Is your smartphone listening to your sins?| National Catholic Register

Anyone who uses a smartphone has probably experienced the same disturbing phenomenon: an emphatically placed ad that seems to appear right after you discuss 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 created enough uncertainty that bishops are starting to issue a ban on smartphones in the 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

It is immediately important to point out that the Catholic Church takes privacy in the confessional very seriously.

The sacrament of confession, also called reconciliation, was introduced by Jesus Christ as a means to forgive sins. He passed the authority to forgive sins to his apostles, who in turn passed it on to the priests of today.

The “seal of confession” obliges 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 heard. If a priest reveals any information he has learned in confession, he is excommunicated from the Church late sententiae – essentially automatic.

What about if someone else hears your confession, or if you accidentally hear someone else confessing their sins? Well, in that case, the person overhearing the confession is bound by what is known as the “secret” and is prohibited from sharing this information.

It is possible that a Catholic layperson could be excommunicated for breaking secrecy, although this would normally entail a criminal trial rather than happening automatically as it does for priests.

As you can imagine, intentionally recording someone’s confession is also a big no. The Church has formally addressed this problem in a decree from 1988 in which the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote that anyone who records or makes public someone’s confession will be excommunicated from the Church late sententiae.

Smartphones: worth the risk?

It has long been known that the “smart assistants” built into almost every modern phone, such as Apple’s Siri, are indeed constantly “listening” for words like “Hey Siri” unless a user specifically disables that setting. (Chances are that most tech-savvy people concerned about privacy have already done so.)

Perhaps a deeper concern, however, is the countless smartphone apps that inexplicably request full access to a user’s camera, microphone, and location — despite no apparent need for control over those aspects of a user’s phone. Could those apps be ‘spying’ on us?

This long-dormant fear was brought back into the spotlight at the end of last year came to light that CMG Local Solutions, a subsidiary of Cox Media Group, openly bragged 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 backed down when challenged, claiming it had never listened to anyone’s private conversations and had no access to anything other than “aggregated, anonymized, and encrypted third-party data used to serve ads.”

Despite CMG’s ties to Google, Amazon and Facebook through those companies’ advertising partner programs, all three of those companies denied ever being part of CMG’s “Active Listening” program. But many found these denials unconvincing.

If you surf online you will find page after page of alerts that your smartphone is indeed listening to you. (Granted, many of them are blog posts from cybersecurity companies selling privacy-related products, which makes them more or less credible depending on how you look at it.) Plus, CMG’s revelation throws some additional uncertainty into the mix.

So what does the evidence say? According to a technology expert, it’s complicated.

David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, told CNA that research he has personally conducted suggests that the question of whether our smartphones are constantly listening to our private conversations is largely a “no.” ”

Choffnes, who is also an associate professor of computer science, led the charge studies in both 2018 and 2020 to test the hypothesis that our phones are constantly listening. Choffnes and his colleagues ultimately examined more than 17,000 apps in an attempt to gain information about their potential to leak media content.

While their analysis revealed some security risks, “we found no evidence that apps are surreptitiously recording audio from our phones’ microphones,” he noted.

However, the results they got when they tested smart speakers like Amazon Alexa were a different story. Most of the models they tested, as previously mentioned, did not ‘wake up’ and start recording unless a specific ‘wake word’ was spoken. But sometimes, Choffnes warned, smart speakers can activate unexpectedly without the user’s knowledge think the wake word was spoken.

Choffnes also said that their tests suggested that smart speakers generally “usually only collect a few seconds of recording, but sometimes it was tens of seconds.”

As for whether a real human will ever hear these recordings, Choffnes noted that there have been cases where private conversations were made accessible to third-party contractors who listened to them for the purpose of improving the accuracy of the voice assistant’s speech recognition capabilities.

“So there is concern that real people have been listening to real conversations. Contractually, these conversations may not be shared or leaked, but contracts obviously do not prevent abuse,” he said.

“In short, I think it’s always a good idea to be cautious, but I don’t think this (covert recording by smartphones) should be a primary concern for smart device users at this point,” he continued.

“On the other hand, I think there is incredible value in removing technology from spaces we want to keep private – not just for privacy, but for peace of mind and eliminating distractions.”

When asked for his opinion on the policy banning smartphones in the Catholic confessional, Choffnes said that as a scientist he “strongly (endorses)” this position – and not just because of privacy concerns.

“I think the value goes beyond privacy because these devices also serve as constant distractions that I would expect would be unwelcome in places of worship,” he said.

However, Choffnes went on to say that it is important to point out that “a mobile app that records your conversations is generally not your biggest privacy threat.”

After all, it is already known that tech companies can and do track their users’ browsing history, app usage, and exact location, and use all of this for marketing purposes. Even religious apps have that sometimes caught abusing user data this way, he noted.

“Given how sensitive and personal one’s religion and religious activities are, I think this is an important consideration for clergy and congregants: think twice about installing apps, try to read the fine print if you can, (and) grant no permission they are not necessary,” Choffnes said.

And he repeated: “Turn off your device if you need privacy and focus.”

To ban or not to ban?

Bishop James Conley of the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, formalized a new policy this year a ban on priests using their smartphones in the confessional.

Father Caleb La Rue, chancellor of the Diocese of Lincoln, told CNA that he has heard anecdotally about several other dioceses implementing similar policies, specifically around privacy — the fear of “accidentally (recording), or in the worst case , to kick a priest’s ass.” someone calls and broadcasts someone’s confession,” he noted.

The main impetus for Lincoln’s policy, however, was actually not privacy concerns, but rather the recognition that a priest’s time in the confessional should be quiet, prayerful and free of distractions, La Rue said.

He said Conley had been “strongly encouraging” priests to leave their smartphones out of the confessional since at least 2014, without going so far as to issue a formal ban until this year.

“You’re not going to have your phone on the altar when you’re saying Mass. Why would you have your phone off while you’re hearing confession?” he said, adding that it was important to “counter the perception that the priest is scrolling Twitter while hearing confessions.”

However, La Rue acknowledged that many Lincoln priests – including himself – liked to use smartphones in the confessional for completely innocent reasons, such as checking the time and looking up prayers or scripture readings. Penitents also often take their phones to the confessional because they have a list of their sins on it or because they have pulled out the Act of Contrition prayer for reference.

But ultimately, La Rue said the policy is really about “removing anything that could possibly get in the way, or create an obstacle” to “an authentic encounter with Christ.”

“It’s about trying to keep the sacraments as holy encounters with God, especially God’s mercy in confession,” he said.