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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: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday July 04 2018, @01:13AM (1 child)
I believe what's behind all this fear is a complete loss of trust.
Companies have foisted this lack of trust by making it difficult, if not impossible, to verify just what is being snooped on.
Most companies can be trusted. A few can't. And few ( if any ) of us know which is which.
What we do know is many companies pride themselves on "thinking outside of the box" when it comes to things like acquiring anything they can out of someone's machine if they will let them in. They figure it didn't cost them anything to get the data, and its a monetizable commodity. Carpe Diem!
I feel toward many web pages much like a merchant may think if somebody enters his business, with dozens of kids in tow, each wearing a little "javascript" shirt. The kids are getting into everything. Going through his books, counting the cash in his cash register.. going into doors marked PRIVATE, everywhere, and he can't lay a hand on 'em... they are kids... protected by law. The most he can do is block them from entering his store in the first place. But that often means turning away the adult that came with them.. an adult that might do business with him. He has to consider is it worth it to him to have all those kids in his store getting into everything. You want to find someone you can trust, and having some people dress kids up in little javascript shirts, and have them rifling through your machine does not do much for trust.
Little "business phrases" like "we will only share your information as permitted by law" sure sends my trust level on a downward spiral... laws can be bought. Nor do we know what information is being shared. Life is too much like a poker game, and if your competitor/opponent/customer/vendor/employee/employer knows certain things, they may seize opportunities when they know they have me over a barrel.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday July 05 2018, @03:14PM
Agree completely, the app biz right now is a dark alley at 2am. When I'm walking down the alley, well, duh, I know I'm not a threat at all, so WTF, but everyone assumes everyone in that dark alley is a mugger.
The infrastructure does not help. Thank you Google for making us all look like assholes. Bare unaltered Firebase/Fabric.io crashltics is as I describe, utterly no personal data and nothing any privacy advocate could be offended by, but those Google assholes added "features" such that crooks will add creepy as hell personal data to the upload "to help with debugging" which sometimes might be the honest truth but at least sometimes is scammy marketing.
Likewise the analytics feature; bare analytics would make a privacy advocate pretty happy as I've seen it used from the inside, but asshole google is like "let me help you out" and next thing you know crooked devs are doing full on identity theft.