Google Will Be Listening, and Maybe Watching?
If you are someone who is already uncomfortable with Google’s ability to stockpile loads of your browsing information, then the recent murmurs of Google developing an eavesdropping technology will certainly not sit well with you.
The news was first revealed when director of research at Google, Peter Norvig, told Technology Review that Google is developing a system that would utilize a user’s PC microphone to pick up background noises including television audio, music, and phone rings. These bits of audio will then be used to determine what relevant advertisements, search results, or chat rooms to show the user.
According to Technology Review, Google first mentioned this idea in Europe last June. Essentially, the technology would break down background noises into five-second clips and convert them into fingerprints, which would be matched on a server.
Google maintains that there is no need to worry about personal identity security with this technology, since no one will be able to really eavesdrop on any user because the five-second audio clips are converted to fingerprints on the PC.
According to The Register, “The Google program converts sound into graphs, weeds out background noise, and reduces the graphs to key features that can then be translated into just four bytes of information, so that the fingerprints for an entire year of television programming would add up to no more than a few gigabytes, the company said.”
If Google is willing to use a PC’s microphone, the company will probably be interested in using webcams as well. This could shed some more light into Google’s recent acquisition of Neven Vision last month.
Neven Vision is a biometric and photo recognition company that Google claimed it would use to enhance Picasa and the ease with which users could search photos. However, Neven Vision is known to have been used by the LAPD for recognizing gang members in images.
It would appear that Google could easily leverage Neven Vision’s technology to monitor webcam images in order to deliver relevant content based on what is seen in those images.
All those jokes about Google being Big Brother could have some credence soon enough, and it is likely that there will be large groups of people that will not be laughing.
Sources:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/03/google_
eavesdropping_software/
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/better-
way-to-organize-photos.html
