Privacy has been a hot button topic lately and with good reason. Millions publicly submit personal information to private networks every day, and anyone with a smartphone can sneakily snap a picture of anyone else - let alone worrying about the surveillance grid our governments have secretly been working on the world over.
Two artists, Kyle McDonald and Brian House, tasked themselves with exploring covert surveillance from an affordable, DIY point of view. Disguised as a lamp or a lightbulb and able to attach to any light fitting, Conversnitch secretly records the private conversations of passersby which are then farmed out to Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform for transcription. The fun doesn't stop here, as conversations are then uploaded publicly to Twitter, and Conversnitch now has its own running stream of non sequitur snippets taken from everyday chatter. While neither McDonald or House will admit to deploying the device, according to the above video it does look a little like one has been left in a few public locations.
Consisting of just a Raspberry-Pi, a microphone, a flower pot and an LED, Conversnitch can be constructed by pretty much anyone with some basic know-how for under $100. If the concept sits uncomfortably, well, that's kind of the point - if two artists can easily set up an amateur spying network, what other possibilities are out there in a post-Snowden world?
While netizens may not be protected so easily against intrusive governments, perhaps there is at least some comfort to be taken from avoiding online annoyances in person, using "anti-social networking" apps such as Hell Is Other People and Cloak.