ryan kennedy’s blog

I wanted to write about this earlier today, but I was heading out the door when I heard about Google’s plan to use your microphone to generate targeted ads. Seriously, how on earth do you drop that nugget with a straight face? People were mad enough that Gmail reads your mail messages to generate targeted ads, this is just a deeper, more invasive version of that. Instead of waiting for you to read a mail message, Google is going to use your computer microphone to listen to the ambient sounds of your location.

This is my favorite part of the article from The Register:

Google says that its fingerprinting technology makes it impossible for the company (or anyone else) to eavesdrop on other sounds in the room, such as personal conversations, because the conversion to a fingerprint is made on the PC, and a fingerprint can’t be reversed, as it’s only an identity.

It’s true, assuming Google is using some form of a one-way hash, they won’t be able to eavesdrop the conversation…in its entirety. Google will however be able to eavesdrop the general topic of conversation, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to target ads (well, they could…but they’d target poorly). While they won’t know every single word of the conversation, they will know you were talking about what kind of new car to buy. Then again, they might just pick up that conversation from the television where the arch-villain is discussing their plan to assassinate someone, triggering their targeting system to find you all sorts of great deals on hit men, sniper rifles and out of the way burial locations (plotted, with directions, on Google Maps, of course).

All that being said, Gmail snoops everything you read and write and people still use it. I guess there’s just no accounting for taste…or privacy (or the illusion of privacy).

This entry was posted on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Unfiled. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.