Your Pocket Dials Are Not Safe

No one is safe from the occasional butt dial, and the stakes of accidentally forgetting to lock your phone just got a little higher. A court in Kentucky says a butt dial eliminates your right to privacy and that anything said during such a call is fair game to the unintended listener. As reported by Bloomberg, the particular case revolved around a 91-minute butt-made phone call:

James Huff inadvertently placed a pocket-dial call to Carol Spaw while he was on a business trip in Italy. Spaw stayed on the line for 91 minutes and listened to face-to-face conversations that James Huff had with Larry Savage, James’s colleague, and with Bertha Huff, James’s wife. Spaw transcribed what she heard and used an iPhone to record a portion of the conversation between James and Bertha Huff (the Huffs). The Huffs brought suit against Spaw for intentionally intercepting their private conversations, in violation of Title III.

The Huffs did not win the case, however, and the judge ruled that pocket dials do not protect your conversations. The real question in all of this: Are touchscreen-made butt dials even all that common?