Yes Virginia, The Cyberverse is Spying on You

By Violet Wisdom

Encriptions make it impossible to… nothing is impossible. It’s all connected and what little of your data that isn’t being sold or shared with apps is one supercomputer nanosecond away from being accessible to whoever wants your information. 

We’ve been told for years that the only way an app (specifically social media apps) can have access to your phone calls, location, and/or text messages is if you allow it. In 2018 it became public that text and call information was being accessed from Android phones by a social media site. The response reaffirmed you could easily stop the sharing in your settings and that they were only collecting what numbers you called or texted, nothing like actually listening to your conversations. 

We’re still being told it is impossible for texts, calls and conversations to be data mined. We’re no longer shocked when we get the mail from the end of our driveways and find notices that our personal information has been stolen in a data breach. We’ve accepted that our social security numbers, address, bank account numbers, health records, etc aren’t secure anywhere. We look at the notices that say, hey, we got hacked and they got your information. We don’t know to what extent, or how they plan on using it. It happens, want free credit reporting for a year?

So, why would we doubt for an instant that our the little computers in our back pockets aren’t sending everything we say and do to the highest bidders? Our little digital personal assistants spy on us. Lawsuits in 2023 and 2025 brought that to the public view. And we just wanted the music turned up in the living room and that neighborhood porch pilot caught. 

It’s gotten worse. Recently. Very recently. For several years I caught it here and there. The time my husband and I went to a jewelry store after a tiny diamond fell out of my wedding ring I was bombarded with ads for jewelry. When my son worked for a pest control company in 2020 he spent a week talking about mice. I was hit with ads for mouse traps on social media, my Roku, even my weather app. Last month though, a really odd one occurred. Our daughter came out to visit over New Year’s weekend. She showed me several pictures of green cabinets on her phone. She bought a house and wanted to look at every picture that has ever existed of green cabinets to decide exactly which shade to paint her own. Like I said, she showed me the pictures on her phone. Didn’t send any to my phone. Didn’t tag me in anything. Didn’t email me. Just showed me. My social media switched from its typical gardening and nature posts from pages I don’t follow to green cabinets from pages I don’t follow. The more I scrolled, the more green cabinets I saw. It stopped after three weeks. 

Today, I got a new slew of posts. Photography tips. I don’t talk much about my photography. I grab my camera, leave my phone in the house and go outside to take pictures. It’s also not a new interest. I got my first manual camera in 1983. That happens when your parents are photographers. No, today I got a text message from a friend. We’re all a bit snowbound and she texted a “hope you’re staying warm” text. I replied, “I am! Did have to grab the Nikon and run outside for a few snow pics.” So it begins. Sure it seems innocuous. Seeing posts on how to frame the perfect photograph is far from hair-raising

It is, though, confirming. I enjoyed the bubble I lived in. Sometimes the needle pressed into the side a bit causing a momentary dose of reality but I always managed to slip safely back in my bubble of thinking I don’t live in an Orwellian nightmare. The bubble is officially popped. As a writer, my online behavior will do little more than confuse the hell out of AI data mining, but beware. We’re being watched, listened to and profiled. I’m going to move to a new bubble now where I don’t know why.