Years ago, I had the then new Amazon echo, I had multiple Kindles, and I had a cough. A bad cough. A cough so bad that I ended up going to a hospital over and got some scary news about, which is a story by itself.

What was weird was that the Kindles started showing ads for cough drops and cough syrups. Just out of the blue. I hadn’t shopped for those on Amazon and I think it unlikely that they were getting updates from my pharmacy on my over the counter habits.

This was creepy.

I donated the Echo to someone else, and the Kindles started having advertisements for books that were semi-interesting again. No more over the counter stuff for coughs. This is purely anecdotal, but as someone who does value his privacy, I opted to simply not have it around. My life was complete without an Echo and I began questioning why I had gotten it in the first place.

Since then, I’ve just quietly nodded my head when people say that they think devices are listening to them. If poked with a stick, I tell the story. Mobile phones, with all the apps that use voice is a big hole.

Let’s be honest about ourselves: We are, collectively, pretty bad at settings and making sure we don’t leak information we don’t want to. It’s not completely our fault either. Staying on top of software settings when the software is in a constant state of being updated is not an easy task.

It ends up that people who have been concerned about it, as I am, may have a reason though it’s being denied:

...In a Nov. 28 blog post (which also has been deleted), CMG Local Solutions said its “Active Listening” technology can pick up conversations to provide local advertisers a weekly list of consumers who are in the market for a given product or service. Example it cited of what Active Listening can detect included “Do we need a bigger vehicle?”; “I feel like my lawyer is screwing me”; and “It’s time for us to get serious about buying a house.”…

There’s a big question as to why someone would even make that claim in the first place without it being true. Maybe it was a drunk intern. Maybe it was an upset employee leaving with a ‘fish in the ceiling’¹.

I could put on a tinfoil hat and say that the NSA probably has backdoors on every operating system made in the United States. It’s credible after 9/11, but when I write ‘after 9/11’ I realize there’s an entire generation who doesn’t remember how things were before. Before that, we were less concerned about who was listening in on us because the need to listen to everyone was much less. The word ‘terrorism’ had many different definitions in government then and almost none of them seemed to agree. It was a troublesome time for technology.

We have generations that are blindly trusting these technologies at this point because they’ve been raised on them much as I was raised on Sesame Street. Sesame Street, though, was not too interested in my shopping habits or trying to prep me for a market to buy a certain line of hardware, software, or subscription services. When you think about it, GenX was being sold on the idea of learning stuff whereas subsequent generations have been increasingly marketed to under the guise of education.

All of this should be something that is at least on our radars, something we understand as a possibility.

If the government is doing it, we can’t really depend on them to get companies not to – and we don’t know who is doing it at all.

It takes one story – a cough around an Echo – to make it feel real, if you’re paying attention.

1. At one company I worked for, someone who had quit had left a few fish in the ceiling tiles in a cube farm. It took months for people to find out where the smell was coming from. ↩︎