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Go ahead, monitor my calls.

I already turn off the sound on my computer so I don’t have to listen to ad audio. Force an ad onto my screen, and I’ll minimize the window and come back when you’re gone. If I can’t minimize the window, I’ll hang a sweater over the screen during the phone call. As for the surveillance, if the U.S. government can’t keep up with terrorists, I’m not worried about a tech startup keeping up with the rest of us.

Do you really need to use this company to get your free or cheap VoIP service?

If you do use it, how about speaking in Pig Latin? Freak the monitoring software out.

No thank you. It might prove to be economically more viable in the future to save past phone logs (or at least topics of discussion/past ad history). It's a small step from listening into my current phone calls to saving them for future use. Imagine the government then issuing a subpoena for someone's "VoIP ad records" or something...

But maybe I'm just being paranoid. In reality, I doubt that this technology will ever really work. Any conversation I have is a meandering twisted road of divergent topics. I simply don't believe that the ad software is sophisticated enough to follow my conversation and analyze it in a way that makes it meaningful for me. I'd expect to be bombarded with ads that pick up on certain key words that I happen to utter.

When the technology advances enough to be truly useful is when it may finally catch on. Say my future wife calls me and tells me to pick up a carton of eggs and a gallon of milk. The ad software picks up on this conversation and guesses that I'm going to go to the grocery store. It then can provide me with ads for various grocery stores - sort of like the fliers that you find in the newspaper that advertise the weekly sales so that I can make the best decision on where to go buy my eggs and milk.

Its still a scary scenario, but at least its sort of useful...

marcparis:

If you do use it, how about speaking in Pig Latin? Freak the monitoring software out.

what if it starts trying to sell you italian pork?

Prosciutto? I'm all for it.

But in my scenario they'd be pushing alianitay orkay anyway.

Unless you're a college student (or someone living in poverty), you would have to be a real cheapskate to take them up on the offer. Why not just pay the full price since I am sure you can easilly afford it. I mean dude, you're fucking Saletam for crying out loud.

Now, back to the topic at hand. It would be even easier to just not use your phone. Get the phone service with internet connection but just never use your landline and simly use your cell phone. I mean they might get supscious after a while if you don't have any voice comming though.

Or just have your phone in a different room than your computer room and hope the ad will have minimized by them.

I'm doubtful about the legality of this plan in all jurisdictions. In a number of U.S. states, the consent of both parties to a call is required before that call may be recorded (absent a court order allowing the police to record your calls). If this system is used to place a call to someone in one of those states, and the person receiving the call is not informed that his or her conversation may be recorded, there is potential criminal liability for the party making the recording. And there might be potential liability for the party making the call who knows about the recording and fails to obtain consent from the other party.

You'd actually let them monitor your calls to save a buck! Is your sense of privacy that cheap?

Reverse question: Would you allow the government to listen to your internet phone calls if they ensured you they wouldn't record the conversations?

analogboy490:

marcparis:

If you do use it, how about speaking in Pig Latin? Freak the monitoring software out.

what if it starts trying to sell you italian pork?

I'm foreseeing a lot of eBay ads....

I disagree, I find this disconcerting from a long-term viewpoint. In and of itself, I think its relatively harmless in the short term. So they'd show a few pop-ads during a phone conversation; nothing like looking at some porn to help stimulate the conversation with my girlfriend.

But in the long term, they wouldn't necessarily need to record your phone conversations...just log all the pop-up hits that your conversations generate. I see that as the real marketing benefit of monitoring conversations. It would be real-time market research over a long period of time. Over time, that would just serve to re-inforce self indulgent behavior individuals. What if I was trying to quit smoking or curb masturbation? So during an innocent conversation with my mom about the weather, I'd be getting pop-up ads with the Marlboro Man talking about the weather surrounded by half-naked coeds. What if you often spoke about guns? or drugs?

My point being...it could be a dangerous re-affirmation of potentially destructive behavior.

"Go ahead, monitor my calls."

Please don't say that.

I see this as the third step in the slippery slope to corporate Big Brotherdom. (Tivo was the first. Gmail is the second.)

The argument that is free and can be ignored is very weak. As Saletan noted, expectations of privacy change. So do expectations of value.

Back to phone filters. What if Worldcom rose from the dead to offer free cellular service for anyone willing to sign up for such an "Ads with ears" program? Carriers would love it because they have the advertisers covering their operating costs. It's unobtrusive, right?

Would you sign up if they offered an i-Phone? I'd bet 98% of the population would sign a deal like that. Don't like it? Carriers can keep sweetening the deal with music, games, and technology features to drive the population to whatever pricing model works for them.

There's a tipping point where public perception changes. Everyone just lives with monitored phone calls because they chose to have it and the costs seem small compared to the benefit. (Free i-Phones! With 50 Cent and Halo for free!) Once it gets past that point, ad-free, suscriber-based service becomes expensive because the numbers aren't there to support those services. So they raise prices, and suddenly you can't "afford" to avoid the ads. That's if they decide to offer it at all.

I'd say that within 10 years, there will be data storage so plentiful, that someone can and will record everything that comes out of your bluetooth-miked mouth.

You want privacy? In the future, you'll have to pay a premium for it. Everyone else will have sold out long ago.

In America, television watches you. Just ask Tivo.

Sometime during the early 90's some company was selling extremely low cost ($200-$400) computers with free Internet access, provided that you were willing to watch an ad when you first signed on. I can't remember any more details, but that's how my cousin got his first computer. He would log in, fix a cup of coffee for a minute, and come back when the ad was over. At the time he had almost no money and this was the only way he could afford a computer. Within a couple of years he had a better job and could afford a better machine.

That's probably why this idea won't catch on. I predict that enough of the customers would be in a low enough income bracket that the advertisers will decide it's not worth it.

Also I wonder what they would do about people speaking in a foreign language. Maybe they have Spanish covered in addition to English but I'm guessing that's the extent of it.

I had to hire a private eye due to money over 1,000,000.00

. mising in the us mail. Or the bank statements for this money and other checks since I was just divorced and everything had been sold and divided so I had some money. Anyway this is in 1999,

he had a machine that could listen to phone calls all over the area. So witha computer or without one anyone can listen in and tape the phone calls you make anywhere at anytime.

This technology is not new in, even if you have a very limited dictionary (limite i.e. to 2,000 keywords) the system would work by picking any mention of pizza in your conversation even if it does not understand that you're talking about a pimple face teenager who you are calling "pizza face" .

Statistically as the ammount of voice data collected the efficiency of the algorithms goes way up.

Having said that one thing is that it is really within the realm of the possible to have this system workin, but quite another to say that using this system is a good idea.