Slashdot Mirror
Ad Networks Using Inaudible Sound To Link Phones, Tablets and Other Devices (arstechnica.com)
ourlovecanlastforeve writes with a link to Ars Technica's report of a new way for ads to narrow in on their target: high-pitched sounds that can make ad tracking cross devices and contexts. From the article: The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
And why can a rogue website or app access the microphone? Oh yeah cuz android.
They pull crap like this and then have the gall to say adblock users are evil?
Don't you think?
Enough with the pollution already!
IANAL, but I was wondering if this would be illegal under wire-tapping laws. A quick glance over the code (18 - US 2511) actually specified "oral" not "audio" communication. Would this then be exempt?
I suppose any app that takes advantage of this would have a disclosure about the recording buried deep in its legalese.
Time for a new hardware-based ad blocker...
The summary mentions tablets repeatedly, but none of mine even have a microphone. So how does that work?
The only difference is that then, you were explicitly aware of it and consented to carrying around the device.
News flash: carrying around a cellular-connected computer in your pocket, and trusting applications that you can't verify, puts you at risk for THINGS HAPPENING. Discuss.
1. Mics don't pick up ultrasonic
2. Speakers don't reproduce ultrasonic
3. And even if these somehow did, Nyquist already limits it all
Look at a high-end mic's response curve. Most barely get above 16 kHz, after which they drop off very fast. Compare that to any system that may be attached to a computer. Same for a loudspeaker. High-freqs are directional, meaning if you get off-axis even a little, even more drop-off. All BULLSHIT. The internet at play and the eager ignorants ready to believe anything it proclaims.
Sounds like it might be time for an Ultrasonic Jammer in my house. They have them to supposedly keep pests away. I'm sure it would blanket the area and disrupt any ultrasonic tracking. Hopefully they won't bother the family pets too much. http://amzn.to/20SJgu6
--
Don't have a smartphone, don't have a tablet, and don't even have a microphone on my desktop machine -- and now, even less interested in ever owning any of those than I was five minutes ago. For the rest of you, I'd suggest hacking into your TV or home theatre receiver, and putting a lowpass filter in all the baseband audio lines so these 'inaudible' signals won't get passed through to the speakers.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
If you RTFA, you'll note that no one actually says this is happening yet.
This is about a complaint filed with the FCC to prevent the use of this technology. One company, SilverPush, is cited as having developed the technology and details about it are in the public view, but that's the only case where there's even anything to cite about this form of intrusive technology.
You can let your hackles go back to their normal position now.
yeah, and I'm sure that everyone's devices will be operating so in spec, and the algorithms designed so carefully, that there will never be any possibility that the harmonics bleed over into the audible and drive everyone within hearing distance nuts with the annoying sounds? Great idea!
People who design, build and profit from things like this do not deserve to eat, pay rent and taxes or... erm... breathe.
And neither do the sites that advertise this way.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
News about ad networks doing evil tracking and such comes up all the time, but I have to wonder what all that data is any good for? I don't use ad block and yet all the ads I see tend to be either be pretty unimpressive and untargeted. They might know that I am male and they might be clever enough to show video games advertisement on a video game site, but that's about it. In a lot of ways the targeting makes the ads actually worse, as they end up covering a far narrower range of products and lead to a lot of repetition. Youtube can be notoriously bad at this, showing you the same ad 20 times in a row. There are also some ads that are extremely personalized, but they are unimpressive in the other direction, Amazon ads for example will just show me products that I just watched on their site. So won't show me anything new, just stuff I am already familiar with.
Never seen ads that actually extrapolate my behavior and interest and end up recommending me a product that I would actually be interested in buying. I found good old untargeted advertisement on TV or magazines far more useful for that, as that showed a lot of products that I didn't even know existed.
The small speakers in phones would have no problems at high frequencies, its the low frequencies that require big speakers. I'd be surprised if any phone speakers were rated 20-20k at +/-3dB, more like 200-20k probably.
