New Spotify patent would use mic to infer emotional state, age, gender, and accent.New York, Washington, and Virginia are three states that are expected to pass privacy bills this coming legislative session.

Spotify has been granted a patent on using your phone’s microphone to analyze the sounds around you for the purpose of giving song recommendations.It’s hard to tell when exactly Spotify might start trying to utilize your phone’s microphone for more than just receiving voice commands.

“The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot,” Microsoft also describes – implying that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death.

News Highlights: Spotify patents technology to recommend songs based on the speech, emotion of users.What is going on: Music stores worldwide reported this week that Spotify had filed in February 2018 and was granted this month a patent dat “uses speech recognition to determine [users’] “emotional state, gender, age, or accent” – characteristics that can then be used to recommend content.

The patent filing outlines how Spotify currently uses a decision tree—showing users different artists, genres, and more—to help refine its recommendation algorithm for the user.

“The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot,” the patent adds, raising the possibility of people training up a digital version of themselves before they die.

(It is worth noting that despite Amazon's stated policy that customers can still access their previously purchased Kindle library even if their account is suspended, Nygaard couldn't download her books to a new device because her account was suspended.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has reportedly filed a patent for a blockchain-based mail-in voting system.Following President Donald Trump’s conclusion that mail-in voting would represent ballots all over the place and fraudulent ballots would be named after dogs and dead people, the patent that was filed back in February 2020 was made public on Thursday 13th August.

The Army Research Lab has previously publicized research in this area, but these contracts, which started at the end of September 2019 and run until 2021, indicate the technology is now being actively developed for use in the field.“Sensors should be demonstrable in environments such as targets seen through automotive windshield glass, targets that are backlit, and targets that are obscured due to light weather (e.g., fog),” the Department of Defense indicated when requesting proposals.

We don’t believe that there is a case GNOME needs to answer to.We want to show that the use of Shotwell, and free software in general, isn’t affected by this patent.

Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye out for patent filings from Google that used a smartphone camera to look at the expression of a user of that device in order to try to understand the emotions of that person better.

Facebook, whose CEO in April declared, "The future is private," has applied to patent a system of coordinated finger-affixed cameras that allow wearers to live stream a panoramic view of their surroundings.

(Reuters) - Inc is exploring using drones not just to deliver packages but also to provide surveillance as a service to its customers, according to a patent granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

A new patent granted to Amazon suggests the retail giant is exploring ways in which drone surveillance could be packaged up as a new business solution.

A patent, filed in June 2015 and approved earlier this month, describes technology that would allow a delivery drone to “perform surveillance action at a property of an authorized party” by making a “geo-fence” of the property and then “imag[ing] the property to generate surveillance images,” after or during which, the image data that is not within that geo-fence would apparently be obscured.

Amazon’s delivery drones are not yet dropping off packages, but the company is already envisioning how else that might be used — including by offering “surveillance as a service.” Amazon was recently granted a patent that outlines how its UAVs could keep an eye on customers’ property between deliveries while supposedly maintaining their privacy.

In case Amazon’s surveillance capabilities weren’t extensive enough with its Echo, Ring , and Key products, not to mention all the data Amazon routinely collects on its customers, the company recently received a US patent to provide “surveillance as a service.”.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Amazon’s patent application for an always-on feature for Alexa, its popular voice-activated personal assistant, has raised a lot of concern.

Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant system that runs on the company's Echo series of smart speakers, works by listening out for a 'wakeword' that tells the device to turn on its extended speech recognition systems in order to respond to spoken commands.

How to find out what Alexa has recorded: Select the icon in the top left corner - often dubbed the 'hamburger' Press 'Settings' at the bottom of the menu.

ByteDance’s smartphone patent acquisitions suddenly make more sense The Financial Times says that ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming has “long dreamt” of building a smartphone full of preloaded apps.

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In patent speak, this is “Associating received contact information with user profiles stored by a social networking system.” Here’s how Facebook describes the process of figuring out everyone you’ve ever met.

This proposed mirror would be able to tell if a user is trying to look at their reflection or at the computerized display simply by analyzing their gaze, and would present one more prominently than the other to match that.

Today’s “smart speakers” monitor and analyze only sounds, while Google’s futuristic automation system wants to measure everything: “acceleration, temperature, humidity, water, supplied power, proximity, external motion, device motion, sound signals, ultrasound signals, light signals, fire, smoke, carbon monoxide or other gas, global-positioning-satellite (GPS) signals, radio-frequency (RF), other electromagnetic signals or fields, or the like.” The patent helpfully walks us through various applications of all this technology.

As critics fear Amazon is pushing for a world policed and governed through automation, Bezos software continues to rack up sales, potentially removing human judgment from the law enforcement tool kit.

The new feature would use your previous locations -- plus previously logged locations of other Facebook users, even people who aren't your Facebook friends -- to make predictions about where you're likely to go.

Recently, a patent application from Amazon became public that would pair face surveillance — like Rekognition, the product that the company is aggressively marketing to police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — with Ring, a doorbell camera company that Amazon bought earlier this year.

Facebook’s app says it collects your current location data in order to “provide more relevant and personalized experiences” right now, like serving you localized advertising or helping you use its check-in feature, which allows you to post about different businesses you’re visiting.

It’s one thing if you want to track the speed of a cart or its route through a store for marketing purposes but a desire to collect a user’s vital signs under the guise that you’re doing so to help sick or elderly shoppers or otherwise improve customer service is outright disturbing.