Weekend Open Thread: “Yeah.”

By
Greg Diamond
– January 21, 2022Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice

My wife and I had an interesting experience the other night. We were in our dining room and she he was showing me a new phone charger she had found for cheap — which she intended be used on my side of the bed, since I had lost my charger cord while traveling. I said that I wasn’t sure that it was long enough, and she said that it was the same length as the one on her side of the bed, which I’ve occasionally been using. I asked again: “Are you sure it’s long enough?”

“Yeah.”

The response did not come from my wife. It came from our living room, essentially the same room in our open-plan home. It was an adult woman’s voice, somewhat high, but not extremely so. It was unaccented, casual, familiar, unaffected — not “girlie,” not plaintive, just normal. “Yeah.” Clear, like she was standing at most a few yards away.

Our heads both whipped around and stared towards towards the living room. We didn’t see anyone there; we didn’t hear the shuffle or scuttle of anyone moving. I rushed in forward to see if anyone was in the bathroom off of the living room, which connects to the backyard. The door was open, light off. Checked it; checked the shower stall. No one.

We have a Google speaker in our living room near the TV, but its voice is more of an alto. No radio or phone. The TV was off.

We have also been clearing property out of my father’s house, after his wife died a few years ago and he has moved into a nice senior facility. (Hence my absence from this blog.) If it was an apparition, it wasn’t her: she too was an alto.

So: probably not a home invasion. Probably not a haunting or a slip in the space-time continuum or a parallel universe, but only because I do not believe in such things. Not a hallucination: we don’t use drugs and we had independently heard the voice and reacted without coordinating with the other. Not some blurt from the TV; it was off. There was only one device running in the room that could have made such a sound.

We can’t prove anything, of course, and the most we can do is to offer an opinion. And we might have a different sort of bug, too,

“Hey Google,” my wife said. “Did you say anything?” I forget the speaker’s exact words, but the gist was “no.”

“Have you been listening to us?”, my wife asked.

“I routinely listen for your commands, which have to be preceded by ‘Hey Google!’ …” or some such thing.

After a little more back-and-forth, Google volunteered: “Do you want me to delete your conversations from today?”

What?!

“YES!”, we said in tandem.

Google said that we would have to go into Settings and “Voice Recognition,” because she didn’t recognize my wife’s voice. We couldn’t figure out what we were being told to do, so —

“Hey Google, OFF!”

A moment passed.

“We should unplug it,” my wife said.

I agreed. But we haven’t.

I thought of two movies in the aftermath of this event.

One was the Francis Ford Coppola/Gene Hackman classic, The Conversation, a Best Picture nominee at the 1975 Oscars., which deals with the means and effects of electronic eavesdropping. (That description is woefully inadequate; you should seek out and watch the movie if you haven’t. Actually, even if you have.)

The other was German (based on life in East Germany, when there was such a thing) called The Lives of Others, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2006, about the paranoia of living the society dominated by East German Communist Party’s Secret Police, the Stasi, and the privilege of those who misuse their power.

Our best hypothesis as to the source of that voice — because all of the others seem so bad — was that at least two people were indeed listening to us and, with an errant elbow or God-knows-what, toggled from receiving to transmitting at the moment where the woman responded to a question with a “Yeah.” This has never happened to us before; it has not happened again since.

We hear a lot about surveillance of cell phones — I forget the name of Anaheim’s alleged system for such — and surveillance through our phones and computers. I’ve long figured that, if I were a good enough leftist activist, I would probably be targeted for it at some point — but I’ve also thought that perhaps I am not quite good enough for that. This unexplained event was a rare, quick — one word — glimpse into the possibility that it is true. I don’t know what to do about it; if they have that sort of access to us, they can probably easily find another if we did unplug the smart speaker. We have already let our guard down. We have not legally permitted such access to our lives — that we know of — but all we can think of doing is to keep on living them as if it is not happening.

If anyone who has to do with surveillance is reading this, let it be known: beyond the limited functionality of passively waiting for our commands, we do not consent to monitoring and capturing of our communications. That’s just for the record, for whatever recourse we may someday discover that we have for harms as yet unimagined.

This is your Weekend Open Thread. (The way things have been going, though, it may last a month.) Talk about our haunting or anything else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of discretion and decorum.

Did I forget to include “decency” in that list? Yeah.

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)