Linked – Facebook seeks patent on tech that turns on your smartphone microphone
Doesn’t sound creepy at all, does it?
“The application, first reported by Metro, was published on June 14 and lays out how Facebook might remotely turn on your phone’s mic to start recording. Essentially, Facebook would embed high-pitched audio signals in “broadcast content” (think TV ads) that would be inaudible to humans. But whereas our ears wouldn’t be able to discern it, “a client device” such as your phone would be able to hear it.
That signal would instruct your phone to record the “ambient audio” surrounding it, and then send an “ambient audio fingerprint” back to Facebook for analysis.
“The online system, based on the ambient audio data, identifies the corresponding individual and content item and logs an impression for the content item upon determination that there was an impression of the identified content item by the identified individual,” explains the application abstract.”
But don’t worry, Facebook’s spokesman says they have no plan to ever use this technology, they just applied for the patent to prevent any other company from doing it.
Sure….
It reminds me of a conversation I was having recently with my wife. My point was that between your phone, your car’s GPS, license plate scanners and security cameras with facial recognition, we are entering a time where anywhere that you go, someone will know you were there and there will be a digital footprint of it. Now, we haven’t started to put all those things together and truly started tracking people’s whereabouts 24×7, but the capability to do that isn’t far off. And once that exists, it will get hacked. You will have no privacy at all outside of your house, and thanks to smart home technology, and again, your internet connected devices, you probably won’t have much at home either.
But, no worries, the people with this data swear they wouldn’t use it against us, or be lax in securing it, no need for privacy laws.
Again I say, sure….
https://mashable.com/2018/06/28/facebook-patent-secret-audio-recordings/
