phone

Here’s a VICE article about how your smartphone is listening to the things that you are saying, and is serving you adverts based upon the things that you speak about.

It’s entitled:

Your Phone Is Listening and it’s Not Paranoia

Sadly though, it does appear to have ignited quite a lot of paranoia about the fact that your phone is listening.

Am I the only one not to have known about this before?

I didn’t think this was news. I thought that this was common knowledge. After all, access to the microphone is often part of the permissions that you give apps when you download or update them.

Am I the only one not to be hugely worried by it either?

I’m not routinely planning terrorist attacks or coups d’état (although…?). And if I did, I’d make sure that my phone wasn’t right next to me. And even if it was, I’d probably only get served some google ads about terrorist attacks and coups d’état.

In fact, given that I am going to be served ads while I am on the internet, I have no issue with targeted ads. I’m wont to ignore them all anyway, but at least they might be of some interest to me.

File under: Wrong?, What could possibly go

Send Me To Heaven (or SMTH) is a novel app for your smartphone. It is, according to the developers:

…a sport game.

In which:

Player throws his phone as high as he can. The higher the better. The phone registers the height and uploads result to leader boards. World Top 10, Week Top 10 and Day Top 10 lists are available.

But isn’t this all a bit risky? Well yes, but it’s ok – they’ve got that covered:

Hints: Be careful not to injure yourself or others. Be always aware that there is enough space above you and around you. Do some training to learn right skills to get best results.

Presumably “best results” means not breaking your phone or your fingers. Or both.

And it seems that this has happened with iPhone users, and that’s why Apple has pulled it from iStore, presumably under some sort of nanny state, user protection clause like their infamous:

Apps that include games of Russian roulette will be rejected.

Anyway, I couldn’t just post about this and not actually do it, so I actually did it.

Here are the (rather straightforward) instructions – remember: no rockets or parachutes, folks.

And, once I’d agreed to their disclaimer, I chucked, with dreams of appearing on CTIA’s radar screens… but this was the best that I could manage (safely) with my precious Xperia T:

So far, anyway…

Here’s the QR code for you Android users:

via engadget.

Tag: phone

Your phone is listening

I want to play a game…