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Samsung SmartTV Customers Warned Personal Conversations May Be Recorded
An anonymous reader writes Samsung's privacy policy includes details that its Smart TV voice recognition feature may pick up on personal conversations and transmit private communications to third parties. Buried in the privacy policy related to the smart television, Samsung advises users to be aware that any snippets of conversation might be captured by the software which allows them to control their television sets with a series of commands. Questions have been raised about who these third parties could be, what the information is used for, and how the data is being transmitted – with potentially unencrypted voice clips left exposed to hackers.
...we can trust them not to abuse this. Right?
Looks like the end of Smart TVs right here.
Only an idiot would want this in their home.
Oh wait...
My phone is spying on me too, just like in Soviet Russia
I didn't read the article and I'm guessing there is more to this story. However, as some point you just have to draw a line and say no more.
Which proves my point - only an idiot would buy one of these.
I have nothing to hide but am mortally offended that some asswipe wants to bug my home. It's my home, not yours.
Selling one of thee thigns is no different from going up to random hot women wearing a light summer dress and asking "Hey, can I take you picture with an infrared camera designed to see through thin clothing?"
It's legal to do, but it should also be legal to punch the slime bag trying to do it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
and I went out of my way to AVOID samsung. at costco, almost all the sets (in the store) were sammys. sucks! 2nd popular brand was vizio and I decided to give that one a try.
anything over 39" was ONLY avail in 'smart' tv format.
fortunately, I was not forced to accept an eula and I never enabled the smart mode. good, actually, since when you give it IP connectivity, it auto updates itself and the current version is bad (no one likes it).
I hope that by continuing to deny it access, it won't ever decide on its own to go snooping for open wireless APs. that would be really bad.
then again, at some point when the new firmware is worth getting, I'll have no choice but to enable IP ;( I don't think you can just carry the firmware over with usb; they don't give you firmware, they only update it 'live over the net'.
its sad that you can only buy smart tv's at a certain size or bigger. I expect the only a few really low end models will be non-smart, as time goes on. nothing I hate more than paying for stuff that I don't want and refuse to even enable.
my htpc does all the 'smarts' I want. my files have no drm and so I don't need or want anthing smarter than vlc on win7, for example.
samsung is bad news, though. pretty evil as a company. they have the rep of building things that last 'the warranty period + 1 day'. its almost literally true, too; they try to use parts that will last a very short time (eg, electrolytic caps). samsung has no ethics at all. its sad that they have so much market share in so many things these days.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Any device or system marketed as "smart" is really your worst enemy. Smart TVs, smart phones, smart homes all do their best to spy on you. I would actually go as far as to say that their it's their primary purpose. No thanks.
For all you with their smart TVs, they report home and will disable networking functionality if they cannot report back to the mothership. Yes, LAN functionality is blocked when your TV cannot call home to report in. So much for the built in media player functionality. Hmmm, are they doing an LG and spying on what you're watching, another case of midgetpron.avi?
How is this remotely acceptable? Essentially they've just said "we're going to bug your home and do whatever we want with the audio, hope that's cool with you."
This is bullshit.
Coming soon to the UK, Mandatory Samsung SmartTVs in every home.
Insert obligatory 1984 reference here...
Of course, with all of the various disclosures being made about who is spying/listening and gathering information on all of us, should anyone be surprised?
...And that toaster came with a microphone that recorded everything you said and transmitted it off to everywhere else.
There's no punchline really, that's pretty much exactly what this bullshit is.
All of this crap which wants to be connected to the interwebs, and which wants to have voice control, and which wants to be a platform for ads ...
This stuff has been created to benefit the company who made them.
They want ad revenue, they want analytics, they want to share that with third parties.
None of this stuff is trustworthy.
The Interweb of Stuff is a marketing gimmick, which has been built to maximize corporate profits .. it isn't secure, it isn't private, and it's probably been hastily written and rushed out the door according to the weenies in marketing.
Sorry, but a 'smart' TV, with voice recognition, hooked directly to the intertubes? If that isn't a recipe for violating your privacy I have no idea what is.
Trusting the makers of consumer electronics to give a damn about your privacy, or your security ... well, that's just naive and stupid.
My DVD player, my TV, my XBox, my toilet, my fridge, my thermostat .... I have zero interest in having ANY of these devices connected to the internet. And this is precisely why.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
geez, the republicans have barely moved into their offices & nsa's already privatized this much?
wow, that was fast!
