New York: At first glance, the gaming apps — with names like ‘Pool 3D,’ ‘Beer Pong: Trickshot’ and ‘Real Bowling Strike 10 Pin’ — seem innocuous. One called ‘Honey Quest’ features Jumbo, an animated bear.
Yet these apps, once downloaded onto a smartphone, have the ability to keep tabs on the viewing habits of their users, even when the games are not being played. It is yet another example of how companies, using devices that many people feel they cannot do without, are documenting how audiences in a rapidly changing entertainment landscape are viewing television and commercials.
The apps use software from Alphonso, a startup that collects TV-viewing data for advertisers. Using a smartphone’s microphone, Alphonso’s software can detail what people watch by identifying audio signals in TV ads and shows, sometimes even matching that information with the places people visit and the movies they see. The information can then be used to target ads more precisely and to try to analyse things like which ads prompted a person to go to a car dealership.
More than 250 games that use Alphonso software are available in the Google Play store; some are also available in Apple’s app store. Some of the tracking is taking place through gaming apps that do not otherwise involve a smartphone’s microphone. The software can also detect sounds even when a phone is in a pocket if the apps are running in the background.
Alphonso said that its software, which does not record human speech, is clearly explained in app descriptions and privacy policies and that the company cannot gain access to users’ microphones and locations unless they agree. “The consumer is opting in knowingly and can opt out any time,” Ashish Chordia, Alphonso’s chief executive, said, adding that the company’s disclosures comply with Federal Trade Commission guidelines.
The company also provides opt-out instructions on its website.
Alphonso is one of several young companies using new technologies to enter living rooms in search of fresh information to sell to marketers. For all the talk of digital disruption in the ad world, television still attracts almost $70 billion (Dh257 billion) in annual spending in the US, and advertisers will gladly pay to amplify and analyse the effectiveness of that spending.
The spread of these technologies, combined with the proliferation of internet-connected TVs and tools that can identify video content through pixels and audio snippets, has resulted in some questionable practices.
Last year, the trade commission issued a warning to a dozen developers who had installed a piece of software known as Silverpush onto apps with the goal of using device microphones to listen for audio signals that humans could not hear to log what they watched on TV.
This year, Vizio agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle charges that it was collecting and selling viewing data from millions of internet-connected televisions without the knowledge or consent of the sets’ owners. Companies gathering such data, especially through games, need to make their business practices clear to consumers “because it’s so inherently unexpected and surprising,” said Justin Brookman, the director of consumer privacy and technology policy at the advocacy group Consumers Union.
“When you see ‘permission for microphone access for ads’, it may not be clear to a user that, oh, this means it’s going to be listening to what I do all the time to see if I’m watching ‘Monday Night Football’,” Brookman said. “They need to go above and beyond and be careful to make sure consumers know what’s going on.”
Through its software, Alphonso can follow the ads that people see in friends’ homes and elsewhere. The company has also worked with movie studios to figure out theatre-viewing habits, Chordia said.
Smartphone apps that are running Alphonso’s software, even if they are not actively in use, can detect movies based on film snippets provided by the studios ahead of time. “A lot of the folks will go and turn off their phone, but a small portion of people don’t and put it in their pocket,” Chordia said. “In those cases, we are able to pick up in a small sample who is watching the show or the movie.”
Chordia said that Alphonso has a deal with the music-listening app Shazam, which has microphone access on many phones. Alphonso is able to provide the snippets it picks up to Shazam, he said, which can use its own content-recognition technology to identify users and then sell that information to Alphonso. Shazam, which Apple recently agreed to buy, declined to comment about Alphonso.
Still, the connection between microphones and ads is a sticky one. Americans are both inviting internet-connected speakers from Amazon and Google into their homes in droves while expressing anxiety that companies are secretly listening to them and then using that information in unsettling ways, like eerily relevant ads.
“We have to be really careful as we have more devices capturing more information in living rooms and bedrooms and on the street and in other people’s homes that the public is not blindsided and surprised by things,” said Dave Morgan, the founder and chief executive of Simulmedia, which works with advertisers on targeted TV ads.
“It’s not what’s legal. It is what’s not creepy.”
