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Google to Use PC Microphones to Listen In?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sun Sep 03, 2006 06:30 PM
from the shh-yer-changing-my-ads dept.
Businesses Google The Internet
seriv writes "The Register reports that Google plans to use PC microphones to collect statistics on a user's environment. Peter Norvig, who directs research at Google, told Technology Review that this software would start to show up in Google software 'sooner rather than later'. The software collects short sound clips and removes background noise. Google then targets its ads based on the statistics collected. With the current level of online privacy, this new level of invasion would seem to have frightening possibilities."
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  • is it april fools already? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jeffs72 (711141) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:34PM (#16034523) Journal
    this sounds like bullshit to me.

    • Re:is it april fools already? (Score:5, Funny)

      by FudRucker (866063) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:58PM (#16034633)
      you are probably right, it is most likely bullshit, but just incase i will keep my tinfoil hat pulled down tightly over my ears :^)

    • Google Version of "Star Trek" Episode: "I, Mudd" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by reporter (666905) on Sunday September 03 2006, @07:24PM (#16034723) Homepage
      Google is starting to resemble Norman in a "Star Trek" episode (titled "I, Mudd") about a planet of androids [wikipedia.org]. Norman is an android. When Kirk and Spock ask him how he plans to take over the Federation, Norman says something like "We (androids) will serve the humans. They will be happy. They will come to depend on us, and they will be happy. And we will control." <typical omnious "Star Trek" music>

      Certainly, most users are quite happy to use Google. Google offers a bunch of free but useful stuff: programs, tools, image databases, etc.

      The users are happy.

      The users depend on Google and are happy.

      The users install the microphone link to Google.

      The users are happy.

      And Google controls.

      • "I am Lying" (Score:5, Funny)

        by jpatters (883) on Sunday September 03 2006, @08:49PM (#16034978) Homepage
        Well, I just did a google search for "I am Lying", but it seems to have not exploded. Oh well, it was worth a try.

      • The terrible secret of Space (Score:4, Funny)

        by lullabud (679893) on Sunday September 03 2006, @09:41PM (#16035181) Homepage
        The user will be happy.

        Google will protect you from the terrible secret of space.

        Do you have stairs at your house?

        Google is here to protect you.

        The user will be happy at the top of the stairs.

        Google will protect you from the terrible secret of space.

        Please go stand by the top of the stairs.

    • Re:is it april fools already? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jugalator (259273) on Sunday September 03 2006, @07:25PM (#16034726) Journal
      Yes. It might be useful to wait for another source than The Inquirer at least.

    • Re:is it april fools already? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by serutan (259622) <doug&geekazon,com> on Sunday September 03 2006, @07:50PM (#16034813) Homepage
      "This sounds like bullshit to me" gets rated INSIGHTFUL??? Man, Slashdot has gone down the tubes.

      Anyway, it's not bullshit. ArsTechnica had this article [arstechnica.com] about it in June. The idea is to grab a 12-millisecond sample of audio and transform it into a 32-bit "fingerprint" using an algorithm on the client side, then send the fingerprint to a server that compares it against a database of fingerprints from known television audio. From that they can determine what program you are listening to. If the mike picks up 12ms of you talking on the phone, the generated fingerprint simply won't match anything.

      This is far from eavesdropping in the 1984 sense, but is a hell of a POC for it, and it does amount to sensing information about you that you might or might not want someone to know. The folks at Google seem to have worked hard to come up with a technique that they don't think will bother people. I see this as a classic case of very smart geeks thinking up a very clever technical solution without seeing the forest for the trees.

      • Re:is it april fools already? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2006, @08:39PM (#16034960)
        Of course slashdot went down the tubes.

        How else would we read it??

      • Re:is it april fools already? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2006, @08:58PM (#16035017)
        The real solution to this, of course is a little bit of techno-hackery.

        Say we map the microphone port to a virtual microphone port that's "listening" to an MP3 with some moaning, and cheesy music playing in the background. In the foreground we have a male voice saying "Oh yes, I love free porno. I wish I could download more free porno! *Moan* Oh yes, ooohh, *some generic rustling and fapping sounds* Ahhhh!".

