Don't obey in advance

Welcome back to the USSR.

Four people are travelling by train, in the same compartment. They share a few drinks, and start talking trash about the party and the government. One of them decides to play a joke on the others: he finds the car's conductor and asks them to bring four cups of tea to the compartment at exactly eight o'clock.

Meanwhile, the others in the compartment continue to insult the authorities.

"Aren't you afraid to criticize the party so openly?", asks the first guy.

"Who will hear you here?", responds one of the others.

"All compartments in the train are bugged, you know", says the guy.

"Don't bullshit us like that"

"You don't believe me? Okay then. Comrade colonel, please send four cups of tea to the fifth compartment", speaks the guy loudly.

A couple minutes later, the door opens, and the conductor brings in four cups of tea. The others in the compartment fall silent, and hurriedly go to sleep.

In the morning, the guy wakes up and discovers himself to be the only one in the compartment. When the conductor comes around, he asks: "Where have the others gone? They were supposed to be travelling further than me."

"I don't know about that", responds the conductor, "But comrade colonel really liked your joke."

Depends where you are from. What are you saying that is so horrible that you need to be this paranoid?

Imagine how many times NSA agents/spys in general have witnessed/recorded evidence of fathers raping their children and have done nothing about it.

Unless you are a political enemy there is no immediate threat.

If you want to speculate on social credit stuff in the background we can speculate that you were flag as being a potential candidate to work on epstien island because you have the appropriate sense of humor or something jeez dude what jokes about a women have you acting like the government is going to get ya?

Baby I'm making them waste resources and spreading them thin

Yeah, fuck em

Yes it is.

If it's not, that has to do with you becoming an explicit target of 3-lettter agencies beforehand. Look, it's legally risky and expensive to collect data from people, evaluate it and draw conclusions. You can become a big enough target for those agencies to reason that it's worth it, but you gotta work really hard to get there.

In fact, the most likely thing for any given random person is either getting caught up in phishing attacks or getting chased by a PI at the mercy of family or a former partner that is holding grudges.

What I'm saying is yes, there's a tiny chance that it's not safe but if it really was dangerous for you to speak, you would probably already know.

Famously at Edward Snowden's first interview the NSA was tapping him and he was chased around right up until they lost jurisdiction and so every TSA checkpoint became dangerous for him. But everyone who thinks they are just as endangered as Edward Snowden is most likely just paranoid.

Yes, it's safe.

The microphones are generally not listening to and processing everything you say.

You can turn off your own devices' passive listening. (E.g., Siri, Google, Alexa...)

If they do listen to what you say, they're almost always not going to care beyond "How can we use this to sell you shit you don't need?".

It would be too much effort for too little gain, even with AI, to try to "catch" anybody for your "satirical jokes and banter". In the government's eyes, you're not as special as you feel you are.

And even if they did, you're unlikely to be charged for a crime unless you live in somewhere like North Korea, China, Iran, or maybe the UAE?

Its not safe, but if you genuinely stop doing that because of our benevolent tech overlords, you're also part of the problem.

I literally don’t give one fuck.

Yes.

Honestly, might not be.

Turning your phone off, and having the friend turn their phone off, probably helps. Computers are easier to put free/open, trustable OSes on, and easier to put into real sleep, unless it's one of those newfangled laptops that don't have a real sleep mode. Even for phones a degoogled Android like say Lineage should help, IF you have one of the (many) devices it's ported to (and then don't install proprietary apps on the thing – even if the app itself isn't sketchy, they could include an SDK that does sketchy stuff; you're not just trusting the app, you're trusting its dependencies too).

That's a bit much just for silly banter though. But probably worth it for serious conversations.

Then again, if you take precautions even for silly banter times, then it'll be harder to tell whether you're talking about something that needs to be confidential or not (like how everyone using encryption for mundane stuff makes it safer to use encryption). So yeah I don't know.

-- Frost

As someone who’s working in an adults only industry I could care less

Probs listening/gathering data of your conversations. For jokes it might be helping to give AI context for humour. I always notice ChatGPT understanding black humour more, so mabs thats why?

Would be weird to see a headline of "2 boys charged with offensive banter as phone secretly listens and calls police"