Because the risk outweighs the consequences and the reward can be monetized, corporations will never really care about your privacy or security in relation to their product. Part of it isnt their fault, but the nature of consumer capitalism as its evolved into a science of ever-growing profiteering. the EFF had to get involved before Samsung mentioned anything about the fact that their television was basically an Orwellian instrument of subjugation
Save money and check out a Raspberry pi for most of the functionality of a "smart" TV. XBMC is a terrific project that serves its users well, and maintains a transparent degree of security. If you're already a Samsung owner, most brands of electrical tape should take care of any privacy concerns.
Good people go to bed earlier.
A TL;DR: Samsung TVs use voice commands and like most other voice command services they outsource voice recognition to their server park. Unlike other services, however, they continously listen and send this data, they don't wait for a button press or keyword.
Or... You buy the SmartTV and just don't connect it to the internet...
Oh wait.. That's pretty stupid too...
that thought that they were being watched all the time. But now with corporations getting microphones in your home and cell phone cameras and GPS everywhere I think they might be right. R.I.P. privacy, bring on the 3rd party licensing and sharing agreement, you can have my metadata for a small fee and slight convenience.
Any system that actively listens for voice commands like Siri, Cortana, whatever Google's is called, the Amazon Echo, any car with a handsfree interface or an Onstar-like service, etc is a risk vector here. Even the ones that don't don't spy on you today may start doing it with a software or policy update.
it is just so fucked up that we have no control over this, its either completely avoid the product (for which this active listening function is only a tiny fraction of the device's full utility) or bare your belly to an amoral megalocorp and hope for the best.
Don't buy the blasted TV's - or, if you do, don't connect them to the Internet (and put some metallic tape over the camera).
It makes me feel like an old codger to say it, but I really don't understand why this is even an issue, or why anyone on the planet would want these "features," except maybe for use in prisons.
Competent natural-language voice recognition is still too hard for a handheld or embedded device. So, these devices digitize your voice (OMG recording!), ship it off to a server farm for interpretation, and receive the results. Because voice recognition is still a challenge, it's usually farmed out to one of a few firms (Nuance comes to mind) that do this as a third-party service. These firms can "retain" that information in the sense that it trains their voice-recognition algorithms, but they probably aren't building a huge dossier of your private conversations.
I'd certainly like to know if Samsung retains the voice information it collects. I'd even more urgently like to know if they sell it to other "third parties" besides whoever's doing the voice recognition. The initial panic I'm seeing around this looks ill-informed, but Samsung definitely has to get out in front of it. If they can't -- if they can't provide a simple, clear explanation of what they are and aren't doing -- it's going to cost them.
Hence the appeal of the One Plus One smartphone, we know these devices spy on us, particular smartphones, so a smartphone that lets you turn off all those permissions looks very attractive right now.
I installed Line on a test Android tablet today, and its sending a mass of packets back, even when its not open. Why? Who knows what data of mine its selling to whom?!
Who the f*** wants this crap? People who don't know what it does.
Oh, I'm not worried about the government finding something out. I'm worried about a criminal organization finding ways to hurt me and/or my family, be it directly or indirectly.
Sure, one might argue the line between criminal organizations and governments has become very blurry nowadays and to that I say... I say... damn, I got nothin'.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
When every manufacturer starts jumping on the bandwagon of the "Internet of Things" bullshit, we will see more of this; whether recording voices, recording video, sensing when you are in the house or bathroom or bedroom, recording heat or air conditioning changes, etc .... etc .... etc ...
All because the "market" wants to control things with their smartphones.
Of course, the IoT will add more "features" which will increase the margins on otherwise low tech shit.
So, in the future, it will be difficult to get find a device that doesn't have this bullshit built in or you will be stuck with it because you want some other feature. And it will be a big project to read all the fine print of the appliance you want to get to make that they didn't slip something in there.
Consumer electronics is just getting to be just expensive garbage.
Why is this so different from what Google Chrome, Google android, Apple Siri, Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Cortana are already doing for a while.
I hate it as much as anyone but most people are already recorded 24/7
As long as the toaster will get my bread out of the freezer, open the bag, insert two slices, and brown it to my desired temperature all by me calling out, "Toaster Man, make me some toast," I'm good.
Where can one buy a 65" 1080P monitor? I don't want a tuner, speakers, wifi, voice control, quad core process or any other BS. All I want is a single HDMI or DVI in port and a RS232 or DC trigger for turning it on and off. Is this too much to ask for?