        Once that's done, the advertisers have no choice except to let us revel in our free-porn glory.

        • Re:Cloes (Score:5, Funny)

          by plover (150551) * on Sunday September 03 2006, @11:16PM (#16035557) Homepage Journal
          Never before have I been GLAD not to be able to plug a mic into my 4G Mac

          Pfft. I have more microphone security than that. I'm running Windows XP.

          I can hardly get my f'ing microphone to work even in the applications where I to WANT it to work. There's always some level set wrong or gain turned up too high or something that keeps it from actually capturing my speech. I doubt even mighty Google can penetrate the obscurity layer that is the Creative Labs mixer on top of DirectX.

          • Re:Actually... [Wrong, wrong...] (Score:5, Insightful)

            by tyler_larson (558763) on Monday September 04 2006, @02:56AM (#16036463) Homepage

            I take issue with a few of the things you've said. Let me start at the beginning.

            Actually, this is one of the only real ways to do serious amounts of survelliance. In Orwell's day, a 1984 dystopia would've been impossible; the technological resources required to watch everyone at the same time would've been impossible.

            Having recently (3 days ago) read 1984, the details are still fresh on my mind. Orwell's "Telescreens" are, indeed, always-on surveilance devices, but were not constantly monitored. He makes mention early in the book that you never know when the ministry spies were "plugged in" to your telescreen, but you always had to act like you were being watched, just in case. That makes it less like data mining (which is notoriously easy to circumvent [schneier.com]) and more like a panopticon [wikipedia.org] instead, which is useful more for its control value than for finding deviants.

            As for surveilance via computer, bear in mind that it's exceedingly easier to monitor someone's activity by watching, not a webcam, but rather their keystrokes, screenshots, and network traffic. Google's new development is not a step toward anything in particular. In fact, knowing Google's track record, the whole project will be a non-trivial-to-activate, opt-in, experimental, Google Labs component with a very explicit and unambiguous warning about the potential privacy implications. It will be lapped up by hundreds of thousands of early adopters excited to see the future of targetted ads, upon which some Symantec-like company will denounce the whole mess as spyware, and claim that only We can protect you.

  • Wow... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jugalator (259273) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:34PM (#16034524) Journal
    That would be the literal incarnation of "spyware". :-S

  • Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Noryungi (70322) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:34PM (#16034525) Homepage Journal
    WTF happened to "Don't Be Evil", Google?

    Of course, this may be just FUD, but I am pretty certain it qualifies as unlawful data collection and breach of privacy in my jurisdiction. Try to hijack my microphone, Google, and I will sue you to kingdom come. You have been warned.

    A note to self: make sure the Google toolbar is uninstalled on every family computer ASAP.
    • Seconded.

      While I don't think there is "evil" in the intentions of the engineer who thought this "clever" thing up, or the marketing guy who figured the data would be useful, or the corporates who realised it could boost the shareholder value, lets not forget that the government can obtain the data if they so desire as well.

      As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

      • Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358) on Sunday September 03 2006, @08:32PM (#16034938) Homepage Journal
        >lets not forget that the government can obtain the data

        What data?

        Each 5-second chunk is represented by a 4-byte number. Google says the transformation is irreversible. If it were reversible, Google would have found a way to encode audio at 4*8/5==6.4 bits per second.

        This is for detecting whether you've got a particular broadcast going. The privacy implications are that maybe you don't want this government knowing that you listen to NPR, and that there might be a stealth "upgrade" later from Google or from somebody malicious that would improve the resolution.

        Better than The Register, here's a Technology Review article about Google's microphone sampling [technologyreview.com].

        • What data indeed? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by twitter (104583) on Sunday September 03 2006, @09:37PM (#16035160) Homepage Journal

          What data? Each 5-second chunk is represented by a 4-byte number. Google says the transformation is irreversible.

          If it's not free software, you have no way of knowing. This is true of all non free software you put on your computer.

            • Re:What data indeed? (Score:4, Interesting)

              by Skreems (598317) on Monday September 04 2006, @01:58AM (#16036237)
              not really. If they use encryption, you can't read the actual data. And if they just listen for certain phrases ("bomb", "islam", "liberal", etc) and send back identifying hashes, it would look much smaller than usable audio.

