Creeped Out: Privacy and Discrimination Risks of Health-related Machine Listening

New technologies and organizations’ practices are regularly placing pressures and challenges on our privacy and transparency rights. This month, Civic Tech Toronto and the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario are highlighting the work to defend, enforce, explain and update these rights.

Typical arguments about creepy technology focus on the visceral ‘ick’ factor of innovation. In contrast, this talk shares a methodology to track patterns of function creep and empirically assess changing privacy and discrimination risks. The research focuses on the product development and deployment of health-related machine listening: apps and devices that combine audio signal processing and machine learning techniques to produce sensitive inferences about people’s health from data points such as vocal biomarkers, coughs, infant cries, and other sounds. Drawing on a 10-year analysis period, the presentation will show the escalating privacy risks that are raised as health-related machine listening expands into new settings and targets ever-more data subjects.

Project website: https://www.infoscapelab.ca/projects/losingyourvoice

Speakers

Stephen J. Neville

Stephen J. Neville is a media and surveillance scholar based in Guelph, Ontario. Currently, he is a Fellow at the Infoscape Research Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. He was the principal investigator for “Losing your voice to AI”, funded by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (2025-2026), which mapped the emerging industry of health-related machine listening to address problems of data privacy, consent, and transparency. With Greg Elmer, he is the coauthor of The Politics of Media Scarcity (Routledge 2024) which foregrounds marginalized histories and storytelling as a challenge to dominant narratives of abundance and digital divides in media studies.