Slashdot Mirror
That Game on Your Phone May Be Tracking What You're Watching on TV (nytimes.com)
Rick Zeman writes: The New York Times (may be paywalled) has an article describing how some apps track TV and movie viewing even when the loaded app isn't currently active. These seemingly innocuous games, geared towards both adults and children work by "using a smartphone's microphone. For instance, Alphonso's software can detail what people watch by identifying audio signals in TV ads and shows, sometimes even matching that information with the places people visit and the movies they see. The information can then be used to target ads more precisely...." While these apps, mostly available on Google play, with some available on the Apple Store, do offer an opt opt, it's not clear when consumers see "permission for microphone access for ads," it may not be clear to a user that, "Oh, this means it's going to be listening to what I do all the time to see if I'm watching 'Monday Night Football."'
One advertising executive summarizes thusly: "It's not what's legal. It is what's not creepy."
One advertising executive summarizes thusly: "It's not what's legal. It is what's not creepy."
Gosh, running proprietary software on your computers comes with great risk? Yeah, that sounds like an important news story .. from maybe 20 years ago.
I can remember watching TV, back a couple of decades ago. They can't track my books by the sound effects in my head
Bears repeating but on the iPhone you have to explicitly allow microphone access, and even if you granted that to a game for some reason, if it had the microphone on there would be a big indicator atop the top of the screen indicating recording was active.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Even getting to the options is optional
Early in the personal computing revolution, consumer computing devices answered to their owners, and life was good.
In the intervening decades via millions of separate choices made by billions of separate mindless consumers, people have voted en-masse to give control of their computing devices to multinational companies, and any data-broker who wants it. They voted to disempower themselves, and give that power to surveillance capitalism companies, even when there were other good choices. They drove the good choices out of the market.
That inevitably means that control will not be used for their benefit. Modern computing is a clusterfuck because too few people chose wisely, and too many chose unwisely. The unwise dictated the market, because they were numerous. The wise are swept along against their will, struggling to avoid the worst of the stupidity.
The sheep have done everything in their power to steer the flock towards the looming precipice.
and sending you adverts for crap that you don't want and can't afford.
All in the interests of your safety and security.
This message has been bought to on behalf of
- Data Miners Inc
- US Government TLA's
- Google
- Any other people we can get to pay for this shit.
*Opens game, and pulls up pron on computer...*
First rule: don't install any apps that you don't have a strong need to install, and particularly avoid games.
Second rule: don't install games.
Third rule: install and use a firewall to prevent any app from communicating to the internet, unless internet access is needed for the app's primary purpose and you really can't live without it.
Fourth rule: marketers are evil scum, and are getting more evil and scummier as time goes on.
Fifth rule: don't install games
These things are also, presumably, chewing up your internet usage for some purpose that you have not agreed to. Likewise a running app will use processor and thus run your battery down. Both of these cost you in one way for another; the cost is part of the app writer's gain (when they sell the information, whatever) - so you are paying for part of their profit -- all without you knowing!
This falls fair & square in the area of computer misuse.
Just read all the dark Science Fiction story out there and you'll see that they come true while we are diverting further and further away from the bright future depicted in Star Trek and similar.
Max Headroom, 1984, Brave New World, THX1138, Soylent Green, Fahrenheit 451, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Running Man, Neuromancer, Logan's Run, The Dispossessed, Altered Carbon, A Clockwork Orange, Earthworks (Aldiss), The Wasp Factory, Darwin's Radio, The Stars My Destination, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Lem), After the Flood (P.C Jersild), The Trial (Kafka), Hyperion (Dan Simmons) to mention a few that are more or less dark.
Trivia: I did meet P.C. Jersild once when he had lost the book he was working on due to a computer malfunction, I was able to recover it.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
1. i dont have any games on my smartphone
and
2. i dont ever watch TV, i find TV far too annoying to watch anymore so i quit, the TV sits in the corner like an abandoned & condemned building waiting demolition
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Milk them all 100%.
No, my firewall and privacy rules prevent that, as well as disabling specific services that apps call for user metrics, prevent apps from starting themselves without user input, and especially on my kid's tablet disable background processes and background apps, and force hibernate when the screen is off.
Radio & TV shows have audio that is beyond human hearing that IDs the show.
