Listening To People Have Sex

Listening To People Have Sex

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Amazon contractors may be eavesdropping on consumers' personal conversations, including perhaps during their most intimate moments, according to a new report about the popular in-home digital assistant.
The British tabloid The Sun heard from a former Alexa analyst in Bucharest who said that Amazon employees in the Romanian capital have spoken about listening in on couples having sex, and on possible instances of sexual assault.
"It's been said that couples having sex and even what sounded like a sex attack have been heard by staff," the 28-year-old analyst said to the paper. "Amazon told us everyone we were listening to had consented so I never felt like I was spying."
The Sun report follows an April exposé from Bloomberg that began to unravel the intricate process of self-proclaimed quality assurance that Amazon implements in order to improve speech recognition patterns on Alexa devices.
"The [audio review] team comprises a mix of contractors and full-time Amazon employees who work in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica, India and Romania," Bloomberg reported. "They work nine hours a day, with each reviewer parsing as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift, according to two workers based at Amazon's Bucharest office, which takes up the top three floors of the Globalworth building in the Romanian capital's up-and-coming Pipera district."
The integrity of Alexa's privacy safeguards and compliance with privacy laws have come into question in recent months. Four U.S. senators sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission in early May asking the agency to investigate Amazon's digital assistant for kids over concerns that, through rampant data collection, the company was violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
The Sun 's reporting did not ascertain the nationalities of anyone captured in the recordings, but consumer privacy groups have raised red flags over possible violations of U.S. law for recorded incidents involving U.S. consumers.
Marc Rotenberg, the president of the digital privacy watchdog EPIC, told Newsweek that corporations generally can't get around federal wiretapping laws "by saying 'we're just doing testing.'"
"The companies claim that recordings only start with the use of an alert word, but there's lots of evidence that's not correct," Rotenberg said of the broader digital assistant market. "They seem to be routinely monitoring speech, which is not surprising if you're trying to catch an alert. But from our perspective this is classic unlawful surveillance."
In response to a request for comment, an Amazon spokesperson defended the company's process of human-based review of captured recordings to improve its speech recognition algorithms.
"We take the security and privacy of our customers' information seriously," the spokesperson told Newsweek in a written statement. "We have strict technical and operational safeguards in place to protect customer privacy, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Data associates do not receive information that can identify customers, access to internal tools is highly controlled, and customers can delete voice recordings associated with their account at any time."
Amazon would not specifically address the allegations involving possible recordings of sex or sexual assault that were printed in The Sun .
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Corine Jansen
Director & Chair (Health), GLC.
She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Foundation Ikone and ambassador Changeday Netherlands

Copyright © 2022 Global Listening Centre.
By: Corine Jansen
Director & Chair (Health)
Global Listening Board
Huub Stapel a dutch actor is having his second show on stage about the differences between men and woman, M-V2. It is a very successful show in the Netherlands. According to Huub, the most important advise for a good relationship is to listen to each other.
While much has been said about women and men being from different planets and having their own cultures, the reality is that we have all grown up on the planet earth, and interact with each other every day. And although there are really strong differences I need to say that we have to be careful to not stereotype and assume that all men will act a certain way and all women will act a certain way. There are women that have some traits that might be attributed to the male style or the other way around.
Okay so we know they see the world through completely different perspectives. But what about listening? Can man listen better than woman?
He is conditioned to listen actively. When a woman initiates conversation he assumes she is seeking for advice or assistance. He engages with the woman, filtering everything she’s saying through the lens of, “What can we do about this?” Learning to listen patiently doesn’t come easily to him.
Men better than women are often able to stay focused on one speaker and ignore others in the environment.
On the other hand, women far more often then men tend to check their environment for other important messages.
She sees conversation as a productive end in and of itself. If she feels sufficiently heard she may not need to take further action to resolve a problem or “make things better.” The fact that she has been listened to assuages her anxieties and dulls the pangs of negative feelings. Sharing with someone who understands and loves her heals her from the inside and equips her with the emotional tools necessary to handle the trials of the outside world.
Women tend to understand the emotional parts of messages more effectively than men. This is probably because research indicates that women process messages on both sides of the brain more so than men. Men tend to process more on the left side of the brain and emotional information is processed on the right side.
According to Larry Barker and Kittie Watson, authors of the book “Listen Up,” men and women typically employ different listening styles. Men are more likely to be action-oriented listeners, which means they focus on listening to information pertinent to the task at hand. Action-oriented listeners have little patience for speakers who ramble off topic or include unnecessary details. Women are more likely to be people-oriented listeners. They connect with the emotional message and undertones of a conversation and are more concerned with the occurrence of the conversation than with the pertinent information discussed.
Men and women in listening roles during conversations tend to express their responsiveness in different ways. Women often interject with small acknowledging remarks such as “yes,” “I see” and “mm-hmm” to show the speaker that they are actively listening and processing the contents of the conversation. Men tend to listen silently, interjecting sparsely and usually only to ask clarification. The difference in response style can cause women to assume that men aren’t actively listening to them in conversations, while men tend to think that women “overlisten.”
The difference in listening habits of men and women is more than just perceptual. A study by Dr. Michael Phillips, a neuro-audiologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine, found gender differences in the brain activity of men and women. Brain imaging scans showed that the left brain hemisphere of men in the study was activated while listening, while both hemispheres were activated in women. This data suggests that there is a physical difference in listening between men and women.
Well despite all the research about gender differences in listening, little to no evidence suggests that members of one gender are better listeners than members of the other. Men and women can listen equally well. Listening ability appears to be more due to individual differences and circumstances than due to gender.
Regardless of why men and women don’t listen the same way, it is important to know what to do to have a better understanding. Remember that these are general guidelines and that each individual is different.
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By
Brandon Gorrell ,
August 3rd 2012

