3 ms·

Its worth investigating the increased use of Subaudible tones to demarcate commercials. These subaudibles are originally intended to be captured by your phones

Its worth investigating the increased use of Subaudible tones to demarcate commercials. These subaudibles are originally intended to be captured by your phones and tablets in order to allow the company to track you across multiple devices through their microphones. the tones are also used to detect commercial ad presence for analytics companies or suites used by advertisers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaudible_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaudible_tone One could use these tones to 'detect' a commercial and avoid it, or strip out these tones entirely to promote operational security amongst devices.

dest 8y ago
Interesting! Thanks for sharing. This might be a criterion among others, as there will always be ads that do not have subaudible tones.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cwkoss 8y ago
>One could use these tones to 'detect' a commercial and avoid it, or strip out these tones entirely to promote operational security amongst devices. Or one could layer superfluous erroneous tones into every stream to poison the dataset.
- dest 8y ago
  Good point. Note I have designed Adblock Radio to rely on audio only, so that it gives the smallest possible margin for radio operators to circumvent it. I do not rely on metadata, nor do I use the usual time schedules for ad breaks.
  - shkkmo 8y ago
    That's great, but can't you use the subaudible tones as an additional blocking metric? Or even as an assessment metric to flag potential false negatives?
    - dest 8y ago
      It may be possible, research is needed on that topic
- JKCalhoun 8y ago
  And poison the advertiser's dataset as well. I like this two-horned decision dropped in the broadcaster's lap.
  - cwkoss 8y ago
    Yeah, advertisers dataset is what I'd want to target. Make a crowdsourced list of 'uuids' or whatever these tones are decoded as, and then just inject a constant stream of random ones into any audio signal. With 1% participation, could probably make advertiser dataset worthless.

dest 8y ago

Interesting! Thanks for sharing. This might be a criterion among others, as there will always be ads that do not have subaudible tones.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cwkoss 8y ago

>One could use these tones to 'detect' a commercial and avoid it, or strip out these tones entirely to promote operational security amongst devices. Or one could layer superfluous erroneous tones into every stream to poison the dataset.

dest 8y ago
Good point. Note I have designed Adblock Radio to rely on audio only, so that it gives the smallest possible margin for radio operators to circumvent it. I do not rely on metadata, nor do I use the usual time schedules for ad breaks.
- shkkmo 8y ago
  That's great, but can't you use the subaudible tones as an additional blocking metric? Or even as an assessment metric to flag potential false negatives?
  - dest 8y ago
    It may be possible, research is needed on that topic
JKCalhoun 8y ago
And poison the advertiser's dataset as well. I like this two-horned decision dropped in the broadcaster's lap.
- cwkoss 8y ago
  Yeah, advertisers dataset is what I'd want to target. Make a crowdsourced list of 'uuids' or whatever these tones are decoded as, and then just inject a constant stream of random ones into any audio signal. With 1% participation, could probably make advertiser dataset worthless.