Joseph Turow. The voice catchers: How marketers listen in to exploit your feelings, your privacy, and your wallet

Abstract

“Voice profiling is a gateway drug to a new era of hyper-personalized targeting,” (p. 227) Joseph Turow concludes in his book The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen in to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet. This crucial function of what Turow calls the “voice intelligence industry” explains the urgency of Turow’s most recent endeavor: a thorough examination of this industry which consists of different players, most centrally call center firms and the developers of voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, the Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and Samsung’s Bixby. The industry is united by its interest in using voice as another source for collecting biometrical data. Such voiceprints, as Turow figuratively puts it, are the “gold in people’s speech” (p. 192). In contrast to the face as another source for biometrical data, voice has received comparatively little public attention.