Xbox, Stop Listening

I think back to my room when I was young. As you can imagine, it hasn’t remained quite the same over the years. There used to be toys, board games, and clothes all over the floor, but now there are just clothes. There used to be globes and model ships and elementary school awards on my shelves, now there are mementos from earlier times in my life (and some liquor bottles).

Things like that will always keep changing. More than anything, the technology has changed. I still had a TV, but now it is high definition rather than a clunky CRT TV. I still had an Xbox, but now I have the newer systems. Additionally, I now have cell phones, a laptop, a tablet, and so on.

               All this new technology is great. It has made my life much easier, much more fun, and much more exciting; however, it has also made me think about things that I never used to think about. When I was young, my concern with technology was whether my parents could hear my TV through the wall.

               Now I wonder who else is listening in to what I’m doing.

               I have a microphone in my pocket for most of the day that I don’t even think about. As I type this on my laptop, there is a camera pointed at me and a microphone waiting to be activated. When I get back to my room, there will be a camera and a microphone pointed at my bed from my Kinect sensor for my Xbox, and all these devices are connected to the internet at all times. Not to mention that the microphone on the Kinect is always listening, even when the console is off.

               How would I even know if I was being listened to? If I was, how would I know what is at fault? There are so many things which could potentially be tapped into. And then I would have no way of knowing who is listening. Is it Microsoft? Is it AT&T? Is it Google? The government?

               There is nearly no aspect of my life which is entirely private. I am operating day to day with the implied trust that this technology which could potentially betray me and humiliate me won’t. It scares me to think about. If there was some government warrant against me, all my information on the internet would be looked at. That’s just the start. Then I could (potentially) be watched and listened to while I sleep at night until I wake up in the morning (Xbox, cell phone), listened to while I’m on my way to class (cell phone), watched while I’m at class (laptop), listened to again for the rest of the day (cell phone), watched and listened to while I’m watching TV at night and again until I wake up in the morning. Literally every interaction I have, every day of my life. There could be a full length movie just detailing the highlights of my day. A funny joke I said or when I stubbed my toe getting out of bed, or an argument I got into with my girlfriend.

That terrifies me. I know (well, I hope) that I’m not on anyone’s radar to make them want to see what I do all day. I also feel confident that if my phone microphone was on all day that I would notice the phone was hot or dying fast. I feel confident that I would notice the light next to my laptop camera turning on if someone decided to watch, but the fact that it’s even possible makes me actually want to turn off my devices if I was ever going to talk about or do something I didn’t want people to know about.

But I don’t. I’m just crossing my fingers that nobody cares enough to listen.