Anyone who uses a smartphone has likely experienced the same unsettling phenomenon — a pointedly placed advertisement that seems to show up right after you’ve discussed a topic or product.
Could it be true that your phone is “listening” to your private conversations?
It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer — and one that has bred enough uncertainty that bishops are starting to issue bans on smartphones in that most private of Catholic spaces: the confessional.
Here’s what you need to know about the privacy concerns surrounding smartphones and how one Catholic diocese is responding.
Protecting the seal
Right off the bat, it’s important to point out that the Catholic Church takes privacy in the confessional very seriously.
The sacrament of confession, also called reconciliation, was implemented by Jesus Christ as the means of forgiving sins. He passed the authority to forgive sins down to his apostles, who in turn passed it down to the priests of today.
The “seal of confession” binds priests to treat a penitent’s privacy with the utmost solemnity; in fact, over the centuries, some priests have chosen death rather than reveal what they have heard.
If a priest reveals any information he learned in the context of confession, he will be excommunicated from the Church latae sententiae — essentially, automatically.
What about if someone else hears your confession, or you accidentally overhear someone else confessing their sins?
Well, in that instance, the person overhearing the confession is bound by what is known as the “secret” and is forbidden from sharing any of that information.
It’s possible that a Catholic layperson could be excommunicated for breaking the secret, though normally it would involve a penal process rather than occurring automatically like it does for priests.
As you can imagine, intentionally recording someone’s confession is also a big no-no.
The Church formally addressed this problem in a 1988 decree in which the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote that anyone who records or divulges a person’s confession is excommunicated from the Church latae sententiae.
Smartphones — worth the risk?
It’s long been known that the “smart assistants” built into almost every modern phone, such as Apple’s Siri, do indeed “listen” constantly for wake words such as “Hey Siri” unless a user specifically turns that setting off.
(The odds are good that most tech-savvy people who are concerned about privacy have already done this.)
Perhaps a deeper concern, though, is the myriad of smartphone apps that inexplicably ask for full access to a user’s camera, microphone, and location — despite no clear need for control over those aspects of a user’s phone.
Could those apps be “spying” on us?
This long-simmering fear was thrust back into the spotlight late last year when it came to light that CMG Local Solutions, a subsidiary of Cox Media Group, was openly bragging about its ability to listen through the microphones of people’s smart devices to “identify buyers based on casual conversations in real time” using artificial intelligence.
CMG quickly backpedaled when challenged, claiming that it had never listened to anyone’s private conversations and didn’t have access to anything beyond “third-party aggregated, anonymized, and encrypted data used for ad placement.”
Despite CMG having ties to Google, Amazon, and Facebook through those companies’ ad partner programs, all three of those companies denied they were ever a part of CMG’s “Active Listening” program. But many have found these denials unconvincing.
Browsing online, you’ll find page after page of warnings that yes, indeed, your smartphone is listening in on you.
(Granted, many of them are blog posts from cybersecurity companies that are selling privacy-related products, which makes them either more or less credible, depending on how you look at it.)
Plus, the revelation from CMG throws some additional uncertainty into the mix.
So what does the evidence say? Read more
- Jonah McKeown is a staff writer and podcast producer for Catholic News Agency.
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