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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 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.