The implementation
of Minority Report style invasive advertising is gaining traction,
as an Internet phone service company announces plans to eavesdrop on
conversations to tailor commercials, bustling aside any notion of
personal privacy as archaic and inconvenient to the 21st century
mass consumer.
Last year we warned that the first steps were being taken to turn
the technology we have all become so dependent upon against us, in
order to create a vast database that catalogues the very essence of
who we are.
Most people don't know that if they signed up for any of Google's
services, be it GMail, AdSense, or Google Video, every single term
they enter into a Google search engine is stored on a central
database. Only by opting out of the program can users prevent this
information from being stored, but since the fact is buried in some
gargantuan terms of agreement document and the default setting is to
collect web history, millions of people's opinions, political
leanings, medical problems, worries, interests, financial concerns,
sexual tastes ad infinitum are being catalogued without their
knowledge.
Around a year ago
Google announced that they would be pushing the envelope even
further, by using the microphones that are installed inside an
estimated 150 million Internet active American's computers to listen
in on conversations and background noise in order to build
psychological profiles which will be used for surveillance, invasive
advertising and data mining.
"The idea is to use the existing PC microphone to listen to whatever
is heard in the background, be it music, your phone going off or the
TV turned down. The PC then identifies it, using fingerprinting, and
then shows you relevant content, whether that's adverts or search
results, or a chat room on the subject," reports the Register.
"Pretty soon the security industry is going to find a way to hijack
the Google feed and use it for full on espionage," concludes the
article.
The fact that Google was founded with the help of CIA seed money
should leave us under no illusions as to where the focus of this
technology is eventually headed, directly to the state who will
implement it as a mandatory requirement of acquiring a license to
use the Internet once the government regulated Internet 2 begins to
dominate the market.
And if that doesn't make you nervous, the same technology has now
arrived for use in the Internet phone service market.
The New York Times reports that Pudding Media, a new company founded
by two former Israeli intelligence officers, is offering its
customers free Internet phone service in return for their consent to
have their conversations monitored for keywords upon which targeted
advertising is directed.
"A conversation
about movies, for example, will elicit movie reviews and ads for new
films that the caller will see during the conversation. Pudding
Media is working on a way to e-mail the ads and other content to the
person on the other end of the call, or to show it on that person’s
cellphone screen," writes Louise Story.
If you think telesales calls and pop-ups ads are annoying, the new
wave of invasive advertising will not only saturate the senses with
24/7 vapid consumerism, but it will signal the death knell for the
assumption that privacy is a human right not to be infringed upon by
corporations or the state.
