well, bye bye privacy. Soon your headphones will measure your response to the ads you see.
Verification can is closing in
I mean… Couldn’t smart watches do the exact same thing?
Yes, 100%. For instance, my Pixel Watch measures and logs my heart rate every second. Though I doubt that something as volatile as a user’s heart rate has any significant value to advertisers, over the treasure trove of other, more reliable data points they already have collected on any given user.
People act like every single facet of their lives has some intrinsic advertising value, when really it’s only specific things that advertisers are interested in. They want to know your habits; what sites you go to, what physical spaces you frequently visit, what sort of content you consume, what you spend your money on, etc. Those are metrics that advertisers can capitalize on to make sure that they’re serving you ads that you’re more likely to engage with.
Biometric data, on the other hand, is basically worthless. Even if we pretend that Google is using my heart rate data from my Fitbit profile for advertisements, that data gives Google basically nothing to work with. Did my heart rate fluctuate because of an ad I saw? Or did it fluctuate because I stood up and walked to the kitchen while a YouTube ad was playing? There’s no easy way to discern this sort of nuance, making it effectively useless for advertising purposes.
Maybe if we lived in a more cyberpunk world where advertisers could access things like our serotonin or dopamine levels, and could link that directly to things we’re actively seeing/hearing, that would be worthwhile to advertisers, because then they could actually know how something you interacted with affected your brain chemistry. But as it stands right now, heart rate by itself is little more than junk data.
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Right, this is exactly my point. One biometric data point on its own isn’t enough, you need a lot more to glean any useful information.
Until your earbuds start tracking all of these, worries over whether or not it’ll be used for advertising are just FUD.
Biometric data is not useless. Perhaps yours alone is, but ALL of ours… combined with our location history, income level, job industry, shopping preferences, spending habits, etc, are worth quite a bit.
Biometric data is useful for establishing identity, that can be used to correlate data better and for surveillance purposes.
Some biometric data can be used for IDing, but unless you have a particularly unique sinus rhythm, I don’t think heart rate can really be used to identify anybody.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Typical heart rate monitoring in wearable tech, like smart watches or wireless earbuds, relies at least partially on photoplethysmography (PPG), which uses light pulses to measure blood activity.
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Google scientists wrote in a new research blog spotted by 9to5Google yesterday that they had tried a different approach, called audioplethysmography (APG), that uses ultrasound to measure heart rate.
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That last one is notable since heart rate accuracy with darker natural skin tones or tattoos has been an ongoing problem with smartwatches and other wearables until now.
Google’s researchers also found the ultrasound approach worked fine when music was playing, but said that it had issues in noisy environments and that “the APG signal can sometimes be very noisy and could be heavily disturbed by body motion.” However, they found they could overcome the motion problem by using multiple frequencies and teasing out the most accurate signal among them.
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Heart rate monitoring headphones have been around for a while, but they use the PPG approach and can be very sensitive to intense movement or a bad fit.
Bear in mind that this is only a study and doesn’t mean Google is about to release headphones that do this (or update your Pixel Buds Pro to do it).
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The original article contains 368 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 40%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
