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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-a-lil-bit-of-spyin' dept.

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.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5882587/Facebook-wants-hide-secret-inaudible-messages-TV-ads-force-phone-record-audio.html


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Tuesday July 03 2018, @10:14PM (2 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday July 03 2018, @10:14PM (#702210) Homepage Journal

    an app running on your phone that turns the mic on 24/7/365

    Ha ha -- what? An app? You honestly don't think the smart phone operating systems themselves (or the firmware) do this already? Whilst offline it could log this stuff undetected if it wrote into a pre-allocated, fixed length file so you wouldn't notice a change in free space. I suppose you could run regular diffs on all files, but it could probably stash data on hidden sectors of the phone's internal memory.

    Actually I'd be interested to see a diff on a smartphone's entire internal file system when it's been left switched off for a few hours. I wonder if there's a way to read the internal storage on an external device without waking up the phone. I wouldn't want to see any changes at all. After all, it's supposed to be "Off"!

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday July 04 2018, @03:21AM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday July 04 2018, @03:21AM (#702342) Journal

    The Phone OS has no reason to attract bad publicly or law suits to help Facebook.
    The most generous thing one could say about this patent is that it is merely defensive. But I suspect nobody would believe that.

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    • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 04 2018, @09:08AM

      by acid andy (1683) on Wednesday July 04 2018, @09:08AM (#702461) Homepage Journal

      The Phone OS has no reason to attract bad publicly or law suits to help Facebook.

      TFA is about Facebook, yes. But Google, Apple and Microsoft make smartphone OSes. They want data too. I'll say no more.

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      If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?