Internet phone service company to eavesdrop on conversationsPaul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, September 24, 2007
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.