One sidelight of the coronavirus pandemic is a warning about Alexa. Lawyers working at home are being advised to keep Amazon’s or Google’s voice assistants far away, or better yet, turned off during any phone conversations about client matters. Although the tech giants assure us that these devices don’t listen until they are awakened by “Okay Google” or other voice trigger, they have yet to explain how the devices respond to the voice stimulus if they are not listening. Voice assistants regularly come to life from mistaking spoken words for the woke word: “Seriously” is heard as “Siri.”
Maybe you’ve been diligent about putting the settings on your smartphone or Facebook account and other social networking platform for maximum privacy. Google is still tracking your movements anyway. Your visit to a retail establishment still will trigger advertising directed to you. You can buy a secure pouch to carry your phone. It claims to block signals from your phone.
It’s an arms race. As electronic scrutiny becomes more invasive, entrepreneurs are developing products to ward off unwanted surveillance.
Automatic license-plate readers (ALPR) track you down when you don’t pay a bridge toll. They are nearly everywhere — on street lights, overpasses, parking garages, on police cars — not just to catch toll scofflaws, but to keep track of everybody. It’s building a data base of where your car has been, for law enforcement and other purposes. Clothing and back packs are available with license images on the fabric to mess up the data collection, “pollute databases with garbage,” as advocates put it.
The last frontier in the assault on privacy might be facial recognition technology. Aggressive “deep” artificial intelligence advances are removing the last shred of anyone’s anonymity. CCTV cameras — about forty million in the U.S., not counting drones — record us nearly everywhere. (China employs surveillance to grade everyone’s “citizenship.”) That selfie you posted on social media, or you in the frame of someone else’s selfie, or that clever TikTok video? You’re in someone’s database and you’re findable. (By the way, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company.) To try to reduce your growing image file, you can purchase sunglasses that purport to block facial-recognition attacks.
And another item. Virtual meetings are exponentially increasing in these days and an application called Zoom is a popular vehicle for them. Zoom was developed with Facebook “software development kits.” That’s right all the data from Zoom goes to Facebook.
For a deep dive into the subject, read The New Yorker magazine’s “Dressing for the Surveillance Age.”
