When Government Eavesdropping Isn't Enough
An interesting new application in Korea takes up where governmental spy agencies leave off. You see, the pesky thing about government spying is that they won’t let you use the tools or analyse their data. Well, all that is now behind us with the advent of KT Freetel’s new “Love Detector” application for mobile phones on their network. The Love Detector uses advanced speech analysis techniques (actually used by Israeli security service, MOSSAD) to surmise the amount that the other party “loves you”. There is also an application for determining if a party is lying or telling the truth. After a monitored call, an MMS message is sent describing the results of the analysis. The application lives in the network, not the phone, and is invoked by dialing a prefix before the call you want to evaluate. The service costs either $1/use or $2.50/mo subscription. To be fair, it’s being billed as “entertainment” and nothing more, and it may even be fun to try out – but there are obvious privacy implications that should be discussed. If you’re not allowed to tape someone without their knowledge (in the US at least), then are you allowed to use electronic analysis tools?
