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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @08:25PM (1 child)
it may not be, in some places in the usa. you may recall recently a kid being dragged through court-approved glass because he recorded part of a conversation without explicitly notifying the other party.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 03 2018, @11:34PM
And the interesting thing is that apparently what he violated was school policy, not some more generally applicable law. (How that got escalated to a felony I don't understand, so perhaps I'm wrong.)
That said, in many states you require consent of both parties to record over a phone line, and that's probably the law that really was used. Why it was used is a separate question. The kid wasn't even marginally a minor, as he was, IIRC, 13. That's really abusive overreach.
THAT said, I do wonder what this means about people who use telephone answering machines.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.