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.

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

[ArylAkamov]

What can really be done?
I explain shit like this to people, they call me paranoid.
I show them proof, they say they don't care.
Privacy? They say they have nothing to hide.
They're beyond saving, but they're the majority. They don't care about their privacy, all they know is they can trade it for more cute cat mobile games.
So what can you do?

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

[Rick Schumann]

The average person has a threshold that they have to be pushed beyond before they'll actually take anything like this seriously. What makes matters worse is that the average person has been so thoroughly indoctrinated by Corporate America and so-called 'social media' sites that sharing everything is what's normal and natural, and that people who want 'privacy' either have something wrong with their brains, or they're criminals with something to hide. With any luck this will all eventually catch up with everyone and there'll be a revolt. Until then all you can do is stay on-message, be consistent, and do what you can to protect yourself (i.e. don't use 'social media', so you're not part of the problem).

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

[MrKaos]

The average person has a threshold that they have to be pushed beyond before they'll actually take anything

This process has a taxonomy that comes under anal fist fucking, right now they're really enjoying it but they're looking at the fire extinguisher with some mixture of fear and anticipation.

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

[MrKaos]

Love your imagery. What's after the fire extinguisher?

Setting off the fire extinguisher

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.

Manually disable camera and microphone

[myid]

Phones and computers need a manual (not software) "data capture" on/off switch. This switch would physically disable the phone's microphone and cameras (and if possible, screen capture).

If I manually slide the data capture switch to OFF, then the mic and cameras are physically disabled. No matter what any data, software, or user preferences are, the mic and cameras are physically unable to capture sound or images. They can't capture sound or images again, until I manually slide the data capture switch back to ON.

microphone is already on

[markdavis]

>" 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"

How can it "turn the microphone on" if it was already "on" and constantly listening for this audible signal? Thus, the mic was already "on" and analyzing everything, all the time. This is aside from the asinine premise of this whole concept. I am sure we all have a BURNING need for our phones to be listening all the time, burning up the battery, doing god-knows-what in the background, sending personal info to places like Facebook, all so we can watch COMMERCIALS and then get even more automatic COMMERCIALS on our phones and give companies even more metrics about our personal lives, whereabouts, believes, and associations. Oh, man, sign me up now! I will make sure to throw away my DVR in the process, too, so I can watch COMMERCIALS religiously...

What I want are HARDWARE switches for: microphone, cameras, and radios on my devices. Funny how many devices USED to have such things in the past.

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.