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, @09:38PM
Trying not to get into the weeds, but one guys lack of input sanitation might be someone else's sql injection attack or sneaky buffer overflow attack, thinking back on the saga of little bobby tables. Fixing input sanitation mistakes should be a developer decision not a user decision.
Also crashlytics isn't really that kind of "system level" thing its a linked in user level library. You can crash an app on startup before you get situated enough to have that little upload dialogue if you badly enough screw up a database migration, perhaps. A system level crash reporter built into android operating at a level above the app would be a great idea, but its not here today. Maybe that'll be the end result and the app dev will have no involvement in crash reporting at all other than a possible recipient of reports.
Another long term outcome is likely removal of features from Crashlytics such that, however helpful it can be, you can no longer include arbitrary data from the app. Oh well. Paranoid people think all crash reports have the feature including the variable containing the user's social security number and moms maiden name and all their sexting pics and are furious mad that might be recorded somewhere temporarily to fix some bug. More realistically the cleanup project I was in had no access to anything interesting like that, didn't log anything additional that I can recall, and most crash dumps were dumb stuff like calculating the statistical average of a table that "can never be empty" but none the less is empty, by adding up a subtotal (ok, result zero...) then dividing it by the length of the empty table (that being zero) oh snap divide by zero. The longer I program the more I expect the "impossible" to not merely be possible, but common, so I wouldn't do something that dumb, but things happen and thats really what crashlytics is for, not sneakily collecting every Sekret Squirrel's top-secret-nuts.