Free Phone Calls... If Advertisers Can Eavesdrop
A US company called Pudding Media introduced a web-based phone service, similar to Skype’s online service but free of charge. The catch: they are eavesdropping on phone calls with voice recognition software to monitor calls, then push conversation-relevant ads to the subscriber's computer screen.
“We saw that when people are speaking on the phone, typically they were
doing something else,” said Ariel Maislos, chief executive of Pudding
Media. “They had a lot of other action, either doodling or surfing or
something else like that. So we said, ‘Let’s use that’ and actually
present them with things that are relevant to the conversation while
it’s happening.”
The company’s model, of course, raises questions about the line between
target advertising and violation of privacy. From Pudding Media say they considered the privacy question carefully. Pudding Media executives said that scanning the words used in phone
calls was not substantially different from what Google does with e-mail. Google
scan their e-mail users’ in-boxes to deliver ads related to those
messages.
Consumer-brand companies
are increasingly trying to use data about people to deliver different
ads to them based on their demographics and behavior online. To give the ads greater accuracy, Pudding Media asks users for their
sex, age range, native language and ZIP code when they sign up. For
now, the company is running ads that are sold by a third-party network,
but Pudding Media plans to also sell its own ads in a few months.
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