Ultrasonic response is not something most devices are good at. We, unsurprisingly, tend to design your sound systems around what we can hear. Particularly when you are talking cheaper equipment the high frequency response of speakers and microphones is often not very impressive. There's also the issue that the digital audio compression we use for things, like TV broadcasts, deemphasizes high frequencies.
So for this to work they need:
1) A TV broadcast with sufficient audio bitrate to get their high frequency signal encoded (the AC-3 streams usually used in ATSC broadcasts can be any bitrate from 64kbps to 448kbps).
2) Encoded in such a way by the broadcaster that the high frequencies are preserved to a sufficient amount that their signal isn't distorted.
3) Reproduced by speakers good enough to produce their signal, but to do it at a sufficient level to be picked up (speakers roll off at more extreme frequencies).
4) Picked up by a microphone with sufficient range to be able to receive such a signal and isn't being occluded too much be being in a pocket or something.
5) Processed by a program running on the device, that has control of the microphone at the time the signal is playing.
Ya... While that isn't impossible, that is not likely to work any real amount of time. To have any good chance of working you'd probably have to push the signal down in to the audible range, which would of course piss people off to hear spurious high frequency noise. Likewise for it to be of any use the user would need to have an app on their device that is running. The mic doesn't magically record everything that comes in and store it for anything to access. A program has to be running and take control of the microphone to be able to get any input from it.
This sounds like an advertiser pipe dream, not something that has been tried with real technology in realistic settings.
People seem to think that ultrasonic communication is some kind of magic. It isn't. I mean it can be done, no question, you can encode information in sound, and you can do it in sound frequencies above human hearing. However that doesn't mean you can do it with any arbitrary device, or under arbitrary conditions.
there's no "Decline forever" option.
Yes there is. It is called death and is a part of nature.
Well people --- you're just in a pickle because you've let 'em abandon THE SWITCH. How was grandpa sure he could get some shut-eye without the vacuum cleaner going round in circles? How'd we know that when we flicked on that AM radio, the batteries in it would be just as good as we left it? When we put down the phone how'd we know the gub'mint wasn't listening? We had honest to God switches, little bits of metal with springs that snapped 'em so far apart those electrons would just stay put.
Now all you have are little copper titty-buttons on the sides of things, and you've got chipsets to manage the buttons, see? And everything is really connected all the time to these chips, and it's all programmable. It's all flashable. It's all exploitable. There was a time when people liked switches on things because they liked control. You could actually beat your competition if your thing had more switches than your competition's thing, even if some of them were silly. But something changed, and now consumer focus groups and product design engineers try to eliminate as many controls as they can. When we started seeing switches disappear from things we thought engineers were stupid. Turns out engineers were doing it because they thought people were stupid.
If you think you have a Power button that's an actual Power button --- well you don't really. There's probably a timer in there somewhere I could exploit to tell your thing to turn on again. And why would I bother? I could just take control of your thing and make it sing and beep like it's shutting off and once you see that dark screen you'd be none the wiser.
Sometimes I used to send a WAKE-on-LAN packet to my buddy's computer the moment he sat down at his desk in the morning, just as he was reaching for the power button. He'd hear the computer beep and withdraw his finger, puzzled. Took him a while to figure out what was happening.
We now worship the Golden Calf of the Software Sandbox... and we expect our devices to be on their Super Duper Boy Scout Best Behavior. Hope that works out for everyone, but I don't want to hear any whining when shit happens. Google offering a 'Decline Forever' button,
Shoo Google, don't bother me,
Shoo Yahoo, don't bother me,
Shoo Amazon, don't bother me,
Nothin' ever turns off
and I ain't gonna pay
gimmie everything for free.
I'm going to thwack off the MONSTER FRANKENSTEIN KNIFE SWITCH that I have all my modern tech wired to, and get some serious shut-eye.
NO CARRIER
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
This practice of spying on people should be made illegal and with severe penalties for any company that uses this type of method either directly or through a third party.
.
