This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the August 26, 2019, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound ([tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet)).
As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.
➕ **Field recording is not for wimps.** Remember the scene in Grizzly Man, the Werner Herzog documentary, in which we watch the director’s slowly contorting face as he listens, in a mix of fear and astonishment, to the audio of a dying Timothy Treadwell, the film’s title character, as Treadwell (an unfortunate name in this circumstance) is mauled by a bear? Keep that in mind as you read about the reported death of Julien Gaulthier, a “French artist who used sounds of nature in his music.” Gaulthier had been traveling in a remote stretch of Canada with a biologist, Camille Toscani, “recording new sounds for his work.” Toscani reports a “[bear entered their camp at night and dragged Gauthier away](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/20/french-musician-julien-gauthier-killed-by-bear-in-canada).” (via Daniel C and Tobias Reber)
➕ **Sarah Jeong, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, writes about Facebook and audio surveillance as part of The Privacy Project.** It’s a limited-run email newsletter. The crux: “insistence that Facebook is not listening to you is, predictably, undermined by Facebook, which sometimes is secretly listening to you.” Jeong is distinguishing a widespread perception (that Facebook or some other service is serving something up to you in an ad or other content based on something you have said) from a reality (that Facebook, for example, is using humans to transcribe audio you may believe to be entirely private). This is [the difference between a deep-seated anxiety and a practical, uncomfortable reality](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/opinion/facebook-privacy.html).
➕ **Consider sonic warfare as a subset of “[hostile architecture](https://whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/why-is-this-interesting-the-hostile)”:** that is, as an audio parallel to uncomfortable benches, skateboard-resistant ledges, and spiked window ledges.
➕ **”The harvesting of biometric data from sometimes vulnerable populations has raised concerns about the potential for mass surveillance.”** Madhumita Murgia, European technology correspondent for the Financial Times, ties audio surveillance together with eye, face, and other technologies into a concern about [biometric data](https://www.ft.com/content/cdf0d52a-c2de-11e9-a8e9-296ca66511c9).
➕ **That hyperviolent fighting video game is actually vegan food-violence porn.** Or at least its [sound effects](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYS0rPYjW28) are. (via NextDraft)
➕ **”Last month alone, Americans received an estimated 4.7 billion illegal spam calls.”** Apparently [a dozen major telecom providers are teaming up](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/major-u-s-phone-companies-agree-to-plan-to-combat-endless-robocalls.html) to fight this. The name of the underlying technological fix is STIR/SHAKEN, which sounds like a James Bond reference, apparently stands for “[Secure Telephony Identity Revisited and Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs](https://robocalllawsuit.com/stir-shaken/).”
➕ **The only thing worse than receiving a call from a spam number may be inadvertently asking your voice assistant to dial one.** [Your robo-assistant may be doing you a disservice](https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/08/21/beware-using-google-assistant-alexa-or-siri-to-call-businesses-could-connect-you-to-scammers-instead/) that has nothing to do with invading your privacy. At least not in the manner you’ve come to be concerned about.