Is your phone listening to your every word or watching you through the camera?

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Is your phone listening to your every word or watching you through the camera?

December 22nd, 2017

Awake Goy

We were sitting in a rooftop restaurant, 30 storeys up, overlooking the Empire State building in New York, when my daughter confessed that she thought she was being spied on by a professional network of cyberspooks.

‘Look at this,’ said Lois, presenting me with her smartphone, where an advert for a snazzy little instamatic camera was displayed. It had popped up a few seconds earlier, when she’d logged on to Instagram.

She met my quizzical ‘so what?’ face with exasperation.

‘What were we talking about? Just now? In the street, down there?’ she said.

Sure enough, we’d been window shopping before our lunch reservation, and spotted a little gadget shop. I remembered Lois had commented on the instamatic cameras on display (dropping a few hints for her forthcoming 21st birthday, I suspected).

We’d had a brief conversation about how they were all the rage in the Eighties, and how one of my memories of Christmas parties at my parents’ house was listening to that familiar ‘whirrr’ and watching the wealthier guests flapping about the instant photos, as everyone waited for them to dry.