Shhht! Google Can HEAR YOU!

With each moment that passes Google is closer and closer to invade the user's privacy. This is possible due to a new technology invented by two researchers of the Mountain View company named: Michele Covell si Shumeet Baluja.

The Euro ITV conference in Greece on interactive television last month was the unveiling site of their invention. The technology offers a means to monitor the acoustic ambient in an enclosed space through a microphone sensor. The software that will operate the system will take no more than five seconds to recognize sound fragments divided by pauses, inflexions and accent and to convert them binary in order to be compared within an audio database and matched to a word.

Google calls this technology "mass personalization" and will find a use for it in monitoring TV programs in order for the search engine to adapt in real-time online advertisements on the web pages that the user is surfing to the programs on TV.

"We showed how to sample the ambient sound emitted from a TV and automatically determine what is being watched from a small signature of the sound -- all with complete privacy and minuscule effort," wrote researchers Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja in a posting. "We could collect snippets from the Web describing the actors appearing in a movie or present maps of locales within the movie as it takes place, no matter if users are watching it as a live broadcast or as a recorded broadcast."

The researchers predicted that their technology will in no way intrude on or pose a threat to the user's intimacy because it is impossible to reverse the process and backtrack the mapping to obtain statistics as the technology only recognizes vocal fragments and not conversations.