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Dystopian corporate surveillance threats today come at us from all directions. Companies offer "always-on" devices that listen for our voice commands, and marketers follow us around the web to create personalized user profiles so they can (maybe) show us ads we'll actually click. Now marketers have been experimenting with combining those web-based and audio approaches to track consumers in another disturbingly science fictional way: with audio signals your phone can hear, but you can't. And though you probably have no idea that dog whistle marketing is going on, researchers are already offering ways to protect yourself.
The technology, called ultrasonic cross-device tracking, embeds high-frequency tones that are inaudible to humans in advertisements, web pages, and even physical locations like retail stores. These ultrasound "beacons" emit their audio sequences with speakers, and almost any device microphone—like those accessed by an app on a smartphone or tablet—can detect the signal and start to put together a picture of what ads you've seen, what sites you've perused, and even where you've been. Now that you're sufficiently concerned, the good news is that at the Black Hat Europe security conference on Thursday, a group based at University of California, Santa Barbara will present an Android patch and a Chrome extension that give consumers more control over the transmission and receipt of ultrasonic pitches on their devices.
In Saks, no one can hear you(r phone) scream.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @04:06PM
C'mon guys, if I wanted that I'd go read the green site.
The solution is not to install apps that use the microphone. Or, if you have a mobile OS that allows you more fine-grained permissions, you can even install the app but not give it microphone access.
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Saturday November 05 2016, @04:47PM
Do you have GooMaps on your phone? Best look at the permissions you granted when you installed it. For some reason virtually every app in the Google Store wants access to not only your location, but also access to your phones camera, microphone, and images in your gallery.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @04:57PM
Google maps doesn't require any of those permissions. The only "inappropriate" permission it requires is access to contacts, but Google already has the contacts, so it's not a big deal (for a third-party app it would be).
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday November 05 2016, @07:25PM
Maps has hands free voice control, which is fucking amazing when careening down the freeway, half a second away from brutal death.
The images permission, if it exists, it probably to pull geolocation data to suggest places to go to in the Driving mode.
You may not want these features, but some people do, and these features in and of themselves aren't evil (it's up to you to trust that Google isn't also siphoning your data to the Illuminati in addition to these).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06 2016, @04:45AM
That's not even a "solution" at all.