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Google to Use PC Microphones to Listen In?
seriv writes "The Register reports that Google plans to use PC microphones to collect statistics on a user's environment. Peter Norvig, who directs research at Google, told Technology Review that this software would start to show up in Google software 'sooner rather than later'. The software collects short sound clips and removes background noise. Google then targets its ads based on the statistics collected. With the current level of online privacy, this new level of invasion would seem to have frightening possibilities."
If anybody believes this story I've got some oceanside property in Nevada I'd like to sell them.
Seconded.
While I don't think there is "evil" in the intentions of the engineer who thought this "clever" thing up, or the marketing guy who figured the data would be useful, or the corporates who realised it could boost the shareholder value, lets not forget that the government can obtain the data if they so desire as well.
As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
First off, this is the Register.. take it with a grain of salt.
Second, does anyone actually believe that - if this was true - you'd be forced to use it to use Google software? Google might track every statistic imaginable, but no one is forced to use anything they provide.
"This sounds like bullshit to me" gets rated INSIGHTFUL??? Man, Slashdot has gone down the tubes.
Anyway, it's not bullshit. ArsTechnica had this article about it in June. The idea is to grab a 12-millisecond sample of audio and transform it into a 32-bit "fingerprint" using an algorithm on the client side, then send the fingerprint to a server that compares it against a database of fingerprints from known television audio. From that they can determine what program you are listening to. If the mike picks up 12ms of you talking on the phone, the generated fingerprint simply won't match anything.
This is far from eavesdropping in the 1984 sense, but is a hell of a POC for it, and it does amount to sensing information about you that you might or might not want someone to know. The folks at Google seem to have worked hard to come up with a technique that they don't think will bother people. I see this as a classic case of very smart geeks thinking up a very clever technical solution without seeing the forest for the trees.
>lets not forget that the government can obtain the data
What data?
Each 5-second chunk is represented by a 4-byte number. Google says the transformation is irreversible. If it were reversible, Google would have found a way to encode audio at 4*8/5==6.4 bits per second.
This is for detecting whether you've got a particular broadcast going. The privacy implications are that maybe you don't want this government knowing that you listen to NPR, and that there might be a stealth "upgrade" later from Google or from somebody malicious that would improve the resolution.
Better than The Register, here's a Technology Review article about Google's microphone sampling.