Imagine your car playing you an ad based on your destination, vehicle information—and listening to your conversations.

Ford has patented a system that, per the filing, would use several different sources of information to customize ad content to play in your car. One such information stream that this hypothetical system would use to determine what sort of ads to serve could be could be the voice commands you’ve given to the car. It could also identify your voice and recognize you and your ad preferences, and those of your passengers. Finally, it could listen to your conversations and determine if it’s better to serve you a visual ad while you’re talking, or an audio ad when there’s a lull in the conversation.

If the system described in the patent knew that you were headed to the mall on the freeway based on destination information from the nav system and vehicle speed, it could consider how many ads to serve in the time you’ll be in the car, and whether to serve them on a screen or based through the audio system. If you respond more positively to audio ads, it might serve you more of those—how does every five minutes sound?

But what if the weather’s bad, traffic is heavy, and you’re chatting away with your passenger? Ford describes the system using the external sensors to perceive traffic levels and weather, and the internal microphone to understand conversational cadence, to “regulate the number (and relevance) of ads shown” to the occupants. Using the GPS, if it knows you’ve parked near a store, it might serve you ads relevant to that retail location. Got passengers? Maybe you get an audio ad, and they get a visual one.

Given how consumers feel about advertising and in-car privacy, it is difficult to imagine an implementation of this system that wouldn’t generate blowback. But again, the patent isn’t describing some imminent implementation; it just protects Ford’s IP that describes a possible system. That said, with the encroachment of subscription-based features, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before you’re accepting a $20/month discount to let your new Ford play you ads on your commute.

  • Grimm665@lemm.eeEnglish
    62·
    2 months ago

    What was that headline about Facebook employees bragging about customer conversations they were listening in on? hmmmm

    • conciselyverboseEnglish
      31·
      2 months ago

      Choose between:

      Entirely fabricated

      or

      On their own hardware, that isn’t a smartphone, because they don’t make them.

      Both iOS and Android make it abundantly clear when your mic is hot and when apps have access to it. It’s not possible to listen undetected.

      • cirkuitbreakerEnglish
        22·
        2 months ago

        Google Assistant is able to activate simply by the user saying “Okay Google,” at any time, without pushing any buttons first. That means the microphone is always listening.

        • conciselyverboseEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          You should do your research on how wake words work. They literally are only capable of identifying the selected words and they do an obscene amount of training to do so efficiently, because actually processing all the audio your phone is exposed to can’t possibly be done in a reasonable way.