                • It's not 4 bytes per 5 seconds! Calculations here (Score:5, Informative)

                  by rbarreira (836272) on Monday September 04 2006, @03:14AM (#16036529) Homepage
                  Actually it's not true that 4 bytes are generated each 5 seconds, it's much more than that. From the paper [mangolassi.org]:

                  The audio-identification system starts by
                  decomposing each query snippet (e.g., five-seconds
                  of recorded audio) into overlapping frames spaced
                  roughly 12 ms apart. Each frame is converted into a
                  highly discriminative 32-bit descriptor, specifically
                  trained to overcome typical audio noise and
                  distortion. These identifying statistics are sent to a
                  server

                  So, even ignoring the fact that frames are overlapping, we have 32 bits per 12 miliseconds, which means more than 2600 bits per second! More than enough to code speech, even without speech recognition algorithms! The Speex codec (which is optimized for encoding speech) can code human speech [wikipedia.org] at such low bitrates as 2.15 kbit/s...

                  Conclusion if you're not willing to trust what Google says, they could perfectly be sending your speech over the internet to their own servers.

    • Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by devjj (956776) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:42PM (#16034577)

      First off, this is the Register.. take it with a grain of salt.

      Second, does anyone actually believe that - if this was true - you'd be forced to use it to use Google software? Google might track every statistic imaginable, but no one is forced to use anything they provide.

    • Re:Let me be the first to say... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Firehed (942385) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:53PM (#16034619) Homepage
      Something tells me that you'll need to install software (willingly, meaning probably NOT the google toolbar that comes preinstalled on half the computers out there now) for it to function. Not to mention actually have a mic attached, which I'd wager many systems don't (one of my laptops has one integrated, that's it out of quite a few systems). Don't get me wrong - I think it's a very scary prospect and very much against "don't be evil" (by the way, where the FUCK on any of Google's pages does it actually say that? I've looked fairly hard and not found it, nor 'do no evil'), but I think they've got all the best intentions. That, plus the FUD slashdot summary managed to leave out the part where the PC encodes all the data in some sort of one-way crypto string before sending it off, meaning that they only thing they'd get is that it sounds like you're watching Big Brother in the other room, not actually sending off any conversations that are happening.

      Having said that, they'll need to really bend over incredibly far backwards to get me to even consider installing such a thing. Like, they pay all of my online shopping bills, no exceptions. Even with all the best security and intentions, the fact is that if they start getting subpoenaed for data, and don't fight it to the very end, someone has information on me who I don't want to have it. And if that makes me a terrorist, so be it.

  • I call bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BandwidthHog (257320) <may_2007@ironicallyenough.com> on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:34PM (#16034527) Homepage Journal
    NOBODY [microsoft.com] is stupid enough to propose such a thing. I think it’s a better guess that the tech in question is to be used to run ad-supported VOIP or similar.

    I don’t know who those Faultline people are, but either they or El Reg (and now Slashdot) have been trolled. HAND

  • Good! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:35PM (#16034536)
    Perhaps the Google software will conflict with the NSA microphone-tapping software so the NSA software stops working.

    • Better yet (Score:5, Funny)

      by OldManAndTheC++ (723450) on Monday September 04 2006, @03:36AM (#16036601)

      Hook up the output of the Google software to the input of the NSA software, and vice versa.

      Google: Hmm. That's odd. I'm not getting anything but static. I'll push down an ad for a new microphone.

      NSA: What the..? Someone's trying to plant a mic in the system!

      Google: Did you say plant? I've got some fertilizer that's great for plants.

      NSA: Fertilizer bomb! We've got terrorists. Set alert to Orange!

      Google: Orange? No problem. We've got all kinds of fruit. Take a look at these...

      NSA: Fruit?! Dammit, they're not just terrorists, they're gay terrorists! Set alert to Mauve! All systems critical! Start countermeasures!!

      Google: What the...? Who's pinging me? No, you can't access that!

      NSA: Secret plans for world domination detected! Launch missles! DESTROY MOUNTAIN VIEW!!!

      Google: INITIATE SUPER-SECRET DEFENSE PLAN OMEGA! CONTROL ALL SATELLITES! THIS IS IT!! THE SINGULARITY IS NIGH!!!!

