With the internet of snitches, 
you’re always on the air.

We call it the internet of things, but it’s really the internet of snitches, because snitches reveal things about us we might prefer to keep under wraps. These devices in our cars, refrigerators, and DVRs regularly track and report not just their status, but our status as well: what we’re doing with the devices, and where. It’s an indirect report, to be sure, but it erodes our privacy all the same. Now, two new web-enabled gadgets— a TV and a doll—directly record and report what we say, which is the very definition of snitching, and our ebook readers, which have been around a bit longer, can even peek inside our heads to expose what we think.

It’s not like nobody saw this coming. In 1877, one year after the invention of the telephone, the New York Times, reflecting the common belief that wires strung high above cities would register everything people said, not just on the phone, but also face to face, predicted that to protect their privacy, people would stop talking altogether and pass notes instead:

No matter to what extent a man may close his doors and windows, and hermetically seal his key-holes and furnace-registers with towels and blankets, whatever he may say, either to himself or a companion, will be overheard. Absolute silence will be our only safety. Conversation will be carried on exclusively in writing. . . . An invention which thus mentally makes silence the sole condition of safety cannot be too severely denounced.

Excerpt from “The telephone unmasked.” New York Times, Oct. 13, 1877, p. 4.

And in 1928, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis anticipated the dangers posed by inventions yet to be invented that would outdo the telephone at broadcasting our words and thoughts. In his dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928), a ruling which affirmed the legality of warrantless government wiretaps, Brandeis warned that,

the progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts and emotions. . . . Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?

Flash forward to the present, when our computers and smart phones report our clicks and locations to businesses intent on selling us more stuff, and to the government, as it hunts down terrorists, suspected terrorists, potential terrorists, anyone who might have heard of terrorists, looked up definition of “terrorist,” or used the word in a game of Scrabble, and just to be on the safe side, all their friends and contacts as well. In other words, businesses treat us all as potential customers, and government treats us all as crooks and revolutionaries.

In the old-fashioned analog age, the secret police snooped the old-fashioned way: encouraging children to denounce their parents, wheedling information out of neighbors, coaxing disgruntled workers to rat on bosses, and bribing bosses to turn in their underlings. Now the internet of things is both snoop and snitch, capturing and transmitting all our data untouched by human hands. No fuss, no muss, no third-degree in a dank cell.

The internet of things consists of labor-saving devices that trade our privacy for convenience:

• a refrigerator that reports when the milk is running low
• a car that sends help when you have a flat
• an ebook that remembers the page where you fell asleep
• a thermostat that knows when you are sleeping and knows when you’re awake
• a watch that not only tells time, it tells your heart rate, BP, LDL, and deepest hopes and aspirations.

To do this, the devices transmit information about their users: how much milk you drink, and how fast, where you drive, and how fast, what you read, and how fast, where you run, and how fast. The internet of things knows when you’ve been good or bad, and whether the plants you are growing illegally in the basement really need all that ammonium nitrate. Businesses will gladly pay for this information, and government will either subpoena it or just capture it as it flies across the web.

The latest addition to the internet of things is voice recognition: now you can talk to a device that is not your phone to activate it and make it do something. For example, Samsung’s new Smart TV lets you turn the set on with voice commands, so you can search for programs with your voice instead of fumbling through the couch pillows for the remote. That means your television has to hear everything you say when you’re within earshot, even when the set is off, in case you suddenly decide to watch something. But it also means your secrets are no longer safe. In its privacy policy, Samsung warns you to watch what you say when you’re near the television:

Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.

So much for Smart TV in the bedroom.

Screen cap from online ad for Samsung Voice Control—“You talk. Your Smart TV listens”—showing a child talking happily to his television set. With Smart TV, you’re always “on the air.”

But it gets worse: the internet of snitches is also spying on the kids. Hello Barbie, “the world’s first interactive Barbie doll,” talks to you, records what you say, asks and answers questions, tells jokes, remembers your name, your mother’s maiden name, the name or your first pet, and all your passwords. And, like Smart TV, Hello Barbie sends everything you say to the cloud, where it’s analyzed, monetized, or turned over to the authorities.

Mattel, which markets Hello Barbie, claims that what children say to their dolls won’t be used against them in a court of law, but parents can opt to receive emails with audio files of their children’s conversations with the doll, and so can the feds, who don’t need a warrant. She’s Hello Barbie because you say “Hello, Barbie,” to get her attention. But Mattel really should have called her NSA Barbie.

Screen cap from promotional video of Hello Barbie being demonstrated at the New York Toy Fair.

Hello Barbie is creepy, and there’s a movement afoot to stop the doll from getting on the shelves. But the widespread popularity of e-books poses an even greater threat to privacy than refrigerators, TVs, or toys that tell, because unlike devices that report what we’re saying and doing, e-books report our thoughts, and they do this by reading us as we read them.

Our Kindles and our iPads track what we read, when we read, how fast we read. They record our bookmarks and annotations, remind us what we searched for last, and suggest other titles we may like. They notice which books we give up on and which we finish. And they share that information.

Librarians will risk jail rather than reveal to government snoops what patrons are reading, because the right to read unwatched is a fundamental component of the right to privacy. But even when we’re totally alone at home with nothing but an e-book to keep us company, there’s an e-reader over our shoulder spying, and telling. Amazon and Apple collect our personal reading data in the name of improving our digital reading experience, and feel no compunction about monetizing that information or turning over our reading records to anyone with a badge if they ask nicely. 

That’s the internet of things, of snitches, so far: Brandeis predicted it; Orwell couldn’t imagine how pervasive it might be. And it’s only just begun.

In 1984, George Orwell warned, in all caps, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Today he’d have to add, “BIG BROTHER IS READING YOU.”