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from the always-listening-to-our-customers dept.
Synchronizing email, texts, calendar, bookmarks, contacts, notes, git? Done.
Synchronizing what ads you heard when you had your phone in your pocket, and you tablet on the train, and you computer on your desk? Also done.
ArsTechnica (UK) has an article about synchronizing consumer and friend's device use without consumer involvement.
The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
Cross-device tracking raises important privacy concerns, the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote in recently filed comments to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC has scheduled a workshop on Monday to discuss the technology. Often, people use as many as five connected devices throughout a given day—a phone, computer, tablet, wearable health device, and an RFID-enabled access fob. Until now, there hasn't been an easy way to track activity on one and tie it to another.
"As a person goes about her business, her activity on each device generates different data streams about her preferences and behavior that are siloed in these devices and services that mediate them," CDT officials wrote. "Cross-device tracking allows marketers to combine these streams by linking them to the same individual, enhancing the granularity of what they know about that person."
According to TechCrunch, Silverpush says it "isn't receiving any actual audio data" from some 18 million smartphones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 15 2015, @02:25AM
When I was a child, only obvious nutters said that television was listening to us .
The intended audience fr this ultrasonics technique, I assume, is those who don't have the chops to put their sets on the Internet and couldn't be bothered to hire someone for the task. I doubt that advertisers want to reach those who air-gapped their TV sets for security or privacy reasons. It might be hindered by removing the microphone from the TV set, but not necessarily: a TV set could just repeatedly transmit its usage data regardless of whether it gets a query.
There was an earlier story about smart TVs: /article.pl?sid=15/11/10/1914254 [soylentnews.org]