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.

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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.