Facebook Patent Imagines Triggering Your Phone's Mic When a Hidden Signal Plays on TV (gizmodo.com)

Based on a recently published patent application, Facebook could one day use ads on television to further violate a user's privacy. From a report: The patent is titled "broadcast content view analysis based on ambient audio recording." It describes a system in which an "ambient audio fingerprint or signature" that's inaudible to the human ear could be embedded in broadcast content like a TV ad. When a hypothetical user is watching this ad, the audio fingerprint could trigger their smartphone or another device to turn on its microphone, begin recording audio and transmit data about it to Facebook.

Comments

There's only two reasons you'd patent this:

[Rick Schumann]

1) You patent an idea like this so that nobody else can use it.
2) You're fucking evil and don't give a fuck about silly frivolous things like people's privacy rights, you want all the data so you can sell it to the highest bidder.

Time to dismantle Zuckerbook once and for all, and pass legislation preventing any company from pulling the sort of shit Zuckerbook has been perpetrating for years now.

Even if you agreed to this

[taustin]

is the terms of service you didn't read before you clicked "I agree," if you're not in the room alone, in a place that one would expect privacy, like your own home, this would run afoul of wiretapping laws in all-party consent states. In some cases, it's a felony.

I would dearly love to see Zuck in an orange jumpsuit for this.

Devices Need Transient Permissions

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love a pop-up EVERY TIME an app on my iPhone needs permission to access this or that (with the option to okay it into perpetuity should I choose). And instead of simply "OK" to grant permission, offer me a list: OK for 5/10/30 minutes, 1/3/6/12 hour(s), 1/7/30/60/90 day(s), or forever. Perhaps even the option to okay permissions for the app "for X minutes OR until the app is no longer active or is sent to the background, whichever is soonest."

Then I could be SURE that granting that one app that needed to read a QR code so got camera access doesn't FOREVER have camera access. This would fix issues with Facebook wanting to access my camera, mic, phone contact list, photo library, etc. when I'm not expecting it.

Another awesome option would be to grant FAKE permission. I.e., an app asks for my phone contacts and won't let me continue unless I grant it FULL access, I can click "OK--grant access to empty phone contacts" or "fake mic that only records white noise" or "fake camera that only records black as if obscured/covered by a phone case".

Yes, apps could detect permissions. Request access to motion/gyro sensors, grant access to fake, and suddenly movement detected is zero... that would be suspicious. Even so, I'd love that option.

And finally, I don't want apps to be able to query and discover if permissions are temporary or permanent. They just have permmissions--for now--that's all they can know.

If not a phone, then something else nearby

[theCat]

Amazon eventually has something similar planned for Alexa, where casually spoken words (not directed at Alexa) will do exactly the same thing. The trend here is that any device in your vicinity (not even your own home, anywhere at all) can be triggered by any kind of sound (voice or ads, audible or not) to turn on your phone and record other conversation, or maybe to direct your phone web client to an online ad or retailer.

We're screwed.

Turning on the microphone?

[Anonymous Coward]

But if it only turns on the microphone when it "hears" the sound, how does it hear it?

Of course the microphone is turned on all the time, just that when it hears the sound it starts recording and send it home.

Still a horrible idea and whoever conceived it should lose their basic human rights as a punishment since they want to take some of them (privacy) away from others. There is a special place in hell for people like these.

Pollute their data

[Solandri]

As I've said before, I believe the best strategy for fighting this type of privacy invasion is to simply pollute their incoming data. Figure out which triggers they're using to initiate the recording (e.g. inaudible audio signal at the beginning of a commercial), and duplicate it and program your phone and other speakers to play them back anywhere and everywhere. The mall, the park, stadiums, restaurants, concerts, movie theaters, amusement parks, traffic jams (over your car stereo with your windows rolled down), YouTube videos, etc.

There's an apocryphal story that at the end of the Cold War, members of the KGB and CIA got together for beer and to swap war stories. The CIA spooks lamented how hard their job had been. They had to struggle just to get anyone into the country since the Soviet Union was such a closed society, while the KGB could simply enter on a tourist visa and drive up to (and even take a tour of) most targets in the U.S. The KGB spooks disagreed, saying that theirs had been the harder job. The U.S. produced so much information that they had to devote huge resources to sift through it all to figure out which was credible and which was not. e.g. If the National Enquirer published a story about the USAF testing a captured UFO at Area 51, they had to figure out if it was made-up or if there was really something to it.