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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?
My phone is spying on me too, just like in Soviet Russia
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.
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)
Not to mention that Smart TVs have a bad record of having their interfaces/applications updated. If your Smart TV's interface is aging, you need to buy a new SmartTV. If the interface on your Roku (connected to your "dumb TV") is aging, you can buy a new Roku for much less. If another company overtakes Roku and makes something much superior, you can ditch your Roku and buy one of those. Smart TVs are today's equivalent of those TVs that had VCRs and/or DVD players built in instead of hooking up a separate VCR and/or DVD player.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.