Are Our Phones and Digital Assistants Listening to Us? Is the Federal Government Buying Our Conversations?

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the walls of every domicile in Oceania bristle with microphones and cameras that catch the residents’ every utterance and action. In 2024, we have done Big Brother’s work for him. We have helpfully installed microphones and cameras around the interior of our homes embedded in our computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Might someone be selling our conversations to companies and the federal government without our consent?
 
Few worry about this because of explicit promises by tech companies not to enable their microphones to be used against us. Google, Amazon, Meta are firm in denying that they eavesdrop on us. For example, Meta states that “sometimes ads can be so specific, it seems like we must be listening to your conversations through our microphones, but we’re not.”
 
Still, many of us have had the spooky sensation of talking about something random but specific – perhaps a desire to buy a leather couch or take a trip to Cancun – only to find our social media feeds littered with ads for couches and resorts in Cancun. The tech companies’ explanation for this is that we sometimes perform online searches for things, forget about them, and then mistakenly attribute the ads in our social media feeds to a conversation.
 
We hope that’s the case. But now we’re not so sure.
 
404 Media has acquired a slide deck from Cox Media Group (CMG) that claims its “Active-Listening” software can combine AI with our private utterances captured by 470-plus sources to “improve campaign deployment, targeting and performance.” One CMG slide says, “processing voice data with behavioral data identifies an audience who is ‘ready to buy.’”
 
CMG claims to have Meta’s Facebook, Google, and Amazon as clients. After this story broke, the big tech companies stoutly denied that they engage in this practice and expressed their willingness to act against any marketing partner that eavesdrops. This leaves open the possibility that CMG and other actors are gathering voice data from microphones other than from those of their big tech clients.
 
What these marketers want to do is to predict what we will want and send us an ad at the precise time we’re thinking about a given product. The danger is that this same technology in the hands of government could be used to police people at home. This may sound outlandish. Yet consider that a half-dozen federal agencies – ranging from the FBI to the IRS – already routinely purchase our geolocation, internet activity, and other sensitive information we generate on our social media platforms – and then access it freely, without a warrant. Considering what our government already does with our digital data, the addition of our home speech would be an extension of what is already a radical new form of surveillance.
 
Congress should find out exactly what marketers like CMG are up to. As an urgent matter of oversight, Congress also should also determine if any federal agencies are purchasing home voice data. And while they’re at it, the Senate should follow the example of the House and pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would stop the practice of the warrantless purchasing of Americans’ personal, digital information by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.