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.

But in the smartphone age, clergy need to realise that the odds of making a spiritual connection have changed — radically.

Young people who spend as many as 10 or more hours a day focusing on digital screens will find it all but impossible to listen to an adult talk about anything, especially in a religious sanctuary.

"As long as children have a phone-based childhood, there is very little hope for their spiritual education," said Jonathan Haidt.

He's the author of a bestseller — "The Anxious Generation" — that has raised the heat in public debates about controlling or banning smartphones in schools.

"An essential precondition is to delay the phone-based life until the age of 18, I would say.

"Don't let them fall off into cyberspace, because once they do, it's going to be so spiritually degrading for the rest of their lives," he said in a Zoom interview.

"There's not much you can do in church if they are spending 10 hours a day outside of church on their phones."

High stakes

It would be hard for the cultural stakes to be higher, argued Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University.

Thus, his book's weighty subtitle: "How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness."

While Haidt's work has ignited debates among politicians, academics and high-tech entrepreneurs, reactions have been muted among religious leaders who are usually quick to spot threats to children.

Then again, clergy may not be used to a self-avowed atheist issuing warnings about the "spiritual degradation" of young people.

It would be a big step forward, he said, if "the leaders of various denominations could make a clear statement about how the phone-based childhood is a threat, not only to their mental health, but to their spiritual health. ...

"We can only save our kids from this if we have the churches, families and schools all working together."

Local religious congregations are "natural settings for the kind of collective action Haidt proposes," noted Keith Plummer, dean of the School of Divinity at Cairn University in Langhorne, Pennsylvania.

But there is a problem.

Predators lurk online

"Far too many Christians ignore the relationship between technology, media theory and spiritual formation for every believer," he noted on The Gospel Coalition website.

"We have been prone to assess digital technologies primarily, if not exclusively, on the basis of the content they provide access to. ... But simply avoiding sexually explicit content is not enough, we have to question the formative power of our technologies."

Meanwhile, parents often insist that smartphones can promote safety, especially during emergencies, noted Haidt.

At the same time, many parents fear allowing their children to play in parks and neighbours' yards, activities that were perfectly normal in the recent past.

Truth is, modern "sexual predators are not going to find kids in the front yard or on the playground. The sexual predators have moved on to Instagram and Snapchat," said Haidt.

Thus, "The Anxious Generation" thesis: "We over-protect our children in the real world and under-protect them online."

Raising healthy children

Believers also need to know that researchers have found evidence that religious communities and families play a crucial role in raising healthy children.

"The kids who made it through are especially those who are locked into binding communities and religious communities," said Haidt.

Meanwhile, it is the "secular kids and the kids in progressive families" who tend to be "the ones who got washed out to sea."

This doesn't mean that children in religious families are not affected if their parents plug them into what many activists call "screen culture."

Haidt stressed that lives built on smartphones, tablets and computers will change their minds and hearts.

"Half of American teenagers say that they are online ‘almost all the time.'

That means that they are never fully present — never, ever," he said.

"They are always partly living in terms of what is happening with their posts, what's happening online. ...

"There is a degradation effect that is overwhelming, but most people haven't noticed. ... I am hoping that religious communities will both notice it and be able to counteract it.

"But you can't counteract it if the kid still has the phone in a pocket. The phone is that powerful."

• First published by Religion Unplugged
• Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston.

Many private schools are now implementing phone and device bans in schools - but they too face fierce opposition.

Parents across Australia fork out hundreds of dollars to equip their kids with smartphones and iPads, often during primary school years.

While peer group pressure and social expectations are behind most smartphone purchases, many parents also hope that these clever devices will encourage their child to learn to be tech-savvy, to develop their creative skills and to use these tiny computers to boost their learning.

But growing evidence shows that smartphones are doing the reverse: rather than making us smarter, mobile devices reduce our cognitive ability in measurable ways.

"There's lots of evidence showing that the information you learn on a digital device, doesn't get retained very well and isn't transferred across to the real world," Professor Mark Williams of Macquarie University says.

"You're also quickly conditioned to attend to lots of attention-grabbing signals, beeps and buzzes, so you jump from one task to the other and you don't concentrate."

Not only do smartphones affect our memory and our concentration, research shows they are addictive - to the point where they could be a ‘gateway drug' making users more vulnerable to other addictions.

Smartphones are also linked to reduced social interaction, inadequate sleep, poor real-world navigation, and depression.

"Given what we know about the effect that smartphones and digital devices have on our brains, it's scary to see how prolific their use is with children from a very young age," says Williams.

