Privacy in the confessional: Is your smartphone listening
to your sins?
CNA Staff, Oct 28, 2024 / 06:00 am
Anyone who uses a smartphone has likely experienced the same
unsettling phenomenon — a pointedly placed advertisement that seems to show up
right after you’ve discussed a topic or product.
Could it be true that your phone is “listening” to your
private conversations?
It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer — and one
that has bred enough uncertainty that bishops are starting to issue bans on
smartphones in that most private of Catholic spaces: the confessional.
Here’s what you need to know about the privacy concerns
surrounding smartphones and how one Catholic diocese is responding.
Protecting the seal
Right off the bat, it’s important to point out that the
Catholic Church takes privacy in the confessional very seriously.
The sacrament of confession, also called reconciliation, was
implemented by Jesus Christ as the means of forgiving sins. He passed the
authority to forgive sins down to his apostles, who in turn passed it down to
the priests of today.
The “seal of confession” binds priests to treat a penitent’s
privacy with the utmost solemnity; in fact, over the centuries, some priests have chosen death rather than
reveal what they have heard. If a priest reveals any information he learned in
the context of confession, he will be excommunicated from the Church latae
sententiae — essentially, automatically.
What about if someone else hears your confession, or you
accidentally overhear someone else confessing their sins? Well, in that
instance, the person overhearing the confession is bound by what is known as
the “secret” and is forbidden from sharing any of that information.
It’s possible that a Catholic layperson could be
excommunicated for breaking the secret, though normally it would involve a
penal process rather than occurring automatically like it does for
priests.
As you can imagine, intentionally recording someone’s
confession is also a big no-no. The Church formally addressed this problem in a 1988 decree in which the
Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote that anyone
who records or divulges a person’s confession is excommunicated from the
Church latae sententiae.
Smartphones — worth the risk?
It’s long been known that the “smart assistants” built into
almost every modern phone, such as Apple’s Siri, do indeed “listen” constantly
for wake words such as “Hey Siri” unless a user specifically turns that setting off. (The odds are good that
most tech-savvy people who are concerned about privacy have already done
this.)
Perhaps a deeper concern, though, is the myriad of smartphone
apps that inexplicably ask for full access to a user’s camera, microphone, and
location — despite no clear need for control over those aspects of a user’s
phone. Could those apps be “spying” on us?
This long-simmering fear was thrust back into the spotlight
late last year when it came to light that CMG Local Solutions, a
subsidiary of Cox Media Group, was openly bragging about its ability to listen
through the microphones of people’s smart devices to “identify buyers based on
casual conversations in real time” using artificial intelligence.
CMG quickly backpedaled when challenged, claiming that it
had never listened to anyone’s private conversations and didn’t have access to
anything beyond “third-party aggregated, anonymized, and encrypted data used
for ad placement.”
Despite CMG having ties to Google, Amazon, and Facebook
through those companies’ ad partner programs, all three of those companies
denied they were ever a part of CMG’s “Active Listening” program. But many have
found these denials unconvincing.
Browsing online, you’ll find page after page of
warnings that yes, indeed, your smartphone is listening in on you. (Granted,
many of them are blog posts from cybersecurity companies that are selling
privacy-related products, which makes them either more or less credible,
depending on how you look at it.) Plus, the revelation from CMG throws some
additional uncertainty into the mix.
So what does the evidence say? According to one technology
expert, it’s complicated.
David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and
Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, told CNA that research
he has personally conducted suggests that the question of whether our
smartphones are constantly listening to our private conversations is, for the
most part, “no.”
Choffnes, who is also an associate professor of computer
science, conducted studies in both 2018 and 2020 to test the
hypothesis that our phones are constantly listening. Choffnes and his
colleagues ultimately examined more than 17,000 apps in an attempt to gain
information about their potential to leak media content.
While their analysis did uncover some security risks, “we
found no evidence that apps are surreptitiously recording audio from our
phone’s microphones,” he noted.
The results they got when they tested smart speakers like
Amazon Alexa, however, were a different story. Most models they tested, as
mentioned before, didn’t “wake up” and start recording unless a specific “wake
word” was spoken. But sometimes, Choffnes warned, smart speakers can
unexpectedly activate without a user’s knowledge because they think the
wake word was spoken.
Choffnes also said their tests suggested that smart speakers
generally collect “only a few seconds of recording most of the time, but
sometimes it was tens of seconds.”
As for whether any actual human will ever hear those
recordings, Choffnes noted that there have been cases where private
conversations were made accessible to third-party contractors who listened to
them for the purpose of improving voice assistant accuracy for speech
recognition.
“So there is concern that real people have listened to real
conversations. Contractually, these conversations should not be shared or
leaked, but of course contracts don’t prevent misuse,” he said.
“In short, I think it’s always a good idea to be cautious,
but I don’t think this [secret recording by smartphones] should be a primary
concern for smart device users at the moment,” he continued.
“On the other hand, I do think there is incredible value in
removing technology from spaces that we intend to be private — not only for
privacy but also for peace of mind and elimination of distractions.”
When asked about his opinion on policies banning smartphones
in the Catholic confessional, Choffnes said that as a scientist, he “strongly
[endorses] this position” — and not just because of privacy concerns.
“I think the value goes beyond privacy, since these devices
also serve as constant distractions that I would expect to be unwelcome in
places of worship,” he said.
Choffnes continued by saying, however, that it is important
to point out that “a mobile app recording your conversations is not usually
your biggest privacy threat.”
After all, it’s already well known that tech companies can
and do track their users’ browsing history, app use, and exact location — using
all of them for marketing purposes. Even religious apps have sometimes been caught exploiting user data in
this way, he noted.
“Given how sensitive and personal one’s religion and
religious activity are, I think this is an important consideration for clergy
and congregants: Think twice about installing apps, try to read the fine print
if you can, [and] don’t grant permissions that aren’t needed,” Choffnes
said.
And, he reiterated: “Turn off your device when you need
privacy and focus.”
To ban or not to ban?
Bishop James Conley of the Diocese of Lincoln,
Nebraska, formalized a new policy this year banning
priests from using their smartphones in the confessional.
Father Caleb La Rue, chancellor for the Diocese of Lincoln,
told CNA that he has anecdotally heard about several other dioceses
implementing similar policies specifically over privacy concerns — fears of
“accidentally hitting [record], or worst-case scenario, a priest butt-dials
somebody and broadcasts somebody’s confession,” he noted.
The primary impetus for the Lincoln policy, however, was
actually not privacy concerns but rather a recognition that a priest’s time in
the confessional should be quiet, prayerful, and free from distractions, La Rue
said.
He said Conley had been “strongly encouraging” priests to
leave their smartphones out of the confessional since at least 2014, without
going so far as to issue a formal ban until this year.
“You’re not going to have your phone out on the altar when
you’re saying Mass — why would you have your phone out while you’re hearing
confessions?” he said, adding it was important to counter “the perception that
the priest is scrolling Twitter while hearing confessions.”
La Rue acknowledged, however, that many Lincoln priests —
himself included — liked to make use of smartphones in the confessional for
perfectly innocent reasons, such as for checking the time and looking up
prayers or Scripture readings. Penitents, too, often bring their phones into
the confessional because they have a list of their sins on it or because they
have the Act of Contrition prayer pulled up for reference.
At the end of the day, though, La Rue said the policy is
really about “removing anything that might possibly get in the way, or be an
obstacle” to “an authentic encounter with Christ.”
“It’s [about] trying to keep sacraments as holy encounters
of God, especially God’s mercy in the confessional,” he said.
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