The concern about our personal privacy has escalated seriously in the United States in the past few weeks, brought about by an accidental convergence of several independent events or public revelations.

Disclaimer: I will cite events and some facts without being fully informed about all the details. I do not mean this post is to inform or educate, but rather to alert the reader and incent further investigation.

We found out that the NSA has requested phone records of private citizens from Verizon. In the turmoil of this story, news has surfaced that the NSA has built a 100,000 square foot, 2-billion-dollar data center in Utah, all presumably designed to mine our private data.

The Verizon request asked for date and time of calls, the numbers called from and to, and the length of the calls. I know Verizon has this information, since it’s printed in my statements. I suspect Verizon also has digital recordings of all my calls, and copies of all my data transactions, including emails, texts, browsing history and other app-related data, which could just as easily be sitting in the Utah data center of the NSA this very moment.

Smart phones are very privacy-invasive devices, by their very nature. We entrust them with our most secret thoughts, sometimes intimate photographs of ourselves and others, we speak into them what we want our partners to hear on the other end, and we record our private information through them. All this information goes through a network, and anyone willing and motivated could intercept all of this for his own legitimate or illegitimate purposes.

If you have an iPhone and have used Siri, you know that the thing can listen to you and understand what you’re saying. But to turn on Siri, you have to push a button, right? So you’re safe when the phone is sleeping. Not so.

I am sure you have received “pocket calls” where somebody’s phone called yours, while it’s in their pocket, and you heard muffled sounds, but more often than not actual conversation fragments that the caller knew nothing about.

My iPhone is on my desk next to me as I type. It’s sleeping, or so I think. I just saw an article about a kid in Silicon Valley who got tired of having to push the iPhone button to activate Siri, so he wrote an app that, when active, makes Siri listen all the time. He can now just talk to his sleeping phone and it wakes up and responds, asking him what he wants.

The fact that he can write this app shows me that the phone is able to listen all the time, on or off, whether I know it’s listening or not.

It also has a camera, front and back. I think it’s only using the camera when I activate the camera app. Really? How do I know? What keeps me from writing an app that looks and records what it sees, front and back, all the time? How would I know? That fact is, I wouldn’t.

I recently also heard that a former Nokia engineer disclosed that as far back as 2007, there was a way that the NSA could remotely TURN ON your mobile device, as long as it knew your phone number. So even of you have powered down your device – if you think your device is completely powered off – the NSA can remotely turn it on. It’s never really off, it’s always ready to receive commands, local or remote. The only way to prevent this from happening was to pop out the battery.

Of this, I also have no evidence. But just the possibility scares the hell out of me. I will never look at my iPhone the same way again. The thing could be outright evil. I have no privacy at all while it’s on me, listening to me, near me, watching me, or while it’s recording everything I do on it.

Let’s leave smartphones for a moment and go to the family room, where the Xbox One sits. You turn it on simply by saying “Xbox On.” This implies, of course, that it’s listening to you all the time, waiting for that command. Microsoft ensures us that it’s not listening to anything else.

Really? I am supposed to believe that? What about the NSA PRISM program requesting direct access to servers from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Skype, AOL, PalTalk and YouTube back to 2007? When Microsoft says my privacy is important, that’s supposed to make me comfortable, when I know that the long arm of the government can reach all the way into my living room through the Xbox One sitting there, listening to every word I say?

Not only does it listen, it can see me, and track my eye movements. It can tell what on the screen I am looking at. What else can it see me doing, sitting on my couch, presumably thinking I am alone?

The irony of all this is that we are volunteering to do this. Nobody is forcing us to use smartphones and carry them with us everywhere we go. Nobody is making us buy Xboxes and place big brother’s eyes and ears right into our living rooms. We are spending our own money on those machines, and we are choosing to subject ourselves, and our privacy, to them.

If you are not frightened enough yet, read The Traveler – by John Twelve Hawks for a healthy dose of paranoia – and probably reality, to really stir things up.

With the government invading our privacy, the threat to our welfare is far, far greater than anything the government could do to “take our guns away” which we seem to have been so worried about recently.

Privacy – what privacy? We have given that up years ago without even a fight.