For all the complaints about iOS, the early versions that closed all background applications now sounds like a good idea. If you didn't open it, don't run it.
Also, an app-invisible spoofing should be kernel level. Every app gets access to everything it asks for and is granted on install, then the user can select what to spoof. "always feed the microphone white noise for any game that requests microphone access". Pokemon Go simply refused to load when "developer tools" was loaded. As I use the GPS spoofing regularly to lock my position to work or home so no app can "spy" on me, Pokemon Go was loaded once, to see what the fuss was all about, then never run. It saw me as a "hacker" for protecting my personal information. The app shouldn't be able to know.
Learn to love Alaska
Any app with microphone access might spy on the user. An obvious red flag would be if the app says it uses the microphone and the microphone isn't needed or used during the app's use.
If there was full transparency in the terms and conditions, 99% of people wouldn't read them anyway.
Even if the source code was available for the user to see, 99.999% of people wouldn't be able to properly parse it in order to assess if it does anything bad.
A healthy distrust goes a long way. Who needs the Stasi when everyone voluntarily pays-for and walks around with a hot mic?
The 0.001% of people that can spot this shit need to shepherd everybody else.
Block network access on apps which don't need it (like most games). This prevents any data being sent back to the app's mothership, not just microphone data. Both iOS and Android allow you to block specific apps from using cellular data (on the premise of preventing data hog apps from using up your monthly data quota).
On Android you can go a step further and control which individual apps can use cellular data, WiFi for LAN access, or WiFi for Internet access. It may require root though. AFWall+ is one such app. (A side-effect if you've never run the app prior to blocking it can be that it can never download an ad to display.)
OH, uh, wait....
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Okay; so I'm going to have to question the plausibility of this one... not because I don't think that the media moguls and other statistics happy people out there aren't interested in collecting this data on us, but rather, because I'm skeptical of just how fruitful such a venture might be. Consider the scenario being described: The situation is, you're watching TV and playing a game on your phone at the same time. Of course, many of us probably do exactly that now and then -- but when that happens, how often are you doing it alone?
Personally, when I'm alone watching a movie or show, it's usually streaming to the iPad in my lap... with headphones plugged into it. So this method of consumer intel gathering from a game on my phone would fail entirely, in my scenario -- and I seriously doubt that I'm alone in indulging in this form of private viewing.
If you're not watching that movie or TV show alone, than there is a reasonable bet that you don't always get your say as to what everyone watches. Targeted ads in that scenario will be decidedly hit-or-miss. And (again, my own personal experience, but probably not all that unique) frequently in my case, I'm specifically playing a game on my phone because I didn't pick the show that's on... and I have no interest in that show at all. The targeted ads could fail rather spectacularly, in this scenario. (Da heck am I seeing stupid football ads in my game, for? Ain't I already sufferin' enough, listening to all these drunk idiots cheering around me??)
So sure; maybe someone is out there, trying to use this method to gather data on consumers... but I certainly wouldn't want to be them, personally. It sounds to me like a very frustrating way to try to make a living, with continually decreasing returns over the course of time.
Mind you, if we're talking about a "game" which in reality is attempting to always eavesdrop on you, even when the game itself is not loaded... well, the scenarios I've described would basically have to be immediately tossed by the wayside, because that's a whole separate level of creepy privacy invasion. "He hears you when you're jacking... he knows when you have nightmares... he knows the secrets that you spill when you're talking in your sleep... sooooo you better watch out..." (Shudder!)
So I've read enough stuff like this to know this is the norm anymore. Other then completely voiding yourself from all internet access you really have little choice but to accept that everything wants to harvest your information these days. Some actually legally let you know up front and some hide it in that tiny EULA that you never ever will read. Some times this is actually very helpful and how virtual assistants work is gathering info on YOU. But its the stuff that tries and hide it that concerns many of us.
That's why I don't have a microphone-enabled browser, or anything that demands a microphone AND internet. Hell, a PC isn't difficult to find: My browsing can wait until then. Contact List and internet is limited mostly to communication apps, nothing else (IE. most games).
My latest Samsung phone update permanently enabled email. I refuse to use a phone as my primary communications device.
I don't know which built-in apps they are, but if I disable them, my tablet refuses to boot. It means a lot of factory-installed applets remain active.
Facebook was a game...
and you get our current state in the US. :(