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
How much of what you're saying in the same room as your LAPTOP is being picked up by the Google voice process, encoded ot converted to text (why else would it be sucking up CPU cycles like Billy-O?) and transmitted to who-knows-where?
Chrome is getting the fuckoff biscuit from me and I'm looking into alternative browsers. Preferably one which is not compatible with Google Voice service. I don't need the "functionality" and I do not welcome the intrusion.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Android and iOS do the same thing. Natural Language Processing is difficult so its done in the cloud most of the time. I don't care if the recordings go to 2nd Party or 3rd Party having cloud based LNP on any device is a security risk. I would expect this disclaimer to come on every smart device that requires a net connection to function.
Momento Mori
hmm, how exactly do these TVs tell the difference between the owner talking at them and dialog from the show? Do they compare input and output before processing? Or is there some sort of training mode where it's supposed to learn the owner's voice? If there is a training mode, what happens if someone leaves the training mode on while watching TV?
fuck. right. off.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
At least it's a Samsung - if it were a Sony you'd know it was already hacked.
The voice mode on a Samsung TV requires you to press a special button on their custom remote control that is provided with the TV. You can toss their remote control in the garbage and use your own. Or, just use their remote, but don't ever press the voice button. This feature isn't "always on" so it's not listening to you 24/7. What they're warning people is that if there happen to be conversations going on at the moment someone presses the voice feature, those clips might become exposed at some point to third party apps that have access to the storage on the TV. What would be nice is if they had an option we could turn on to never cache those voice clips. But, I think they're using the cache to improve voice recognition, which is why they were storing them.
why cant i get a teevee that instead of spying for the NSA... does stuff i want it to do... like:
Being able to block channels i dont want. Fuck you jesus network!
Being able to correct all the aspect ratio wrongness i see everywhere. WTF, its in pillar box AND letter box & its still all stretchy.. fuck you NBC! Learn how video works!!
Being able to split the screen & display 2 HDMI devices... for when my kids friends bring their xboxes over they wont need to bring a teevee too.
I been shopping around for a new TV for a while now since my 46" fried last summer (amazingly 1 month after the extended warranty expired /sigh).
At first I wanted a smart tv because I do watch a lot of netflix and youtube. I have a WD Live TV and Chromecast hooked up figured why not get it built in from the get go. Then during the course of my research I realized that a lot of these manufacturers actually spied and reported on what you watched. I would assume WD and Google do the same, however only when I use that device, not EVERYTHING I ever watch ever. As more and more times goes by, I am starting to notice more and more TVs having built-in smart abilities for the same price (and sometimes cheaper) than a comparable model without smart features. And I do not like it.
Now I would actively avoid buying one with smart abilities, however I am not most people. It will get to the point where there will be no "dumb" TV for sale. Which is kinda fine, since you do not need to setup your wifi on it.
However the day is coming, where if your TV (or fridge, stove, etc.) will refuse to work if you do not enable internet access. Either that or wireless will become soo cheap they will all come with a built in 3g connection to report back in secret.
And this scares me. And it ought to scare everybody. But it does not. This is worrisome for the future of the human race (Imagine a world where your every action, every word, every though is recorded and send to a central storage, analyzed and action taken upon).
6079 Smith W! Pay more attention.
Great, now my teevee is going to rat me out to my insurance company that I spend too much time sitting around and eating pizza.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
And there was a plan for your STB to listen to conversations, and schedule advertisements to sell contraceptives if cuddly-sounds and family-counseling if yelling.
Any problems with this?
I worked at a large So Cal Universal remote control Electronics company.
We will not sacrifice our freedom. We've made too many compromises already; too many defeats. They spy on us and we let it happen. They add spyware to our devices and we let it happen. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And *WE* will make them pay for what they've done!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Who cares about those unnamed, unknowable, so very special, cyber-bogey-men? Seriously, really, wtf mate, is that all you got? HELLOOOO?
It's not about the bogeymen. It's about effectively extending the reach of your voice to absolutely anyone without you noticing, but of course with your "you bought it, so you agreed to everything our lawyers put in the small print"-consent-you-didn't-know-you-were-giving. And that in turn means absolutely anything or anyone might be listening in. Not just persons wearing hats indoors behind keyboards from those sensationalist stock photos.
