Your Smartphone is watching you

ComputerWorld:

This Week in Tech. Host Leo Laporte and his panel shocked listeners by unmasking three popular apps that activate your phone's microphone to collect sound patterns from inside your home, meeting, office or wherever you are. The apps are Color, Shopkick and IntoNow, all of which activate the microphones in users' iPhone or Android devices in order to gather contextual information that provides some benefit to the user.

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Obviously, the idea that app companies are eavesdropping on private moments creeps everybody out. But all these apps try to get around user revulsion by recording not actual sounds, but sound patterns, which are then uploaded to a server as data and compared with the patterns of other sounds.

There have been apps that use the microphone of course, eg those "what song is that" ones like Shazam. The difference is these ones don't tell you what they are doing:

The new apps are often sneakier about it. The vast majority of people who use the Color app, for example, have no idea that their microphones are being activated to gather sounds. Welcome to the future.

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What you need to know about marketing and advertising is that data is king. Marketers can never get enough, because the more they know about you and your lifestyle, the more effective their marketing and the more valuable and expensive their advertising. That's why marketers love cellphones, which are viewed as universal sensors for conducting highly granular, real-time market research.

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You should know that any data that can be gathered, will be gathered. Since the new microphone-hijacking apps are still around, we now know that listening in on users is OK. So, what's possible with current technology? By listening in on your phone, capturing "patterns," then sending that data back to servers, marketers can determine the following:

- Your gender, and the gender of people you talk to.
- Your approximate age, and the ages of the people you talk to.
- What time you go to bed, and what time you wake up.
- What you watch on TV and listen to on the radio.
- How much of your time you spend alone, and how much with others.
- Whether you live in a big city or a small town.
- What form of transportation you use to get to work.

Even more fun, some apps like to rifle through your digital drawers, find data and then Phone Home:

Of course, lots of apps transmit all kinds of private data back to the app maker. Some send back each phone's Unique Device Identification (UDI), the number assigned to each mobile phone, which can be used to positively identify it. Other apps tell the servers the phone's location. Many apps actually snoop around on your phone, gathering up personal information, such as gender, age and ZIP code, and zapping it back to the company over your phone's data connection.

All this data and more, plus the UDI on your phone, could enable advertising companies to send you very narrowly targeted advertising for products and services that you're likely to want. It could also enable snooping on an unparalelled scale, never mind if the data was stolen or exposed accidentally (that could never happen, I'm sure.....). Not so much "Welcome to the Future" as a return to a "Brave New World".

We've been banging on about the intrusion of the Web 2.0 FreeConomic model till we're blue in the face, but the transgressions seem to get more and more intrusive year by year, I have come to the conclusion that it will only be regulation that will put a stop to it - or else, endgame is that privacy will be something that only the priviledged will ever have.