Williams, who spent 10 years studying the neuroscience around people's perceptions of facial expressions and how these impact our social interactions, became interested in the impact of devices on our brains when his own children started school.

"All of a sudden they wanted to play video games, because that's what their friends were doing - and the school introduced a bring your own device (BYOD) policy so we had to buy them an iPad," he says.

"I was just like: ‘ We shouldn't be doing this. It's not good for them.'"

Smartphones make us prone to addiction

Williams is currently contributing to a large study at Macquarie investigating the relationship between social media addiction, gaming addiction and porn addiction.

"All addiction is based on the same craving for a dopamine response, whether it's drug, gambling, alcohol or phone addiction," he says.

"As the dopamine response drops off, you need to increase the amount you need to get the same result, you want a little bit more next time. Neurologically, they all look the same.

"We know - there are lots of studies on this - that once we form an addiction to something, we become more vulnerable to other addictions.

"That's why there's concerns around heavy users of more benign, easily-accessed drugs like alcohol and marijuana as there's some correlation with usage of more physically addictive drugs like heroin, and neurological responses are the same."

Could a child's smartphone act like a ‘gateway drug'?

Many of the apps that are hugely popular on smartphones and devices tap into decades of neuroscience and psychology research funded by the casino and gambling industries, which are designed to be addictive, Williams says.

"Casino-funded research is designed to keep people gambling, and app software developers use exactly the same techniques.

They have lots of buzzes and icons so you attend to them, they have things that move and flash so you notice them and keep your attention on the device." Continue reading

• Professor Mark Williams is a neuroscientist in the Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Human Sciences at Macquarie University.
• Macquarie University.

The survey also found more than half of New Zealanders choose their phone or computer if they have to deliver bad news, but 43 percent of respondents felt guilty about this. Continue reading

In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless - classic symptoms of depression - surged 33 percent in large national surveys.

Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent.

In a new paper published in Clinical Psychological Science, my colleagues and I found that the increases in depression, suicide attempts and suicide appeared among teens from every background - more privileged and less privileged, across all races and ethnicities and in every region of the country.

All told, our analysis found that the generation of teens I call "iGen" - those born after 1995 - is much more likely to experience mental health issues than their millennial predecessors.

What happened so that so many more teens, in such a short period of time, would feel depressed, attempt suicide and commit suicide?

After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens' lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone.

All signs point to the screen
Because the years between 2010 to 2015 were a period of steady economic growth and falling unemployment, it's unlikely that economic malaise was a factor.

Income inequality was (and still is) an issue, but it didn't suddenly appear in the early 2010s: This gap between the rich and poor had been widening for decades.

We found that the time teens spent on homework barely budged between 2010 and 2015, effectively ruling out academic pressure as a cause.

However, according to the Pew Research Center, smartphone ownership crossed the 50 percent threshold in late 2012 - right when teen depression and suicide began to increase.

By 2015, 73 percent of teens had access to a smartphone. Continue reading

Sources

• The Conversation, article by Jean Twenge, Professor of Psychology, San Diego State University
• Image: Huffington Post

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The results were swift and shocking, raising the question of just what is happening to the selfie generation and whether we have more to fear than just a bad Snapchat Story or a wasted day bingeing on Netflix.

It was out of desperation that I instructed my teenagers to go cold turkey from screen time for a term - thanks in part to the advice of our tutor who said they needed to study more to catch up in maths - and save up the things they wanted to do, even "go crazy", after their exams.

Social media apps were deleted but I had to concede my children could keep their mobiles to text the tutor and use their laptops as part of the school's Bring Your Own Device policy for homework and "research".

The depth of the problem revealed itself almost immediately one bedtime when I sent an article to my kids via Facebook (for them to read later); and immediately one of their mobiles buzzed via the Messenger app I didn't even know was there.

Further investigation revealed a folder set up in the phone that one daughter had ambitiously named "Do not look" and in there were the apps I had previously deleted.

I caught my other daughter once in her room offline, looking through the photo stream on her mobile - she explained she just wanted to go through the action of swiping.

I had long had the feeling that the fact we all seem increasingly stuck to the screen was no accident.

And just days ago, Facebook's ex-president Sean Parker admitted that in developing their ubiquitous social media products the creators of Facebook and Instagram consciously strived to manipulate people's vulnerabilities so that their creations "consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible", aiming to give users a little dopamine hit every time someone likes or comments on a photo.

Facebook, he said, "literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains." Continue reading

• Vivienne Reiner has teenage children and works in public relations.

But they're on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas.

She answered her phone - she's had an iPhone since she was 11 - sounding as if she'd just woken up. We chatted about her

We chatted about her favourite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. "We go to the mall," she said.

