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Hi, everyone. Let’s talk about how to read patents again. There’s a raft of headlines today claiming that Facebook has a patent on secretly turning your phone mic on when it hears a signal from a TV. The story appears to have picked up in, which ran the headline “Facebook wants to hide secret inaudible messages in TV ads that can force your phone to record audio.”, in classic Giz style: “Facebook patent imagines triggering your phone’s mic when a hidden signal plays on TV.”, which personally breaks my heart since I used to do all the patent stories there: “Facebook patent turns phone mics on to record reactions to ads.”, for some reason: “Facebook’s new patent can turn on your microphone and secretly record you.” Anyway, all of these headlines are wrong. Facebook did not apply for a patent on turning your phone microphone on when a hidden signal plays on a TV. I know this because I simply read the patent claims, which do not have the word “phone” or “microphone” in them at all.
And the claims are the only part that truly matter. A patent is composed of several parts. There’s the title, which is usually gibberish, the abstract, which broadly describes what’s in the patent, the specification, which explains how to build or use the invention being patented, and then there are the claims, which is the actual subject matter of the patent. If you are not a patent lawyer in patent litigation and you are reading anything but the claims, you are getting it wrong.
This is so fundamental to reading patents that law students are taught “the name of the game is the claim” in order to remember it. The patent claims do not contain the words “phone” or “microphone” So what are the claims of Facebook’s patent application? You can open it here — — and follow along. Let’s look at the first claim, which is typically the broadest and most important — the following claims tend to narrow the first claim in different ways. It is basically the backend of Shazam for ads That’s it. It is basically the backend of Shazam for programmatic ads.
Again, the words “phone” and “microphone” do not appear in any of the patent claims. There are some parts of the specification that describe triggering microphones with a silent-to-humans sound, but again, the specification does not matter. Just the claims. Now, could you read these claims and the specification and infer Facebook needs such a backend so that it would be able to silently enable your phone’s microphone and keep track of the ads on your TV? Sure, if you wanted. But you know what other kinds of devices listen for triggers to enable microphones and send audio data to the cloud?
Smart speakers. Like the for some time. The claim does mention that one device will capture audio from another device, citing “ambient audio captured by the client device during a broadcast by a household device in a vicinity of the client device,” but again, there’s no claim about how that “client device” would get automatically turned on without your knowledge. And there’s already an example of a smart speaker listening to silent commands from a TV: Alexa devices can into Alexa commercials so they don’t accidentally trigger commands. Once you put an always-listening microphone in people’s houses, the next logical step is thinking about what other kinds of triggers could set them off, and what they might do. And if you’re a big tech company, you file as many patents as you can to block competitors.
Facebook gave a statement to exactly that effect: However, Facebook says it has no intention of ever implementing the technology described in the patent.