Samsung Warns Customers To Think Twice About What They Say Near Smart TVs (theantimedia.org)

In a troubling new development in the domestic consumer surveillance debate, an investigation into Samsung Smart TVs has revealed that user voice commands are recorded, stored, and transmitted to a third party. The company even warns customers not to discuss personal or sensitive information within earshot of the device.

The new Samsung controversy stems from the discovery of a single haunting statement in the company's "privacy policy," which states: "Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party."

Comments

who'd have thunk?

[The Real Dr John]

If it is a recording device, that's what it is supposed to do.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[fustakrakich]

Well, that's the rub, isn't it? The TV is not supposed to be a recording device.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[SuricouRaven]

Once again, I note the biggest error of the book 1984: It failed to anticipate the role the private sector would come to play in loss of privacy.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[DarkOx]

Well yes, but in the past voice command processing has been implemented locally. When I used to say "Open Word" to my IPAQ back in 2003, nobody at Microsoft got sent an audio clip. I grant you voice commands were highly limited, and you had to know some syntax to get anything more advanced done than launching an application. OOTH you did not need to worry your device was spying on you.

I think this is kinda of an insane position for Samsung to take. They need to find away to address the privacy concerns or make it possible for people to 'securely' disable the feature, like maybe be able to unplug the pickup mike!

Consider TVs are things people put in their living rooms and in their bed rooms. These are our most private places. I want to be able to have a conversation in my own homes without outsiders listening or even potentially listening in, I bet if you ask most customers they'd say the same thing! I even suspect if you made it a conditional like, you can either have voice activation on your TV or know we are not listening to you, suddenly voice activation would not be considered a feature.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[thesupraman]

How do you think siri or google voice command work??

This is nothing at all new.. Not to say it's a good thing. How easily it triggers is certainly a factor.

At least google can have a local option if you work hard enough to enable it.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[The Real Dr John]

Yeah, and 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale for the public, not an instruction manual for the psychopaths running things.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[fustakrakich]

Most people don't, but it has been that way all along. Private and public are not the separate things they appear to be.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[fustakrakich]

How do you think siri or google voice command work??

They are not supposed to execute your command, not record it

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Dirk Becher]

Especially regarding the human addiction to self-exposure.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[vlad30]

Well, that's the rub, isn't it? The TV is not supposed to be a recording device.

Could be fun though place radio on talk balk channel near TV, Or recordings of samsung info like the samsung washing machines catching on fire stories, Now hack the smart tv's in samsung to see and hear the results

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

We covered that by turning the corporation into the state with citizens united.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Jack Griffin]

Once again, I note the biggest error of the book 1984: It failed to anticipate the role the private sector would come to play in loss of privacy.

Even bigger error, that the government is likely to be the hero in the story (since Gov regulation will be the only force that can stop this)

Re:who'd have thunk?

[synaptik]

In capitalist United States, TV watches you!

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah there's a lot of weight to the complaints about invsasions of privacy...

from the generations that willingly put every tiny detail of their life on facebook, twitter and youtube.

Or not.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[JBMcB]

They won't ban private companies collecting your data to protect your privacy, they'll ban it 'cause they don't want the competition.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[OzPeter]

I think this is kinda of an insane position for Samsung to take. They need to find away to address the privacy concerns or make it possible for people to 'securely' disable the feature, like maybe be able to unplug the pickup mike!

Have you heard about Siri (Apple), Cortana (MS), Echo (Amazon) and whatever you call Googles technology (and Onstar's "always on")? What Samsung has done is nothing new. Perhaps they are actually better than the rest for actually being honest as to where the audio goes.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Krishnoid]

That's probably because you're primarily considering the material that a bespectacled academic would review, rather than that which a contemporary ponytail-adorned pencil-stash might be exposed to.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how things turn out sometimes. Machiavelli's The Prince was meant to be a manual for how to be a good ruler. not a manual for how scheming climbers could take control.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

1984 was a book about BBC culture. The BBC was run as a quasi-totalitarian public-private hybrid (now a lot of it has been privatised entirely, and the rest of it is essentially run as a private company). The rest of the world being like this was predicted accurately.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[catchblue22]

Once again, I note the biggest error of the book 1984: It failed to anticipate the role the private sector would come to play in loss of privacy.

Not really. What has actually happened is that the most powerful actors in the private sector have merged with and taken over the state.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Jack Griffin]

I think this is kinda of an insane position for Samsung to take. They need to find away to address the privacy concerns or make it possible for people to 'securely' disable the feature, like maybe be able to unplug the pickup mike!

Time to write to your local politician.
It seems to be the norm now with the likes of MS, Google, Facebook etc all feeling like they are entitled to your private life. It would seem the obvious solution is an open-source, hardware edge router/firewall for the home that can simply block everything at the gateway.
Does anyone know of anything even remotely user friendly in this space?

Re:who'd have thunk?

[PsychoSlashDot]

Well, that's the rub, isn't it? The TV is not supposed to be a recording device.

Preamble... Yes, I abhor this functionality personally, and I think these devices should ship with a giant caution tape banner stuck to the screen explicitly declaring "we're spying on you. Yes, now." But...

That's not actually accurate in this case. The product in question isn't a TV. It's a "Smart TV". As in, a television with other functions. A person who buys one of these paid a premium for those extra functions.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[peragrin]

Siri at least requires a button to be pushed. Google and cortina have always on options but those always turned unpopular. And Google has begun turning off the always recording functions.

Samsung smart tv record and transmit continuously. The only option is to disable smart tv network connection.

Which is a good reason to use roku, Apple TV or chromecast.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair to George Orwell, the developments that led to the totalitarian regime in the book are mostly only alluded to.

In Huxley's Brave New World, however, it's fairly clear that the change was brought about by the private sector and specialization.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, never heard that one before!

Re:who'd have thunk?

[vtcodger]

"Gov regulation will be the only force that can stop this"

A router running at normal speed down and limited to about 256 bps up would go a long way toward taming it. Sure the TV can record stuff, but it would need to be really selective about what it tried to pass on to a third party.

I wonder if it will be possible to hack said third parties by feeding the microphone circuit improperly formed audio data. Wouldn't that be ironic?

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Solandri]

When I used to say "Open Word" to my IPAQ back in 2003, nobody at Microsoft got sent an audio clip. I grant you voice commands were highly limited,

That's the key. It's easy to record an audio clip, and figure out which of a dozen keywords it comes closest to matching. It's much, much harder to record an audio clip and try to find a match in a library of 20,000 words.

Hopefully in the future, processors will come down in power and cost enough for this generic speech recognition to be done locally on the device itself. But for the time being, transmitting the audio to a beefy server is the best we've got.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[radiumsoup]

well, that's not at all the message of the book, though, is it?

It's not a book about loss of privacy, it's a book about the evils of State suppression of free will, and government intrusion into privacy is a component of that suppression.

It's very much like saying "the biggest error of the book 1984: it failed to anticipate the role that slang would come into play in the loss of colorful language". While it might be tangentially true, it's not important enough to the message of the book for the author to address, so calling it the "biggest error" is not in any short measure hyperbole.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[radiumsoup]

I think the term you're looking for is "cronyism"

Re: who'd have thunk?

[fustakrakich]

Correction:

They are supposed to execute your command, not record it

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Lumpy]

He gazed up at the enormous Logo. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the large screen. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished.

  He had won the victory over himself. He loved Samsung.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[amiga3D]

If you don't have anything to hide what's the problem?

Re:who'd have thunk?

[wvmarle]

Even if listening for voice commands, it is NOT supposed to send recordings to third parties (may or may not be reasonable for interpretation of the voice command), who then store it (I don't see any reason for this).

Re:who'd have thunk?

[SNRatio]

Time to write to your local politician.

Almost ... Time to write to your local politician and explain this applies to both the TV in their office and the TV in the office of the lobbyist that they called.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the government and state, right? They are to blame for everything! I know, because I heard it once on mercenary TV.

Captcha: fattens

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

A router running at normal speed down and limited to about 256 bps up would go a long way toward taming it.

Except that in our brave new world, "smart" devices don't necessarily need you to give them an Internet connection before they can phone home. Some already have built-in wireless and arrangements with mobile data networks. Given sufficient market penetration, mesh-style networking also becomes a possibility. Unless we're all planning on living inside Faraday cages, we need more powerful solutions to this creeping invasion of privacy than merely controlling our standalone Internet connection(s).

Re:who'd have thunk?

[peragrin]

Smart TV features are standard on just about every TV now.

The choice you have is to connect it to the net. Some TV require a net connection for initial startup.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[ShanghaiBill]

A person who buys one of these paid a premium for those extra functions.

Not really. I recently bought a TV at Costco, and ALL the TVs were "smart". Unless you are buying used, a dumb TV is no longer an option. There doesn't seem to be any premium for additional "smart" features. It is mostly just software, which has near zero marginal cost.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[sumdumass]

And to think. What was tinfoil hat conspiracy bs in the past is now a feature.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Teun]

I'd try to put a real (galvanic) switch between the mic and the TV.
Which should be there OOTB instead of a warning deep into the manual..