"Do your parents drop you off?," I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I'd enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends.

"No - I go with my family," she replied.

"We'll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we're going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes."

Those mall trips are infrequent - about once a month.

More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned.

Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear.

They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other.

Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends.

"It's good blackmail," Athena said. (Because she's a minor, I'm not using her real name.)

She told me she'd spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone.

That's just the way her generation is, she said.

"We didn't have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people."

I've been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology.

Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum.

Beliefs and behaviours that were already rising simply continue to do so.

Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.

I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys.

Then I began studying Athena's generation.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviours and emotional states.

The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear.

In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s - I had never seen anything like it. Continue reading

• Image: Periodis Moecuador

School principal Martin Chamberlain said he wasn't banning phones, but he was limiting their use.

Wanting to see more students out playing in the sunshine is the reason why he started turning off the school's wi-fi most of the time during morning tea and lunch breaks.

"It's really something that I've wanted to do for a long time but it's not until recently that we had the power to be able to shut down our wi-fi at set times and yet not dislocate the staff. The staff can still have use of it," he said.

The school operates two wi-fi networks, one for staff that stays on and another for students that turns off at certain times.

Chamberlain said the move wasn't about banning cell phones or the use of internet, but instead about managing how both were used.

"We see phones as an essential part of modern life so students are often invited to use their phone in class and to look up things on the web, and certainly we see them as a vital parental communication tool during breaks. So no, we're not Luddites; phones are a part of modern life," he said.

"But the other side of it is when I see students fixated onto screens, generally junior students who haven't been used to having this at their primary schools but now when they get it here they tend to make a feast of it."

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• Image: fdmcfoundation.com

"Catholic Bible" is one of the most complete apps of its kind; the breadth and availability of its content are astonishing: it offers as many as forty two editions of the sacred text and the quality of its dynamic functions is exceptional.

The latest updated version of the software - which has been available online since the middle of August comes with translations in fourteen different languages (Italian, English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Russian, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Swedish, Arabic, Korean, Japanese and traditional and simplified Chinese) and allows the user to purchase seven more editions of the Catholic Bible which are not included in the standard version, using "in-app purchase". Continue reading

Speaking to 50,000 German altar servers in St Peter's Square on August 5, the Pope was asked by one of the young people how to make time for assisting at Mass.

Francis said the excessive use of the Internet and social media distracted them from what was really important.

"Maybe many young people waste too many hours on futile things, chatting on the Internet or with smart phones, watching TV soap operas, and [using] the products of technological progress, which should simplify and improve the quality of life, but which distract one's attention away from what is really important," he said.

Acknowledging that young people are often torn between many different commitments including school and church, he advised: "You need to organise your lives a little, plan things in a balanced way."

"But you are German, this comes naturally to you," the Pope quipped

Continue reading

Rather than complain about the occasional 21st century interruption of a bleeping mobile disturbing his congregation's Christian meditation, Father Gil Florini told FRANCE 24 the devices "should be recognised as a powerful source of potential good". continue readimg

The statue, a lifesize likeness of the Pope, had been installed for about 10 days in the gardens of the Buenos Aires cathedral where he had been archbishop.

But as soon as he heard about it, the Pope telephoned the cathedral and asked for it to be removed.

The statue was created by artist Fernando Pugliese, who had created other monuments dedicated to John Paul II and Mother Teresa.

Made of fiberglass and resin, it was in a courtyard closed to the public, but could be glimpsed from the street, where the pontiff appeared to smiling and waving.

Local people had been posing for photographs next to it ever since it was erected. But within a few hours of the Pope's phone call it had disappeared.

The artist had intended to populate Buenos Aires with variously sized sculptures of the first pope from Latin America, in public and private spaces related to his life in Argentina.

"I've known Jorge Bergoglio for 14 years. I've always admired him and his very humble personality fascinates me," he told reporters.

Meanwhile, back at the Vatican, Pope Francis gave an off-the-cuff talk to about 6000 seminarians and religious novices.

Urging them to live out their vocations with joy, he said: "True joy doesn't come from things. No, it is born of an encounter, of the relationship with the other. It's born of feeling ourselves accepted, understood, loved, and of accepting, understanding and loving."

He cautioned his listeners to avoid the temptation of thinking "the latest smartphone, the fastest moped and a car that turns heads" will make them happy.

The Pope said it pains him when he sees a nun or priest driving an expensive car. When a car is needed, he added, "get a humbler one".

Sources:

Clarin

Patheos

Catholic News Agency

Image: Patheos