There is more being gathered than just uttered statements, as VAPAs and other eavesmining systems overhear personal features of voices that involuntarily reveal biometric and behavioural attributes such as age, gender, health, intoxication and personality. (Shutterstock) Recording more than just speech Recent market research predicts that by 2024, the number of voice-activated devices will explode to over 8.4 billion.Įven when virtual assistants aren’t actively on, they’re listening to and recording their environments. Alarms have been raised in the past - in 2014, privacy advocates raised concerns on how much the Amazon Echo was listening to, what data was being collected and how the data would be used by Amazon’s recommendation engines.Īnd yet, despite these concerns, VAPAs and other eavesmining systems have spread exponentially.
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There are pressing issues that derive from the collection, storage and analysis of sonic data as they pertain to parents, youth and children. These include children’s digital toys, home security systems that listen for break-ins and smart doorbells that can pickup sidewalk conversations. The adoption of VAPAs is proceeding at a staggering pace as it extends to include mobile phones, smart speakers and the ever-increasing number products that are connected to the internet. Their data is accumulated over lifetimes in ways that go well beyond what was ever collected on their parents with far-reaching consequences that we haven’t even begun to understand. These concerns intensify as we apply them to children. This raises significant concerns pertaining to issues of privacy and surveillance, as well as discrimination, as the sonic traces of peoples’ lives become datafied and scrutinized by algorithms.
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The VAPAs are continuously listening, recording and processing acoustic happenings in a process that has been dubbed “ eavesmining,” a portmanteau of eavesdropping and datamining. While this may seem like a mundane part of domestic life, there is much more going on. They may make a game out of asking the voice-activated personal assistant (VAPA) what time it is, or requesting a popular song. In many busy households around the world, it’s not uncommon for children to shout out directives to Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa.