SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for SoyGuest52256
According to the patent, spotted by Metro, the system would use 'a non-human hearable digital sound' to activate your phone's microphone.
This noise, which could be a sound so high-pitched that humans cannot hear it, would contain a 'machine recognisable' set of Morse code-style beeps
Once your phone hears the trigger, it would begin to record 'ambient noise' in your home, such as the sound of your air conditioning unit, plumbing noises from your pipes and even your movements from one room to another.
Your phone would even listen in on 'distant human speech' and 'creaks from thermal contraction', according to the patent.
TV advertisers would use this data to determine whether you had muted your TV or moved to a different room when their promotional clip played.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 03 2018, @09:00PM (1 child)
This tech is a decade or so old in broadcast engineering land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_People_Meter [wikipedia.org]
I remember some scandal when it came out because noise pollution would be logged as "listening". If your coworker, a la office space, was playing his talk radio too loud, you'd be recorded as a faithful listener even if you're ignoring it or wearing headphones to tune it out, pretty wild. Ditto your apartment, if the jackass next door was blasting "spice girls" while you try to sleep, you are now officially logged as a devoted listener to that radio station. Ditto elevators. People not too concerned about being documented as listening to stuff they like, but got pretty wound up about being documented as listening to stuff they did not want to hear.
A lot of people who lost money when listening accuracy was improved filed lawsuits along the lines of their business model of surviving off faked audience numbers was being unlawfully interfered with, pretty crazy.
I would imagine "digital internet world" is about to go thru the same stuff legacy broadcast went thru in the late 00s, just tape-delayed by a decade or two.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @09:27PM
The difference is Nielsen is up front with what these things are doing.
And they are paying for the data.