Somebody's Listening In "Talkwalker" - Intelligent People Assume Nothing

This morning I was going through the numbers on my Substack page. It’s a list of where readers come from.

Most of it is what you’d expect. People who come straight to the page, people from the Substack app, a handful from Google and Bing. Then one line stopped me. One reader came in through something called Talkwalker.

I had to look it up. Talkwalker is what the business world calls a social listening service. Companies pay it to watch the internet for them. Its machines read public posts, comments, news stories, blogs, forums, and reviews, all day and all night. They hunt for a company’s name, its products, its competitors, and the topics it cares about. Then they report back on who said what, and how people seem to feel about it.

So here’s what that one visit most likely means. Somebody’s machine was reading the internet for its client. It came across something I wrote. It flagged it. Then a person sitting at a desk somewhere clicked the link to see what this old man had to say. The machine read my work before any human did.

I’m not upset about it. What I write is public, and I write it to be read. If a company wants to know what I think about AI, they’re welcome to it. But it made me stop and think about you. Because most folks have no idea this goes on.

Think about the last time you left a review. Maybe you were mad at a restaurant, or a phone company, or a car dealer. You typed out what happened and posted it. You probably thought the manager might read it, or a few other customers. You likely didn’t picture a machine reading it within minutes, scoring how angry you were, and dropping it into a report for a company that’s never met you.

Or think about a comment you made on a public post. You were having a back-and-forth with a stranger about a news story. Those words don’t just sit there. If they mention a brand, a politician, or a hot topic, there’s a fair chance a listening service has read them, counted them, and filed them with thousands of others that sound like yours.

Some of these tools can do more than read words. They’re built to spot a company’s logo in a photo, even when nobody typed the name. So the picture you posted of your grandson in a ball cap can show up in somebody’s count, all because of what was stitched on the front of the hat.

This isn’t all bad. A lot of the time, these services are how a company finds the customer who’s been wronged. Someone complains in public, the company sees it, and somebody calls to make it right. That’s a good use. A business that listens is better than one that doesn’t.

The trouble isn’t the listening. It’s that only one side knows it’s happening. The company knows exactly what it’s collecting about you. You don’t know it’s being collected at all. That’s not a fair table. One side is playing with all its cards face up on its own screen, and the other side doesn’t even know there’s a game.

And it’s all done by AI now. No room full of clerks could read millions of posts a day. A machine can. It decides what matters, what’s angry, what’s a threat to the brand, and what gets passed along to a human. Those choices are made by rules you’ll never see, set by people you’ll never meet, for a client you’ll never be told about.

So what can you do about it? More than you’d think. You can’t stop the machines from reading public words. But you can decide what’s public in the first place. That’s where your control is, and it’s yours to use.

Start with your settings. On Facebook and most other sites, you can choose who sees your posts. Friends only keeps your words off the open internet, where these services do their reading. Public means anybody, and anybody includes a machine working for somebody you’d never shake hands with. Take five minutes and check what yours are set to. A lot of people find out they’ve been posting to the whole world for years without meaning to.

Next, before you post in public, ask yourself one question. Would I say this out loud in a room full of strangers taking notes? Because that’s closer to the truth than the picture most of us carry. It’s not a chat at the fence with your neighbor. It’s a public record, and it’s being read.

That doesn’t mean go quiet. Your voice matters. Complaints get things fixed. Opinions change minds. I’m not telling you to stop speaking. I’m telling you to speak knowing who’s listening. A man who knows he’s being watched chooses his words. A man who doesn’t, gets his words chosen for him.

And when you leave a review or a public complaint, say it straight and say it true. Stick to what happened. If a machine is going to score it and a company is going to read it, make sure what they find is the facts. Clear words get action. Angry rambling just gets filed.

The last thing is simple. Remember that free sites aren’t really free. When you don’t pay with money, somebody is paying with you. Your words, your pictures, and your habits are the product somebody else is buying. Once you see it that way, you start making different choices about what you hand over.

I’ll keep writing in public. That’s my choice, made with my eyes open. If a listening machine picks up what I say about keeping AI honest and passes it to some company, good. Maybe somebody in a meeting room will read it and think twice.

But I want you making that same choice with your eyes open too. Somebody’s listening in. Now you know. What you say next is up to you.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing