The Pudding provides free ad-supported phone calls by eavesdropping

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web services, Google, VoIP

The Pudding provides free ad-supported phone calls by eavesdropping

by Brad Linder Sep 24th 2007

Back in 2004 when Google announced its new e-mail service would "read" your messages in order to serve up relevant advertisements, privacy advocates around the world shuddered. Three years later, most folks hardly bat an eye at the concept.

But there's still something a bit creepy about a similar business model put forward by internet telephony startup The Pudding. The web service will let you make free phone calls from your PC to any land line. The Pudding is completely web-based. There's no software to download, you just plug a headset into your computer, open up a web page and dial away.

Here comes the creepy part. The reason The Pudding can let you make phone calls for free is because the site will serve up relevant advertisements. And it will determine relevance by listening in on your conversation.

There won't be a room filled with people listening to you talk with your best friend about relationship trouble with your spouse. But a computer will be listening and using voice recognition software to serve up on-screen ads for divorce lawyers. The company is also working on a way to send ads to the cellphone screen of the person you're calling.

We imagine at first people will just make sure to only use The Pudding for completely trivial conversations. But if the service proves trustworthy, at some point, they'll forget about the eavesdropping and use it on a regular basis, much as they do Gmail. And while there may be no real difference between the two companies' business model, eavesdropping still feels a bit more invasive than screenreading.

[via The New York Times]

Tags: eavesdropping, privacy, the-pudding

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

colin_w said 4:45PM on 9-24-2007

Only works for North America

Lee said 12:41AM on 9-25-2007

> Only works for North America
>

Thank the internet Gods!

Has anyone noticed an intellectual arms race (in the Richard Dawkins sense, see 'The Selfish Gene', I believe) between those wanting to force someone to view advertisements for their banaal products and on the other side, we become ever more skilled at avoiding them.

Urghh, roll-on an advertising-free future.

Eleventeen said 11:22AM on 9-25-2007

I'm betting you could easily defeat this by using some sort of audio encryption or out of band signalling. Most voice recognition systems will only recognize voices in a given, but limited, frequency range. I bet an easy phase shift up or down (and a correlating correction at the other end) could befuddle this.

Or you could just go old school and speak in code: John has a long mustache, the chair is against the wall, etc etc.

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