Electronic Ears

Interestingly I received a trust pop up from my AV software regarding software activity. Updates rolled out the other day, machine rebooted and things were running as usual. This morning when the pc came up I received an activity notice regarding cognitive speech services which seemed to be linked to the browser. Not that it is something attempting to do something nefarious, it just seemed strange. A quick lookup, (which I assumed would be the case) was that it was linked to speech recognition... the translation of spoken audio to text. I had always considered this in the past, and I am fairly certain that this machine is not the only piece of hardware with the potential to listen to my boring life and conversations. With all of the tracking of "personal information" it certainly warranted the unplugging of my microphone (which is normally turned off but not physically). Creepy does not begin to describe the far reaching affect these binary number crunchers can or could have on our lives. Their ability to manipulate the actual portrayal of truth, applications that now have the ability to put works in peoples mouths, realistic embedding of people in videos, it may be time to consider their role in the game. Since they first came out, probably some 20 years ago, I have never owned a webcam or device that did not include its own piece of tape. I have never trusted them and I am fairly certain that I never will..