It’s a question many people ask quietly, after noticing something small but strange. An advert that feels too specific. A recommendation that echoes a private conversation. A sense that someone else is paying attention.
Smart devices are designed to listen — at least sometimes. Voice assistants, smart TVs, baby monitors, and home hubs rely on microphones to detect wake words or commands. That much is openly acknowledged by manufacturers. What’s less clear, and more unsettling, is how much listening occurs outside those moments, and what happens to the data that’s collected.
Most major technology companies state that their devices are not actively recording unless triggered. In practice, this means microphones are always-on, but they’re in a passive state, waiting for a key sound pattern to wake them. When a false trigger occurs — and they do — short audio clips may be recorded, processed, and stored.
According to disclosures from companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, some recordings are reviewed by humans to improve accuracy. These clips are typically anonymised, but they originate in private spaces: kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms. Places where people speak differently than they do in public.
Smart TVs and baby monitors introduce a different kind of concern. Many include microphones or cameras that operate independently of voice commands. In some cases, default settings prioritise convenience over privacy, and users remain unaware of what is enabled until they actively check.
This doesn’t mean smart devices are secretly surveilling you in real time, at least, not purposely. There’s no credible evidence of constant, deliberate eavesdropping, malicious or otherwise. But the discomfort doesn’t come from conspiracy. It comes from opacity. From not fully knowing when listening begins, when it ends, or how fragments of domestic life are stored, analysed, or retained.
The psychological impact matters as much as the technical reality. When people suspect they’re being listened to, behaviour changes. Conversations soften. Words are chosen more carefully. Silence stretches. The presence of a device alters the atmosphere, even if it never records a single usable second.
That tension — between convenience and quiet self-censorship — sits at the heart of modern domestic life.
In SEETHINGS, the surveillance is so subtle that no one knows it’s happening. No one alters their behaviour. That’s the point. If the characters altered themselves, surveillance wouldn’t be necessary, and the data gathered would be useless.
That’s why the question about device listening persists. Not because we’re so naive to believe that it can’t happen, but because we don’t know which device it’ll happen to or when. And then not knowing what’s being heard becomes the most disturbing part of all.
–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)
SEETHINGS II follows the return of the Storm Killer as a body on a secluded beach in Moreton Bay, igniting fear and denial. While police dismiss the link, the media doesn’t. Mitchell Felding forms a dangerous bond with a man who understands his darkest impulses. When Natasha enters his life, carrying love letters from her murdered mother, intimacy deepens, and truth closes in. Some futures are inherited. Some have escaped.
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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