So this scheme is an explicit admission by the advertisers that they are doing things to customer devices that customers do not want done to their devices.
Going to be depressing for them to see what i do when i view and ad... absolutely nothing.
the question is why does a phone intended for *human* consumption even allow frequencies beyond human hearing?
But Audiophiles! And Golden ears!!! And 192Khz 24bits!!!!!
Maybe you can't hear the difference, but that's because you didn't buy the necessary "Monster" polarized cables.
It really change the warmth of sound !!!! And the ultra-sound cause harmonics!!! (*)
(sarcasm over)
(* = actually true depending on the installation. but has the exact opposite effect: these harmonics are distrotions and generally degrade the output quality by outputing singal that was never here in the first place)
More seriously:
- Technical limitation: it's simpler and cheaper to have a microphone and a ADC that can pick up higher frequencies, and then filter them in software, rather than design a microphone that has perfect pick-up in the human hearing range but abruptly stops at the hearing limit and has no distortion.
(I think Xiph have a few documents about this. Or was it one of the anti-Audiophilie post of some real-world-physics-based-science blog ?)
So: your phone and lots of other electronique device can hear above the 10-16 Khz limit because hearing at 24-48Khz and downsampling causes less harmonic distortions. But afterward the rest of the audio software pipeline works in a reasonable audio bandwidth.
(Unless you consider a rogue piece software that on purpose keep sounds in the 16-24Khz range - such as adware)
- Technology: smartphones use piezo speaker, instead of magnetically driven. These can have good response beyond the human hearing range. (In fact, the ultra-sound emitter on your car's sonar parking assistance is very probably a piezo speaker).
So if your smartphone has 192Khz/24bits DAC (because "audiophiles"! because in fact it's not much complicated to handle higher bitrates/audio bandwidth, and that makes a bullet point for maketing to boast about),
and the audio circuit lacks proper high quality filters (because it's cheaper)
and the audio device is a piezo (like in anything smaller than a speaker set),
your smartphone can output ultra-sounds (as do any speak-set using a piezo for tweeters).
And unlike the recording situation, it doesn't even require a rogue software: CD quality (44 ksample) or higher (48 ksamples) is considered the golden standard at which most audio pipelines operate. And thus any software could output 22Khz-24Khz sounds if they like.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Cue-in highly paid youtubers that make public announcement that low-pass filters are hurting the internet economy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
First of all, other than ethics, this is awesome technology... Truly, ad- and porn-sellers are at the forefront of it all.
But is this really true? I mean, speakers and microphones are both designed to produce/recognized sound useful to humans (except some exotic devices meant for dolphins, I suppose). Making them do a reasonably good job on the entire human-audible spectrum is a non-trivial task already and different devices do better/worse on different parts of the spectrum.
Why would a designer of a mobile phone bother with the frequencies, which a human can neither produce nor hear anyway? It certainly increases the costs of both the design and each individual device... Unless, of course, it is to enable exactly the kind of things discussed in TFA...
So, if we really do carry such hardware in our pockets — and neither TFA nor links from it list specific brands/models — then our fingers of blame are to be pointed at the hardware-makers.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
1. Mics don't pick up ultrasonic
Actually they do, on purpose.
It's simpler and cheaper to pick-up a wider range and filter afterward.
Than managing to produce a "perfect" microphone that has I high response on the whole range of human hearing, and drops sharply outside without causing any harmonic distortion.
Mics that pick up ultrasonics + software filter is cheaper than high quality mic + high quality hardware filter.
So most mics can pick up ultrasonics and do. (all it takes is one rogue software NOT to filter them).
2. Speakers don't reproduce ultrasonic
You subwofer might not, indeed.
But the cheapo piezo that is most small electronics device and used as a tweeters in speaker systems can produce them without any problem.
So overall lots of devices could produce them without you knowing (or with only your dog knowing).
3. And even if these somehow did, Nyquist already limits it all
Yup Nyquist. Nyquist predicts that the max frequency will be at half the max sampling rate.
