Comment by fmajid

At one of my previous companies we made a moderately popular mobile app SDK that app developers would embed in their apps. We were approached by a company that claimed they had a MIT developed (or was it Bell Labs?) audio recognition technology similar to Shazam, but orders of magnitude more efficient, that would be used to recognize audio from ads and record when a user was exposed to a TV or radio ad for tracking purposes.

I don’t remember the name, that was at least 10 years ago before Apple started enforcing permissions on microphone access and showing an orange dot, but they wanted to do a revenue-share deal in exchange for us quietly bundling their SDK inside ours.

Needless to say we turned them down so we never learned more or tested the veracity of their claims, but there are some really sleazy companies out there. Modern smartphones have sufficient horsepower to do the audio processing on-device so the argument that this would show up in network traffic does not hold.