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In Spotify, music listens to you: streaming platform wins patent to surveil users’ emotions to recommend music

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Streaming music platform Spotify has won a patent enabling it to snoop on users’ speech and even background noise in order to gauge emotional state and location type to serve up the appropriate soundtrack. Not creepy at all!

Spotify has received a patent that will allow it to use speech recognition and sound analysis to assess a user’s demographic attributes, determine their emotional state, and even glean insight into their location. The information will be used – hypothetically, at least – to pick the perfect song to play without requiring any conscious data input from the listener.

Arguing that expecting users to input the details of their own tastes and preferences was asking too much of the platform’s average user (and consumes valuable time that could be spent streaming music), Spotify applied for a patent to automatically perform these functions in February 2018. It was granted earlier this month, though went unreported-upon until it was picked up by music press on Wednesday.

Using speech recognition, the app will not only be able to pinpoint the user’s age, gender, and other demographic basics – it will analyze their voice for “intonation, stress, rhythm and the likes of units of speech” in order to determine emotional state. As if that wasn’t intrusive enough, the app will pick up “environmental metadata,” parsing background noise to find out whether the user is out for a walk, riding the bus, at a party, and so on.

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The newly-patented system cascades depending on how the user reacts to the selected song, seeking “positive metadata/emotional state” in order to fine-tune the algorithm. Listening and rating history, as well as friends’ histories, are also factored in. Which emotions Spotify will encourage and which it will seek to shift the user out of through music suggestions are not explained in the patent.

The dubious new ‘feature’ is far from Spotify’s first step over the creepy line. In October, it secured a patent for “methods and systems for personalizing user experience based on [user] personality traits,” seemingly laying the groundwork for the ‘feature’ it unveiled earlier this month. The patent would allow the streaming service to “humanize the user interface…in accordance with the user’s personality,” perhaps speaking in a more bubbly tone to listeners identified as extroverts while using a more subdued voice for introverts.

In a paper published in July, Spotify cited a three-month study it had done analyzing 17.6 million songs listened to by 5,808 users, explaining AI analysis showed “moderate to high accuracy” in personality traits predicting musical tastes. The platform was quite open about its desire to do more research “to link streaming behavior with brain scanning, genetic, and physiological data.”

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Also in October, Spotify won a patent to deliver geo-targeted advertising using 3D audio, which would give the impression that streamed sound is coming directly from a geolocated source – say, a coffee shop literally beckoning to the listener as they walk down the street. It’s not clear if Spotify users will be given a chance to opt out of these features or whether they’ll be silently slipped into an app upgrade, ready to freak the user out the next time a shopfront starts talking to them.

Spotify seems aware of how powerful the complex emotional profiles built up by the app will be, noting in the July paper that “a user’s digital history is extraordinarily personal and sensitive and should be treated with proper consideration of the conceivable misuses and unintended externalities.” And should such a bevy of behavioral data fall into the wrong hands? It’s not like Spotify hasn’t been hacked before.

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How much YouTube pays for 1 million views, according to creators

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  • YouTube creators earn money from Google-placed ads on their videos.
  • A number of factors determine how much money they make, including video views.
  • Creators said how much YouTube pays for 1 million views ranged from $3,400 to $30,000.

While many factors — content niche and country, among them — determine how much money a YouTuber earns on any particular video, the number of views it gets is perhaps the most significant.

When a YouTube video hits 1 million views, there’s almost a guaranteed big payday for its creator. In some cases, creators can make five-figures from a single video if it accrues that many views.

Three creators explained how much money YouTube had paid them. YouTube pays $3,400 to $30,000 for 1 million views, these creators said.

When tech creator Shelby Church spoke with Insider, she had earned $30,000 from a video about Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon). At the time, the video had accrued 1.8 million views.

Her RPM rate — or earnings per 1,000 views — are relatively high, she said, because of her content niche. Business, personal finance, and technology channels tend to earn more per view.

“YouTubers don’t always make a ton of money, and it really depends on what kind of videos you’re making,” she said.

Influencers can earn 55% of a video’s ad revenue if they are part of YouTube’s Partner Program, or YPP. To qualify for the program, they must have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on their long-form videos.

They can also make money from shorts, YouTube’s short-form video offering. In order to qualify, creators need to reach 10 million views in 90 days and have 1,000 subscribers. YouTube pools ad revenue from shorts and pays an undisclosed amount to record labels for music licensing. Creators receive 45% of the remaining money based on their percentage of the total shorts views on the platform.

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Tesla employees shared sensitive images recorded by cars – Reuters

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Some pictures were turned into memes and distributed through internal chats, former workers told the agency

Tesla workers shared “highly invasive” images and videos recorded by customers’ electric cars, making fun of them on internal chat groups, several former employees of Elon Musk’s company have told Reuters.

The electric-car manufacturer obtains consent from its clients to collect data from vehicles in order to improve its self-driving technology. However, the company assures owners that the whole system is “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy,” the agency pointed out in its report on Thursday.

According to nine former workers who talked to the agency, groups of employees shared private footage of customers in Tesla’s internal one-on-one chats between 2019 and 2022.

One of the clips in question captured a man approaching his electric car while he was completely naked, one of the sources said.

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Others featured crashes and road-rage incidents. One particular video of a Tesla hitting a child on a bike in a residential area spread around the company’s office in San Mateo, California “like wildfire,” an ex-employee claimed.

“I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected… We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids,” another former worker told the agency.

Seven former employees also told Reuters that the software they used at work allowed them to see the location where the photo or video was made, despite Tesla assuring its customers that “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.”

The agency noted that it could not obtain any of the pictures or clips described by its sources, who said they were all deleted. Some former employees also told the journalists that they had only seen private data being shared for legitimate purposes, such as seeking assistance for colleagues. Tesla did not respond when approached for comment on the issue by Reuters.

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Nordic nation’s military bans use of TikTok – media

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Sweden’s Defense Ministry has reportedly barred employees from using the Chinese-owned app on their work phones

Sweden’s military has reportedly cracked down on TikTok, decreeing that staff members are no longer allowed to use the Chinese-owned video-sharing application on their devices at work because of security concerns.

The Swedish Defense Ministry on Monday issued its decision, which was viewed by Agence-France Presse, banning the use of TikTok. Security concerns were raised based on “the reporting that has emerged through open sources regarding how the app handles user information and the actions of the owner company, ByteDance,” the ministry said.

The move follows similar restrictions imposed by other EU countries in recent weeks. For example, France banned government employees from downloading “recreational applications,” including TikTok, on their work phones. Norway barred use of the app on devices that can access its parliament’s computer network, while the UK and Belgium banned it on all government phones. Denmark’s Defense Ministry and Latvia’s Foreign Ministry imposed their TikTok bans earlier this month.

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“Using mobile phones and tablets can in itself be a security risk, so therefore we don’t want TikTok on our work equipment,” Swedish Defense Ministry press secretary Guna Graufeldt told AFP.

The US, Canada and New Zealand previously banned their federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices, citing fears of ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Members of Congress may try to ban the app from the US market altogether after testimony at a congressional hearing last week by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew failed to ease their security concerns. “They’ve actually united Republicans and Democrats out of the concern of allowing the CCP to control the most dominant media platform in America,” US Representative Mike Gallagher said on Sunday in an ABC News interview.

Chinese officials have denied claims that TikTok is used to collect the personal data of its American users. “The Chinese government has never asked and will never ask any company or individual to collect or provide data, information or intelligence located abroad against local laws,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters last week. She added that Washington has attacked TikTok without providing any evidence that it threatens US security.

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