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Samsung SmartTV Customers Warned Personal Conversations May Be Recorded

Posted by samzenpus on from the not-in-front-of-the-television dept.

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.

5 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. But surely... by fruviad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...we can trust them not to abuse this. Right?

    1. Re:But surely... by CaptainLard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I know right?? Star Trek proves that even after 400 (?) years of voice command optimization, the best activation method is still to physically press the communicator emblem thingy. If Picard isn't too busy for a quick gesture to get beamed out of a warp core explosion, you can push a button when you want to know where the closest chicken nuggets are.

  2. In Soviet Russia TV watches you. Oh, wait... by Still+beliving+I+am+ · · Score: 5, Funny

    My phone is spying on me too, just like in Soviet Russia

  3. That's how today's voice recognition WORKS. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:So... by jordanjay29 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.