Welcome to The Overthinker’s Guide — a weekly column that aims to advise overthinkers on the difficult situations that seem to characterize the lives of those who too often succumb to analysis paralysis. This week, I’ll cover the difficulties of overhearing your roommate having sex, which can be especially problematic if you’re already feeling #foreveralone.
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I live in an apartment with two guys. I share one wall with one of them, and another wall with the other. I have heard sex exactly one time, at around three in the morning — a sort of frantic, animal panting sound that quickly turned into rapid-fire cries of pleasure. The whole thing lasted no more than 10 seconds; I guess she was climaxing. It had woken me up, and as I lay there afterward I felt troubled. Don’t feel so weird, it’s just sex, I thought. Are you so vanilla that you can’t hear two people fucking?
One time when I lived in Seattle I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. I usually worked at our “dinner table,” a small thing of polished oak situated next to a large window that overlooked an apartment building across the street, and because I couldn’t sleep that night, that’s where I sat. Our place was on the fifth floor so I could see into four stories of apartments in the adjacent building. Sometimes we would notice people walking around in each of their apartments; it was always of mild interest, to watch what people with their social convention program inactivated, not filtering their appearance through their perspective of how others would perceive them. Scratching themselves, jumping, stretching, sitting in funny positions.
As it happens, on this particular night, as I was looking at our view of the city beyond the building, something in one of the apartments caught my eye. A large man was exercising on the floor of the living room. I squinted for a few seconds. I noticed there was something underneath him, and he quickly moved to the end of the… thing. He’s face-fucking her , I thought. And then I felt strange.
Inner monologue of a person hearing their roommate having sex
“What… what is that? I was dreaming about… what was I dreaming about? Is that…? Are they having sex. Hold on a second. [Pause for 20 seconds.] They’re having sex. Fuck. [Pause for indeterminate amount of time.] Oh god, I can hear slapping sounds. Jesus, she’s loud. Don’t they know I’m in here? Okay, the sound’s dying down. Please let them be finished. I’m just going put this pillow over my head and even if they’re not done I won’t be able to hear them and I’ll totally get back to sleep. This is a totally viable sleep position. Head sandwiched between pillow, forearms applying pressure to where your ears are. Great job, genius. You’ll totally get to sleep like this. [Pause for indeterminate amount of time.] Are they still having sex? I can’t tell. Is that noise coming from outside? Well, now I feel like now I’m actually trying to hear if they’re having sex despite the fact that I desperately want it to end . I’ll just take the pillow off for a second to see if they’re still doing it. Jesus, they are, it’s faster… How long can they do this for? How long can this guy go? Should I make sounds in here to let them know I’m awake? They don’t care. They’re having sex. Time for the earplugs.
Theoretically I don’t have a problem with seeing other people have sex. I watch porn… it doesn’t bother me. I probably have an average amount of shame concerning sexual behavior. But having it happen in your physical proximity can be troubling. Why? Why is that? Sex is someone surrendering to a person who’s taking, something that is not society, not convention, not safe, not normal, not sanctioned… it somehow feels tragic and depressing. Anyways.
Six tips for mitigating the difficulties of hearing your roommate having sex
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