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Burger King Runs Ad Triggering Google Home Devices; Google Shuts It Down (theverge.com)
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.
I wanted to hear more about this "Whopper" burger! What are you trying to hide Google???
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?
Rather than shut it down, Google should have simply changed the response to something on the order of "The Whopper is a big bunch of tasty calories, but doesn't provide good nutrition. If that's what you want, you should consider a burger from McDonald's, Wendy's, Sonic, or some other brand, which although no better nutritionally, isn't trying to play weird games with its advertising."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
...although leaving it as Wikipedia would probably have been more effective at warning advertisers off this tactic.
However, prior to the ad's premiere, the article had been modified by a user allegedly tied to the company, so that Google's automatically-generated response to the query would be a detailed description of the Whopper burger that utilized promotional language. The edits were reverted for violating Wikipedia's policies discouraging "shameless self-promotion". Furthermore, the snippet became the target of vandalism, which caused Google Home to read off statements suggesting that the sandwich's ingredients included "rat meat", "toenail clippings", and a "medium-sized child".
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."