Excuse me while I overshare and tell you all about my recent experience purchasing some new underwear on Amazon. The actual buying of the undergarments went off without a hitch. (And the underwear? It's fantastic!) What took place after the purchase, however, gave me a moment of digital pause.

Later that day, I clicked over to Facebook and was greeted with ads for men's underwear. This ad placement was, of course, no coincidence. My purchase evidently followed me down the cookie-crumb trail from Amazon to Facebook. Let's put aside the seeming upside down logic of attempting to sell something to me after I've already bought it, and take a moment to appreciate that viciously efficient data funnel.

Data is the lifeblood of The Modern Internet. All those "free," tech-enabled magical abilities we take for granted (the ability to virtually Facebook stalk your family and co-workers, Google the entire universe, or buy anything in the world with a few clicks) aren't actually free, of course. We've rented out our eyeballs in exchange for cool future toys.

By quantifying our behavior, companies can deliver surgical marketing strikes to potential customers. And the platforms that package this behavior are making a killing selling it to advertisers (Apple being a notable outlier by selling a closed ecosystem at a premium rather than your data). This is what the marketplace in the age of algorithms looks like.

Taking this data-thirsty business paradigm into consideration, what are we to make of Big Tech's push into the always-listening digital assistant space? Devices like Amazon's Echo (inhabited by Alexa) and Google's recently announced Google Home (haunted by "the Google assistant") allow users to scour the Web, make purchases, and control other connected devices, just by speaking. These devices are only activated into service by specific voice prompts (e.g."Hey, Alexa"), but in order for those interactions to work, the microphone always has to be turned on.

Hands-free UIs have been around in some form for a number of years—think phone-based tech like Siri, Google voice search, and Cortana. Facebook has even experimented with a feature that can use your device's microphone to identify what music or TV shows you're listening to.

However, we are beginning a whole new chapter with the introduction of dedicated, always-listening appliances (not to mention the bevy of smart voice-activated devices that have been market for a number of years). Even Apple is rumored to be looking at taking over its premium cloistered niche. In a way, our very homes are becoming conscious.

These devices are all part of a compromise. We allow Silicon Valley to listen to our living rooms (and other previously offline oases) in exchange for letting us feel like we're commanding The Enterprise.

I don't think we consumers are necessarily getting the short end of the deal. We get some very useful and cool tech out of it. For example, I am an avid user of the "OK Google" voice search on my phone. It's a far superior process to tapping in a search query on a touch screen. I love it. But there is one freaky aspect to it: Google keeps these voice searches (and their machine-guided transcripts) on its servers. And they'll likely stay there forever unless I decide to remove them.

If you use "OK Google" for search and haven't had a chance to peruse your past searches, you really should. Go to google.com/history, click the hamburger in the top-left corner, and select "Voice & Audio Activity." Here you'll find data about every time you've used the function (in my case, it went back years).

Listening to my vast library of recordings, it wouldn't be difficult to piece together key elements about my life—from ambient noises, I was able to discern not only when I was inside or outside when the recording was made, but which room in my house I was in; in one search, the sound of a TV on across the room clearly revealed one of the shows my kid was watching; and, unsettlingly, the voices of my wife and young son were captured in the background and are now stored on Google's servers.

In effect, I willingly volunteered to bug my own house and place my family under surveillance.

Google's official lawyer language states that one of the reasons these recordings are stored is that "your voice & audio activity items help Google understand what you say when using features like voice search." And, to be sure, the company's machine-learning technologies have used these recordings (and my subsequent corrections) to improve speech understanding over time. This is no simple engineering task and helps me use the technology, so I'm fine with the recordings being there. (And I should also note that Google gives users the ability to delete particular recordings from their servers—or I could simply choose to not use the feature if I was truly worried about it.)

But as it stands now, Google has a not-unsubstantial collection of personal recordings. If it's not happening already, you can be assured that machines will one day peruse through all that audio in search of marketing data points. This isn't some crazy way-out-future tech, it's called "audio content analysis," and it's a huge new field of research. Exactly how this audio data mining is handled is still being sorted out.

We've already seen issues stemming from voluntary home-surveillance beginning to percolate. Last year, there was a small privacy furor around Samsung's Smart TVs, because of Orwellian language in the privacy policy that stated, in part "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." Samsung later clarified how it's using recording technology and updated its Privacy Policy.

Even if companies aren't yet scraping ambient audio recorded in our homes, they are free to pivot their business models at any time. (And, let us not forget all those hackers and other malevolent players in the greater webbernets.)

Feel unsettled about all your conversations being monitored? Well, unfortunately, there's probably no turning back. Once the technology is perfected and your friends and neighbors start using them, you'll want to talk to your house, too. Once the engine of technological progress turns on, it doesn't turn off (and, if history is any guide, you'll probably just learn to be okay with it).

Right now, at this very moment, engineers and associated bean counters are hard at work constructing an infrastructure that will quantify a whole new segment of your life: the analogue conversations taking place in your home (or in any home that has these devices).

There is simply too much potential money at stake for tech companies to risk not investing in these conversational interfaces. The good news is that when tech companies compete, the public gets to enjoy a tsunami of #FutureCool—think of how mobile phones evolved from the Motorola RAZR V3 to the Apple 6 Plus in just a decade while, as a point of contrast, the comparatively less-lucrative microwave market features 2016 models that are largely indistinguishable from those sold in 2006. The bad news is that there is a trade-off that many people aren't even cognizant of (if they care at all).

I love technology, and I genuinely believe that its continued evolution always ends up being a plus for humanity. But let's not lose our awareness of this brand new thing that is happening: Technology is literally becoming unavoidable.

In the 1990s, the Internet—and all the businesses that lived there—only had access to us when we rode our screeching modems online. In the mobile age, the Internet (via ever-strengthening data networks) travels with us though out the day, but there are still times when we put the phone down or turn the Fitbit off. Soon enough, this will no longer the case—the very concept of "going offline" will soon be rendered obsolete.

Just imagine what type of underwear ads will be in store for us then.

Questionable Material: Are you worried about tech spying on you? Technology is listening. Should you be paranoid? Why or why not? Posted by PCMag on Wednesday, May 25, 2016

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