Is Your Cell Phone Spying On Your Confessions?

The believers are beginning to realize that ears are everywhere:

As our smartphones become smarter and social media expands, so does the risk that your privacy will be increasingly breached.

In light of this, how much of a danger is it to bring your smartphone into the confessional? And what precautions can priest and penitent take?

“All phones have a microphone, and Facebook and many other phone apps require access to the microphone and camera,” said Fr. George Hajj, parish priest at St. Anthony of Padua Maronite Church in the United States. “Therefore we don’t know what technology, and in whose interest it is in, to spy and overhear what is being said in the confessional…”

Facebook “listening” technology uses the same algorithmic technology that allows your smartphone to identify a song playing in a restaurant. The phone uploads “waveforms” of ambient sound picked up in its microphone, then compares those waveforms to a massive database of nearly all recorded music. When it finds the match, it reports it back to you. This is all accomplished nearly instantaneously. These same “listening” algorithms now track certain words or phrases as they are picked up on the phone’s microphone. So, if you are talking with a friend about taking a trip to New Zealand, the algorithm will hear and identify the words “New Zealand,” and then populate your Facebook or Google advertisements with content relative to New Zealand tourism. These same algorithms could very easily be programmed to record data after picking up the sound waveform of the words, “Bless me Father, for I have sinned…”

Why would a priest even think in these terms? I know you can think about someone being able to turn your phone on remotely, but who would ever think somebody would actually do it? And who would think about it while serving is such an occupation as priest, where danger is so far away?

Here is a thought – how many priests are getting a window into the surveillance state when the members of their flock who are taking part in it come in to confession? This is the second article I have seen in a religious publication talking about the risks of confessions being eavesdropped on through cell phone technology.

The confessional is probably the single best place to gather intelligence on a believing target. Every sin they have committed, even the most private, are laid bare.

Ever wonder what that new NSA facility needs to be able to store a yottabyte of data for?

Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields.

This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. Yes, they need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.

It is not impossible they are using the waveform of the phrase, “Bless me father, for I have sinned,” to detect and hoover up confessions over cellphone networks all over the nation, so they can add them to everyone’s database file, for later perusal, should you become of interest – or should they want to add you to their informer network.

Paranoia will become the new black, in the Brave New World we are heading toward.

Help Spread r/K Theory, even if just by talking about it around your cell phone