Sure, it's just a prototype. But still.:

The idea is to use the existing PC microphone to listen to whatever is heard in the background, be it music, your phone going off or the TV turned down. The PC then identifies it, using fingerprinting, and then shows you relevant content, whether that's adverts or search results, or a chat room on the subject.

And, of course, we wouldn’t put it past Google to store that information away, along with the search terms it keeps that you've used, and the web pages you have visited, to help it create a personalised profile that feeds you just the right kind of adverts/content. And given that it is trying to develop alternative approaches to TV advertising, it could go the extra step and help send "content relevant" advertising to your TV as well.

For that, the solution is simple: Turn off your teevee. (Or tape over the mike (or throw "chaff" at the system with other noise)).

But this won't stop with the teevee, will it?

Here's the original Technology Review article on this technology:

A system recently outlined by researchers at Google amounts to personalized TV without the fancy set-top equipment required by previous (and failed) attempts at interactive television. Their prototype software, detailed in a conference presentation in Europe last June, uses a computer's built-in microphone to listen to the sounds in a room. It then filters each five-second snippet of sound to pick out audio from a TV, reduces the snippet to a digital "fingerprint," searches an Internet server for a matching fingerprint from a pre-recorded show, and, if it finds a match, displays ads, chat rooms, or other information related to that snippet on the user's computer.

Well, shit. I got that barcode on my forehead, and all for nothing?

Now, Google does say that we don't have to worry about privacy:

But the fingerprinting technology used in the Google prototype makes it impossible for the company to eavesdrop on other sounds in the room, such as personal conversations, according to the Google team. In the end, the researchers say, the only personal information revealed is TV-watching preferences.

But that presumes that the "fingerprint" technology is all that is ever developed, or ever used. And it also presumes that fingerprints for conversations will never be developed. Both these assumptions seem shaky, to me.

Tinfoil hat time!

NOTE Via What Really Happened.