The real danger is invariably from out-of-control governmental TLAs or even just corporate entities that make up so many corporate shell games. Blaming "hackers" therefore signals the writer is feeding you misinformation.
We need to demand that any networked device that is equipped with a microphone or camera include a physical switch that can disable them and that clearly indicates when they are enabled. Software switches aren't enough, since there are already hacks that can access laptop cameras without turning on the led indicator.
Just start muttering "I want to kill Obama" in your living room and see how long it takes for the Secret Service to come knocking.
If it bugs you enough, like it did with me and my H7150 Smart 60", you can open casing and disconnect the microphone. Took about an hour due to all the screws and the button panel, but the silly microphone can just be unplugged from its source board once you get to it. Smart View Voice Control just complains "it can't hear" now.
Problem solved.
Back in the olde days of IBM PCs and telephones, when Interactive Voice Recognition was in its wee infancy, I had to train our Scott Intruments voice recognizers to hear the difference between 'yes', 'no', and 'garbage'. We recorded all the utterances and when it was time to train, a human, namely me, would listen to them and tell the software what it was supposed to have heard. It was occaisonally amusing what people would say in a two second recording in response to the question: "Press 1 or say yes to accept this collect call."
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
My current smart TV is Samsung - and it will be the last Samsung product I will buy. Samsung is obnoxious. They messed with my TV apps several times, heavy-handedly removing some that I had bought, refusing to upgrade old ones, and just plainly tell me to piss off when trying to get in touch with them about such issues. People complain about Comcast and the like, but Samsung is not far behind in obnoxiousness.
A TL;DR: Samsung TVs use voice commands and like most other voice command services they outsource voice recognition to their server park. Unlike other services, however, they continously listen and send this data, they don't wait for a button press or keyword.
You mean "unlike other services, ... , they don't pretend to wait for a button press or keyword." (I especially love the latter, which basically says "they wait listening for a keyword before listening to you").
The icon would never lie.
...wait, isn't the government filled with a bunch of criminals?
I have a Samsung HDTV I only use as a Monitor as I've read the Privacy Policy long ago.
Why does it collect what it does? To warn you of upcoming programs you might like. Not only does it monitor what you say (if a microphone is attached) but watch you (if a web cam in attached) the video is for gestures. It also keeps a record of every key or button you press this is also included for the program you might miss other wise.
I've written of this many times, but people are meant to ignore common sense or looking for someone to sue.
Seriously people, this is right out of Orwell's 1984, where everyone has a screen in their home that can never be turned off which spies on them. You'd think that's the sort of technology we'd shy away from.
I dont need a TV that can hear me, sounds like an extra appendage that I just need to remove if I buy a Samsung TV.
Abuse can be a 2-way street... I live alone, so the only voices are from Talk Radio -- on all day long... Hope they like listening too...
You can always just disconnect your tv from the internet.... there is a solution. just saying
If it bugs you enough, like it did with me and my H7150 Smart 60", you can open casing and disconnect the microphone. Took about an hour due to all the screws and the button panel, but the silly microphone can just be unplugged from its source board once you get to it. Smart View Voice Control just complains "it can't hear" now.
Problem solved.
Wow. Just wow. You fell for it. There are two more smaller microphones hidden deeper in the tv. By manually disabling the main dummy speaker not only did you make it onto a short list at the NSA but now have a dedicated data channel opened as well. It just keeps saying that to placate you into thinking you have one. Oh and watch out fo......... NO CARRIER
Because, provided it's accurate (which is the real problem), a voice UI is a pretty good way to signal that you want to use the voice UI. Captain Picard and Security Chief Garibaldi both preface their computer commands with "Computer," and it does appear to work out fairly well for them. This is a cross-universe tested UI.
I wonder what happens with the software when the residents of a house speak a language like... Welsh? Or, as in our house, Scots Gaelic?
I won't have that kind of crap in my house.
So now all you have to worry about is any time you visit anyone else's house and they might have unexpected surveillance running, perhaps not even realising it themselves.
Having ubiquitous devices that have sensors and transmission equipment is fundamentally a risky situation that should be handled with care. It doesn't matter whether it's Smart TVs, or Google Glass, or universal CCTV networks, or the smartphone in your friend/boss/mother's pocket.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The particular beef in this instance seems to be the "third party" bit, since while Apple and Google do exactly the same thing they process the audio themselves, instead of farming it out to a third party.
You're assuming that most people realise the data is transmitted to any external party at all.
