re opening the door to government to have a transcript of our every private auditory interaction? None of this is even addressed in the MIT piece.<\/p>\n Only in the final paragraph of the article does it admit that \u201cpeople skittish about surveillance\u201d might have a problem with any of this.<\/p>\n A respondent to the article summed up such concerns, commenting, \u201cI am not my phone. I do not want a phone that thinks it is me, nor even that thinks it understands me. My phone is a tool. It is not my friend. It is not my assistant. It is a tool. It is MY tool. It is not the tool of advertisers nor data collectors nor the government.\u201d<\/p>\n