GOOGLE'S LATEST PATENT COULD STOP YOU SEEING SPOILERS..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................Sometimes you only need be a single episode behind or a few hours late to the final score for it to feel like the whole internet is against you. You avoid messages from friends at the match and make sure not to look at Twitter when you're stuck on the bus during Bake Off, only to squint at your computer screen through a chink in your fingers to discover some "friend" has made a still from the Breaking Bad finale their Facebook cover photo (yes, this actually happened to us).
Social media has ruined many a sports game, Netflix series and Apprentice finale. But what if it didn't have to be this way?
Google may be on the verge of a solution. It has just been awarded a patent that outlines a system for blocking from your vision posts or information that may include details about TV shows, movies and even books before you are ready to see them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the system will require you to surrender even more of your data to Google than you do already -- but rest assured that the company's "don't be evil" mission statement has never been pertinent. By tracking your progress as you watch various shows and movies, Google might just be able to protect you from seeing something that pertains to an episode you haven't reached yet.
magine if Google could see that people on your friends list had reached the end of a series you were only halfway through. If one of those friends then posted about that series, Google would automatically blur out their post and a message would pop up warning that it could contain a spoiler and asking if you want to read it anyway.
While the premise for this is very exciting, there are of course many ways in which spoilers can be delivered, many of which aren't anything to do with social media. We once were sitting down to watch Brokeback Mountain with friends, only for one of them to utter the words: "it's so sad at the end when [redacted]". Her reasoning? "I thought we'd all seen it before."
magine if Google could see that people on your friends list had reached the end of a series you were only halfway through. If one of those friends then posted about that series, Google would automatically blur out their post and a message would pop up warning that it could contain a spoiler and asking if you want to read it anyway.
While the premise for this is very exciting, there are of course many ways in which spoilers can be delivered, many of which aren't anything to do with social media. We once were sitting down to watch Brokeback Mountain with friends, only for one of them to utter the words: "it's so sad at the end when [redacted]". Her reasoning? "I thought we'd all seen it before."
That was carelessness, but even the more malicious example we described above, whereby a Facebook user posted a spoiler in the form of the image, rather than through text, could possibly slip through the net if the system was based entirely on text recognition. Similarly, the system doesn't seem to account for shows or movies you haven't started watching yet. It also won't be able to account for absolutely everything you've watched in the past.
The concept of spoiler-free technology is fascinating, but for it to work, Google would not only have to be plugged into every channel you use to watch video and social network of which you are a member. This is likely the major stumbling block in ensuring the anti-spoiler algorithms are actually deployed across the platforms where users need them most. In the meantime, the best thing to do would be for all of us to adopt Google's mantra; don't be evil, folks.
The concept of spoiler-free technology is fascinating, but for it to work, Google would not only have to be plugged into every channel you use to watch video and social network of which you are a member. This is likely the major stumbling block in ensuring the anti-spoiler algorithms are actually deployed across the platforms where users need them most. In the meantime, the best thing to do would be for all of us to adopt Google's mantra; don't be evil, folks.
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