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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.
I would like them to explain why a recording function is needed in the first place.
Probably for the voice recognition. The way smartphones have been doing it (and the way I'd suspect this TV works as well) is that they record your spoken commands, then send them out over the internet for a more powerful machine to crunch. After a few milliseconds of processing time, the interpretation is sent back to the phone and it performs the commands.
The reality is that this is probably a tempest in a teapot and samsung isn't doing anything more nefarious than apple does with siri or google does with the "ok google" feature on android phones. That said, samsung deserves all the flak they get over this. They should have known better than to leave that kind of blanket statement in their license agreement as it clearly allows for abuse on the part of samsung or their 3rd parties.
Competent natural-language voice recognition is still too hard for a handheld or embedded device.
I disagree.
First, doesn't the XBox One do it without internet access?
But in general, we had competent natural-language voice recognition in 2002 on single-core x86 CPUs. Today's embedded ARMs are just as capable as those. I personally worked on a project where the software could recognize phrases such as "Patient presents with acute myocardial infarction caused by necrosis of myocardial tissue..." with very good accuracy. I know this is harder to do without context, so that same program might not get "Okay Google, show me pictures of Tom Cruise in his new car." But it sure as heck should be able to get "Samsung Play movie" and "Samsung volume up" every time.
We even had "dumb" phones in the 1990s that could recognize "Call Kathy Smith" where it could recognize a name from your contact list. That's not so different from "Play Game of Thrones."
You didn't press the voice-to-text microphone icon. You hit the "Capture a sound" microphone icon, which is a new feature in the iOS 8 Message apps (https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/messages/ scroll to "Add your voice to the conversation").
Now whether having two microphone icons with two different behaviors on a single screen is good UI design is whole other matter...