I suspect if you did a random survey of people who had bought Smart TVs, knowing that they had voice and/or image recognition included, you would find a significant fraction of those people assumed it was done by the TV itself and had no idea that anyone else was going to see or hear anything.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You're half-right... You either press the voice button on the remote, or say "Hi TV"... It's always listening for the latter, but not sure whether that processing is done locally or remotely.
(I have a Samsung smart TV... Tried out the voice recognition, decided it was useless and stupid, and disabled it.)
"The amount of intelligence on this planet is a constant. The population is growing." -Cole's Axiom
We've always been at war with Eastasia.
No, thanks!
I remember voice recognition was cool. Back in the early 90s I was messing around voice recognition in high school. It wasn't perfect but surely in the 2 decades CPUs have gotten fast enough with their dual cores and quad cores to handle voice without calling home. What happened?
How many times have you lost the remote inbetween the couch cushions? It's not unthinkable to imagine that such a scenario could activate the special button and start recording your voice.
Face it, you live in 1984.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm not worried about the government finding something out. I'm worried about them misconstruing data into something imaginary.
Has been harping about this for months.
Makes me wonder if either /. is starting to lag on newsworthy articles, or the kooks may not be so kooky after all and on the bleeding edge of truthieness.
Why does my fscking television need a microphone in the first place? Everyone knows microphones only belong in thermostats and smoke alarms.
So, I imagine the 3rd party is like a big call center with a bunch of people in it. When you say the activation phrase, "OK TV" it connects your tv to somebody's terminal and they hear you say your commands "Channel 20, volume medium" and they push the remote control buttons on their terminal for you. (You're call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes, and general hilarity).
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
Oh and watch out fo......... NO CARRIER
Oh and watch out for the black helicopters.
FTFY because yo............. NO CARRIER
Or... You buy the SmartTV and just don't connect it to the internet...
Oh wait.. That's pretty stupid too...
You must be new here..
Wow this is big brother by definition!
And ... if you've got nothing to hide, you can't possibly object, right?
Only luddites and pinko hippies will protest (or worse: boycott) this particular "technology".
http://www.wired.com/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/
Not buy a smart TV. Everything you have already does those same function. Why do you need another thing doing it?
Was flipping through the channels last night and Enemy Of The State was on. A little excessive with what technology could do, but conceptually some of those ideas starting to appear.
"Computer, open a comunnication channel"
or
"Deck five!"
or
"Tea, Earl Grey, hot!"
So... no. Star Trek may actually be the place they got the idea from.
Is it honest when a burglar gives warning that you may be burgled?
Is it honest when a murderer gives warning that you may be murdered?
Fsck Samsung. This is worse than deplorable.
Is Samsung's privacy policy something similar to an un-birthday, in that it isn't - private that is. And what are the penalties for disabling such a feature?
How can a smart TV record and upload personal conversations if they're not connected to the Internet?
I mean, no one in their right mind would connect a microphone/camera enabled TV to the Internet anyway, right?
Right?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Do not buy this crap without full control over when it is and is not recording and without full knowledge of how any information it gains is being used and by whom.
Seriously... A device that "listen" to you, also records you. Same with the Kinect, Siri and everything else that accept voice controls.
ironic?
Making private rooms effectively public was the dumbest move ever, people will shun these devices when this becomes well known.
Most devices from the last decade has some form of local speech recognition that can understand a handful of preprogrammed phrases, without an Internet connection. They can, for example, wait for a command and then connect to a server farm to process the actual query.
Speaking of duplicitous pricks, I think you forgot to check the AC button. Enjoy your troll mods, prick.
Lollipop on an S2? That's about as likely to happen as Toyota releasing a drop in version of the Tundra V8 for my AE86 Corolla! Your S2 & my AE86 are both considered old junk now.
I am the walrus. Coo coo cachoo!
I found the EULA to be quite detailed at describing what is possible and allowed and what isn't and have had many discussions on whether things such as collecting statistics on things watched could even be legal in Germany (since you neither sign the EULA before use nor can the behavior be expected by a layman). On the other hand, I noticed my Samsung Smart TV was storing thumbnails of videos I had watched, apparently even surviving across reboots or reinserting the media - so I chose to investigate further and use it as part of my Master's in computer forensics. My TV had quite a lot of potentially interesting data on it - from thumbnails and names/details of previously-played (perhaps all that had ever been played, this was inconclusive) media files, YouTube activity, Etc etc...