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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.
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.
Generally, voice commands on phones require an activator. Such as "Siri," or "Okay, Google," or "Hey, Cortana." These are phrases that probably don't seep into the average person's life too often, so they're fairly safe to use as activators. I don't have experience with iOS or WP's apps, but Google Now requires you to "train" it to the sound and cadence of your spoken phrase, "Okay, Google." This allows the phone to detect the activator phone-side, without sending information to the mothership. It's also easy to test this, simply turn off network data (perhaps by putting the phone on Airplane Mode) and activate Google Now by saying, "Okay, Google." The screen will pop up, allow you to speak, but it won't be able to contact Google to parse your question. So it's clear that Google Now handles its activation phrase offline, and although I'm not certain, I can guess that other phones do similarly.
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?
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Not so different...
As I understand Siri, the phone only activates the voice command function (and thus sends what the phone hears to Apple HQ) when the home button is long pressed (unless "hey Siri" or the older "raise to talk" IIRC is activated). If you want voice commands on a Smart TV, it seems they are eavesdropping all the time. Together with what seems to me to be a bit of a luke-warm statement on privacy of this data from Samsung, this seems to be qualitatively different, IMO.
I agree that the summary of this summary (and other stories about this today) make it sound like that, but the more I think of it, that premise seems suspect. Basically, it would be almost constantly streaming audio back to HQ. Now multiply that by 10s (100s?) of thousands of sets across the world, and getting any usable data to improve voice recognition, or parsing which words are intended to be voice control vs. just random talk would take far more computing power and bandwidth than it's worth.
It seems more plausible to interpret the statement to say that while you are issuing voice commands, either via a keyword that can be recognized locally or by pressing a button, THEN any statements that may be unrelated to the functions of the set may be inadvertently picked up and sent to Samsung's (or partners') servers.
Still, even with a favorable interpretation, it seems like an unnecessary, risky, costly "feature" that has only a marginal benefit to customers. Are we so lazy that even pressing a series of buttons takes too much effort? As an accessibility feature, fine, it makes some sense, but it should be turned off by default.
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.
The other day I discovered a new iOS feature I had no idea existed. While sending a text to a customer, I hit the microphone icon by mistake. Another person in the (parked, idling) car was muttering about how the customer was a moron, which, although true enough, wasn't something I intended to include as part of the text. Not hard to see where this story is going, right? Well, it's even dumber than you're thinking.
I hit the 'Done' button to make the voice input UI go away, finished the text message, and hit 'Send.' As far as I knew, there was no danger that my friend's comment would be added to the text message. The car was too noisy and her voice was too low.for the speech recognition engine to understand, and in any event, the "moron" comment didn't appear in the outgoing text message. No problem.
Except what did appear in the text message, visible only after I sent it, was a small attachment balloon with a waveform. Apparently, iOS now sends the captured audio file as a binary attachment if it can't extract any recognizable speech.
So the obvious question is, what kind of drugs are these people taking? Is no one at a Fortune 500 company capable of thinking anything through these days? Do the programmers who think these features are "cool": and "awesome" not have managers with a three-digit IQ?
Fortunately for me, my phone lost its signal right about then, and I was able to kill the text app while it was still displaying "Sending." I knew from experience that iOS's text app didn't attempt to provide guaranteed delivery, and sure enough, when I restarted it, it had forgotten all about the message it was trying to send. So in a sense, I was saved by the same dumbshit programmers at Apple who tried to ruin my day.
It seems we have to adopt the same attitude around microphones that we normally apply to firearms. The gun is always loaded, and the mike is always live.