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Should Burger King Be Prosecuted For Their Google Home-Triggering Ads? (washingtonpost.com)
Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein thinks Burger King should be prosecuted for
successfully running an alternate version of its advertisement to trigger Google Home devices again Wednesday:
Someone -- or more likely a bunch of someones -- at Burger King and their advertising agency need to be arrested, tried, and spend some time in shackles and prison cells. They've likely been violating state and federal cybercrime laws with their obnoxious ad campaign... For example, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act broadly prohibits anyone from accessing a computer without authorization... Burger King has instantly become the 'poster child' for mass, criminal abuse of these devices... It was a direct and voluntary violation of law.
You're looking at this the wrong way - you should see this as an opportunity. When you see an obvious dupe on Slashdot, your first response should be to submit a new, slightly tweaked version of the item.
If we all work together, we can make it so Slashdot's front page is full of eight or nine copies of the same story!
#DeleteChrome
No, this is a good thing. The security hole is, and has always been, that the devices only recognize selected trigger words. This hole is due to poor design choices of the manufacturers, and they must step up to the plate to fix it or become liable for any and all consequences.
My GPS in my car has a 100% programmable verbal trigger (I have used "yo, bitch" in the past... so as you can see, quite programmable) and it is almost a decade old. So there's zero question it can be done.
The message is flat on the table now: Amazon, Google, Mycroft... everyone has to set up user-programmable trigger words as part of the install of the device / app. Otherwise this kind of thing, including truly hostile events, will be a regular consumer experience, and the manufacturers will be complicit.
No manufacturer can argue they were ignorant of the risk now. Entirely a good thing. I look forward to them repairing this obvious malfeature.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I wonder if anyone has figured just how malicious this actually is, it is insidiously so when we consider this deliberate repeat activations of what is a google search recorded against a users google account and feeds into the advertising interest algorithms for the advertising google's network serves. It is directly going to skew adverts to win win the advert buy auction on an interest score rather than a price per an advert.
But it would be really simple here: That activation phrase is already annoying enough. ("Hey Siry" rolls like something you'd normaly say to someone, but chanting some company name to get results back sounds more like arcane magic summoning a demon from mammon's hell..)
Why not use individualized activation phrases?
Give your "personal assistant" some personality! A name of it's own, randomly modulate the speech synthesis parameters a bit for each device, and BK would need to go "OK John, OK Helen, OK Majel, OK Eliza, OK HAL..." and the spot would be over without triggering any device
bickerdyke