Most audio pipe-line work at CD quality (44 ksamples) or higher (48 ksamples).
That makes a max of 22-24Khz. Well above the typical 10Khz that most people tend to hear.
And that's without taking into account the tendencies of some audiophile on insisting to run everything at 192Khz 24bits.
It's completely useless for humans, but that would help a bit this whole story.
Look at a high-end mic's response curve.
Which is high-end, and thus tries to mimick human range (plus some headroom to avoid distortion).
Low quality cheap microphone might accidentally have weirder response curve. (Specially piezo-based one. They would suck at the low range, the would have abnormal high ultrasound drop off, and they are dead cheap).
Most barely get above 16 kHz, after which they drop off very fast.
...which is well enough above the typical 10Khz limit that most human hear.
High-freqs are directional, meaning if you get off-axis even a little, even more drop-off.
so what? the point of advertisers isn't to generate some ultra-high bandwidth transmission techniques that can carry 1Gbps data over 10km.
The point is only to get some very basic presence/absence (some ad is playing on some TV nearby the phone) and maybe a few bits worth of data (enough to transmit a tag, so the server might be able to know that AD n xyz that got sent to device #A was heard by device #B and thus both device probably belong to the same person).
And that doesn't need to be a constant flow of information. If the ad presence/absence works a couple of time per day, that's already enough data for marketeers.
If the tagging works well enough to match device a couple of time per months, its already enough for marketeers to wet their pants and/or order an extra round of blow.
All BULLSHIT.
bullshit that has already been demoed in conferences.
the news isn't that you can do communication over ultra-sonics using of-the-shelf parts. that has been known for years.
the news is that some advertisers are interested to actually do it in the wild.
The internet at play and the eager ignorants ready to believe anything it proclaims.
That's Ars. They tend to have a little bit less dummy content than your garden variety of "internet-crackpot-theory-cesspool".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yes, what about the poor children with their sensitive hearing, and dogs, cats, chickens and cockroaches ... An advertiser who elects to disrupt their lives with horrible noises should be ashamed (and sued).
Hey, don't pretend that you haven't any chickens in your house. We can hear them via the microphone installed in your thermostat, we can see them from your television and we can smell them via your smoke detector.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I used to care about my privacy and ad profiling a lot. I still put around 10k entries in my hosts file blocking ad domain, I use adblock and I also allow cookies using white lists, blocking everything by default. However, I do not care if anything slips by anymore. Why?
Two reasons:
- I do not have time or resources to bother with big companies. They will always find a way to achieve their goal.I just take general precautions and invest my time in my own business.
- I never act on ads. I have never bought anything that I saw on an ad. I can't even remember ever clicking on an add willingly. If I need anything, I have my trusted places that I go and I show the middle finger to everyone else. Especially those, who tried to make be believe I need their sh*t.
I guess the voices weren't just in my head...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
If you are not a paying customer, YOU are the product.
Well then, I'm taking me right back to the store for a refund. I won't stand for defective merchandise.
Have gnu, will travel.
Could this be built into phone apps like Shazam? Shazam needs microphone access. That app seems built for collecting information for advertisers so it seems a likely candidate to me. There are lots of popular phone apps that request mic access even on iOS: Skype, Telegram, Dolphin Browser, Shazam, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. We need a way to tell which apps are doing this.
It also appears that even on iOS if you give an app microphone access then the app can access the microphone in the background:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
Does this mean that some of my "tinnitus" may actually be electronic devices conspiring against me, as I've known for years, or should I take those anti-psychotics my doc prescribed?
FWIW, the Librem computers (https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-15) do feature real switches for all radio-related links, and mic.
I'm not one of the first buyers, but clearly that'll be the machine replacing my curent mac when it fails.
In addition to things already mentioned (nyquist, speaker/mic response, mics not turned on) the really big reason this won't work is because almost all commercial audio transmission is highly compressed in the frequency domain. Inaudible frequencies got unceremoniously tossed to reduce bandwidth.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us