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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: 3, Informative) by bitstream on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:19AM (1 child)

    by bitstream (6144) on Wednesday July 04 2018, @12:19AM (#702264) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday July 05 2018, @03:21PM

    by VLM (445) on Thursday July 05 2018, @03:21PM (#703012)

    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.