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Burger King Runs Ad Triggering Google Home Devices; Google Shuts It Down (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the not-on-my-watch dept.

Burger King unveiled a new advertisement earlier today designed to trigger users' Google Home devices. The ad specifically used the Google Home trigger phrase "Okay, Google" to ask "What is the Whopper burger?," thus triggering the Google Assistant to read off the top result from Wikipedia. But less than three hours after Burger King launched the ad, Google disabled the functionality. The Verge reports: As of 2:45PM ET, Google Home will no longer respond when prompted by the specific Burger King commercial that asks "What is the Whopper burger?" It does, however, still respond with the top result from Wikipedia when someone else (i.e., a real user) other than the advertisement asks the same question. Google has likely registered the sound clip from the ad to disable unwanted Home triggers, as it does with its own Google Home commercials.

4 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. 1984 CFAA violation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Isn't this basically a blatant violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse act? What if a small timer had done this and not a mega corporation?

    1. Re:1984 CFAA violation? by LesFerg · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Isn't this basically a blatant violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse act? What if a small timer had done this and not a mega corporation?

      Essentially it is an act of accessing a computer system belonging to somebody else, without their permission. I imagine the legal description of hacking could be stretched around this well enough to take it to court in a country like the US where litigation rules.

      --
      If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
  2. CueCat all over again by Red_Chaos1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The company that made the CueCat wanted to be able to do just this eventually. When I worked at Radio Shack in the early 00's we gave these stupid things away. Information coming down the pipeline said they eventually intended to make a device that connected to the PC and would respond to audio cues in advertisement on TV and open a browser to the product page. At the time it sounded retarded, like, "who the fuck would want such a thing?" Laugh's on me I guess, everyone wants an Echo or Home now.

  3. Re:Nice Play by darthsilun · · Score: 5, Interesting

    from the article: ... its high amount of fat, cholesterol and sodium makes it an unhealthy food...

    Well, not to defend Burger King (and a bit off topic), but if you're getting the appropriate amount of exercise your body won't metabolize the fat and cholesterol, and the original research that claimed salt is bad for you was flawed (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/); posting this kind of counter attack could be considered – by some – as misguided. Then again, most people don't get sufficient exercise and the fat and cholesterol is bad for them.

    It wasn't uncommon in the early days of the web for people to shift the bandwidth load of their websites by linking to content on other people's web servers. When those other people figured out this was happening to them, they would replace the content with something else that the bandwidth "thief" didn't intend, e.g. smut, much to the bandwidth thief's embarrassment.

    A better counter attack, IMO, would have been to replace the content Burger King was expecting with something else, e.g. an audio clip of Meg Ryan's faux orgasm from "When Harry Met Sally" or a clip of HAL saying "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."