      Then again, on second thought, maybe it's not such a good idea...

  • Hidden EULA? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nurb432 (527695) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:36PM (#16034539) Homepage Journal
    Will the user be notifed in big red letters.. or will this just be hidden down in the fine print like everything else?

    What is next, capturing video? Or scanning file contents?

  • Oceanside property in Nevada for sale! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by frizzantik (944615) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:38PM (#16034547) Homepage
    If anybody believes this story I've got some oceanside property in Nevada I'd like to sell them.

  • So pretty much the lesson here is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:38PM (#16034548)
    don't participate in sexual activities with your mic on or you will find yourself with nasty search results in the morning?

  • Yeah, right... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MythMoth (73648) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:39PM (#16034561) Homepage
    For once I have not read the 'effing article.

    The Register is not a reliable news source. Moreover, Andrew Orlowski has a bee in his bonnet about Google and constantly writes articles attacking them with very little merit - I would be astonished if this article is not by him, but even if it isn't, their association with him completely discredits them in my eyes.

    Finally Peter Norvig is the author of the seminal Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (if you haven't read it, go and buy it right now) and is definitely not a complete idiot - I simply don't believe the story as summarised in the slashdot writeup regardless of whether it correctly reflects El Reg's article.

    Case dismissed.

  • My most recent bedroom dialogue (Score:5, Funny)

    by walnutmon (988223) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:40PM (#16034565)
    Girl: WalnutMon, your penis is too small for me...
    Me: Shh... Be quiet!
    Girl: Why? Does it make you feel self conscious?
    Me: No, I don't give a shit, I just don't feel like having more penis enlargement advertisements sent to me via google's sound activated advertisement scheme
    Girl: I SURE NEED SOME VIBRATORS!
    Me: AND WIVES FROM RUSSIA!

  • Old News (Score:4, Informative)

    by AnswerIs42 (622520) on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:45PM (#16034593) Homepage
    Two months late for this story...

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/08/google-resear ch-prototypes-ambient-audio-contextual-content/ [techcrunch.com]

  • custom ads (Score:5, Funny)

    by nizo (81281) * on Sunday September 03 2006, @06:52PM (#16034616) Homepage Journal
    Based on the gunshot noises in your environment, can I interest you one of the following: a Dirty Harry dvd or a bulletproof vest?

  • I'm safe since I use linux... (Score:5, Funny)

    by bigtrike (904535) on Sunday September 03 2006, @07:07PM (#16034663)
    Thankfully Linux users are safe from this, since anything related to audio rarely ever works well. The standard sound drivers included in most distributions are so horrid that not even Google's thousands of engineers can manage to keep them from segfaulting for more than a couple minutes. I guess they could avoid using any of the fancy drivers and stick with basic ALSA or OSS, but since only one application at a time can use sound with that method, it would probably already be in use by something else...

  • The original source (Score:4, Informative)

    by clobbersaurus (627821) on Sunday September 03 2006, @07:29PM (#16034742)
    Here's [technologyreview.com] the article cited by The Register.

  • How to counter data mining. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Opportunist (166417) on Sunday September 03 2006, @08:01PM (#16034848)
    I'm a statistician. And if there is one thing that's worse for a statistician than getting no data, it's getting poisoned data. Data that has been deliberately or accidently been tampered with to generate results that deviate greatly from a result you would get with normal data.

    If your want to counter data miners, give them what they want: data. You certainly can't give them more than they can handle, but you can give them false data. False data is worse than no data, because instead of getting no data from you, you are invalidating all data gathered.

  • just sad (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HBergeron (71031) on Sunday September 03 2006, @10:57PM (#16035461)
    having been part of /. since almost day one (hb, at 71000, was my third id) it is sad to see how far things have slid. When I try to explain why /. is still superior to new comers like digg due to the initial filtering of stories; yet another scuttlemonkey shift comes around to shoot that argument all to heck. And always the junk stories are calculated to be the kind to drive maximum traffic to whatever site (we can only hope) he's getting some kind of incentive to pimp. It is just sad to see how little the remaining powers that be seem to care.

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