By Pascal Oparada
If the patent pulls through, Facebook may be eavesdropping on your private conversations and that of billions of Facebook users worldwide.
The purpose, tech analysts believe, is for advert targeting.
A patent application filed by the Menlo Park-based company details a knotty process to trigger users’ devices to record the ambient audio surrounding them, be that your conversation or the sounds in your bedroom, and then send some form of data based on that recording back to the company.
The application, first reported by Metro, was published on June 14 and lays out how Facebook might remotely turn on your phone’s microphone to start recording. Essentially, Facebook would implant high-pitched audio signals in “broadcast content” 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 the determination that there was an impression of the identified content item by the identified individual,” explains the application abstract.
Facebook, when reached for comment, claimed it has no intention of ever actually implementing the technology described in the application.
Facebook Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Allen Lo said: “It is common practice to file patents to prevent aggression from other companies,” Lo said in a statement to Mashable.
“Because of this, patents tend to focus on future-looking technology that is often speculative in nature and could be commercialized by other companies.”
“The technology in this patent has not been included in any of our products,” Lo explained.