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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
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.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
how is it remotely avoidable when your tv has voice recognition? like systems like siri it'll send it off to a remote server for analysis and to see what it has to do :). It will pick up random conversations and try to see if it's a command. I'm not endorsing things like this, i would never want a smart tv, i'll attach a htpc or raspberry pi or whatever to it if i want such features. But i can understand that things like that are pretty unavoidable with voice commands, and don't sound that much like a spying nightmare, just a logical result of voice recognition...
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.
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.
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.
Have you seen "Smart Cars" ???
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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)
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
I guess we are ALL toast then....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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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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
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 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
However, it only consistently works properly in the *other* universe. And considering that that universe is entirely fictitious to the point of having different laws of physics, I think it's safe to say that, for now at least, voice control doesn't work well.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.