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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, @10:47PM (5 children)
Looking more closely at the version numbers, I am not working the afternoon before the 4th, but clearly someone IS working ... One of the NPEs in the hopper crashed this afternoon on a phone described as "Android SDK built for x86" so ...
As a cultural phenomena the crash hopper at a multi-person company ends up about like you'd expect with orphaned junk in it that doesn't age out until its auto-deleted in 30 days, so naturally some dev didn't delete the other NPEs and no one else will because its kind of sabotage if someone actually needed that data (who?) and there's no theoretical way to reverse the data and de-anonymize who crashed their emulator, so its impossible to figure out who done it. With more motivation and less alcohol I could log into the VPN then the rdesktop to the cluster to get into the gitlab to see who was making commits to that java class around the time of the NPE which doesn't exactly prove who caused the problem but does implicate someone who fixed it, but ... I'm lazy. Which makes the point that its hard to violate someone's privacy if even the guys working there with source code access still can't effectively de-anonymize a crash report.
Firebase and crashlytics and all that is like a network test tool; the fact that a crook could pingflood someone with it doesn't prove everyone with that binary is in fact a criminal requiring extensive regulation, in fact most people are not criminals. Again, the fairly obvious gun control analogy, that the only people following the draconian rules are by definition exactly the people you don't need to worry about and shouldn't be subjected to the draconian rules.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bitstream on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:19AM (1 child)
I think our perspectives may differ. I'm thinking primarily on "core dumps". They may contain memory regions of various data.
Your logging stuff may be way less prone to inadvertent data leakage.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday July 05 2018, @03:21PM
Ehh... Android studio is free, Google firebase with crashlytics and analytics is free, you can log in and try this stuff yourself if you don't believe me for nothing but hours.
Computing world being very big, there could be some competitor product you're talking about that I'm unaware of that uploads your complete photo gallery and stored website passwords with every NPE; but I can assure you, not with what I have experience with.
I'm not kidding, you get a crash in crashlytics, it doesn't have memory dumps or variable contents, which sometimes makes debugging weird, yet merely knowing what crashed when is often enough data to fix stuff. I suppose a real jerk could embed single bits of data at a time in the backtrace by having string to binary functions recursively call each other and then do a 1/0 to drop a crash where the backtrace is a binary representation of "secret data", but its impossible to prevent active intentional malice.
Maybe Apple dev tools contain curious stuff in their crash reports; again, I've only worked on Android using standard google services with one non-scummy company.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @03:45AM (2 children)
What happens when you are not in that company and an asshole psychopath replaces you?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @06:52AM
You mean, how will they tell the difference?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 04 2018, @03:14PM
Are they looking for one? I'm available.