A pair of artists have hidden recording devices in random public and private places around New York City and have been tweeting people’s private conversations for months as part of an experiment to increase surveillance awareness.
Kyle McDonald and Brian House installed the Wi-Fi-enabled audio recorders in lamps at McDonalds, a library, a bank, Washington Square Park and even a bedroom. The captured audio is then sent to the crowdsourcing Internet marketplace Mechanical Turk, where workers transcribe the conversations and post them on Twitter. They call the project “Conversnitch.”
Many of the bits and pieces of conversations posted are rather harmless.
“Socks, I need socks.”
“No, I don’t follow the weather. You can’t trust what they say.”
Others touch on more private topics.
“I’m not pestering you, hun, I’m just asking why you didn’t get the job!”
“I’m not sure I’m qualified for the new position.”
“I’m really fine. Please, just drop it. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
— Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 18, 2014
“So you are posting stuff you don’t want me to see. What are you posting about?”
— Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 18, 2014
“It’s twitter. It’s just twitter. Settle down. Screw it, I’ll unfollow her if you really want.”
— Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 18, 2014
“Are you sure you want to be talking about this? I really don’t know if this is the place.”
— Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 18, 2014
“What does it mean to deploy one of these in a library, a public square, someone’s bedroom? What kind of power relationship does it set up?” House said in a Wired report. “And what does this stream of tweets mean if it’s not set up by an artist but by the U.S. government?”
The artists have made the Conversnitch source code public, allowing anyone interested to copy the experiment.