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Ol Olsoc]

If it is a recording device, that's what it is supposed to do.

I have many recording devices that merely record and play back. They don't phone home to someone to let them know what I am saying.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they'd extend that ruling by requiring that a corporate individual found guilty of a criminal action be removed from society for the same incarceration period that any other individual would be, I think it would make an interesting change in corporate behavior. Outside of some of the biggest corporations, I doubt most businesses would be able to survive having all of their business operations shut down for even as short a term as six months while they were 'in jail'.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Brave New World had nothing to do with corruption and favoritism; the regime there was the result of the prefection of the division of labor (and the class system itself as a whole) and an inevitable and somewhat organic centralization of power (i.e. would happend with or without your "cronyism"). It wasn't about interest groups and an injust distribution of money and power to a few, it went much deeper than that.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are all sheep BAH BAH BAH.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[epyT-R]

or just open the unit up and disconnect the mic..

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

/s?

Re:who'd have thunk?

[The Real Dr John]

Agreed, but how many of them are connected to the Internet, and how many were touted as "smart"? Remember, in 1984, everything means its opposite.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

*unjust

Re: who'd have thunk?

[vtcodger]

Execute vs Record -- a meaningless distinction to the digital overlords.

Welcome to the Internet of Horrors.

Just remember, all this is done for you (and very cheaply BTW) to improve your productivity and quality of life. Why just a century ago, it would have taken scores of actors, brigades of stagehands, dozens of scribes, and a number of police, magistrates, jailers and such to replicate what a single inexpensive modern TV can do to improve your life.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[i.r.id10t]

What is even better is if you don't give the TV a valid DNS server or gateway on your LAN - just a local IP.

Of course, I tried that but as it turns out the TV remote apps for the iPhone won't work with it unless the TV has full internet access.

Fortunately, we tend to keep track of the actual TV remote so we don't often need to use our phone as a remote...

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

more like communist USA.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Everyone else is already doing it, so it's not (as) bad when I do"

Fuck off with your weak logical fallacies.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are supposed to execute your command, not record it.

While a nice sentiment, that isn't how the technology works. Commands take time to speak and you have to record it in order to send it to be interpreted as there is insufficient local processing power to do the interpretation. I know the article is about TVs, but I know Google Now better so I will use an example from there. Say the user says OK Google, show me pictures of dogs that have humans in the picture with them. Google thinks for a moment and does this - but it sends the equivalent of an MP3 or WAV file to their servers to interpret. That's recording. Now, let's say you then say OK Google, only the ones of pit bulls.. Google is expected to maintain context between the first and second command and simply filter the picture results. If it didn't record and store the command it would not be able to do this. You might argue that the commands could be deleted after say 5 minutes and I would agree. But they have to record in order to execute the command.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem about that isn't that young people don't care about privacy. Actually when issues are put to them properly they are surprisingly pro-privacy.

The problem is they are technologically ignorant and don't associate, say, Facebook with spying.

Those of us who know how stuff works are more suspicious but that's BECAUSE we know how stuff works.

When I was in middle school I was lucky enough to have a 'radical' teacher who taught all of us how to read advertising. Specifically, how to spot the lies, opinions masquerading as fact, and other techniques marketers use.

I'm sure that teacher would be fired today for being anti corporate, but this is exactly what we need. Young people need to be taught the implications of tech and what (and who) is/are behind the stuff they use. Given full information most people make surprisingly good decisions. The problem is the huge number of well funded parties interested in people not knowing these things.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't just that it records, but that it transmits what is recorded.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[vtcodger]

Now that I think about it, devices like this allow ordinary folk to live the life of a 16th century European monarch. Complete with worries about the servants spying on you and other nuisances.

(No, I do not know why anyone would wish to lead the life of a 16th Century European monarch -- which tended to be short, to end unpleasantly and in many cases to include a significant period of incarceration.)

Re:who'd have thunk?

[ihtoit]

no, they're not premium functions, they're standard functions.

If you want a TV WITHOUT these functions, you pay extra!

Re:who'd have thunk?

[orlanz]

The current and possibly into the distant future way of understanding what you want is to have ONE entity answer it. This single point learns the human condition over time and adapts the responses to the locals. Having this learning distributed to each and every local processor is wasteful and ineffective.

We don't provide enough input nor does the system have enough sensors or processing capability for it to "learn" about us and our needs; let alone our wants . The sensors and processing will be solved over time, but the former will not. We don't teach every entity we interact with about us, we expect them to learn through trial & error and figure it out to interact with us (the wife being the perfect example). The threshold of errors before we cut the relationship varies depending on the relationship & parties involved. For in adamant objects, it is very low. To deal with husbands, it is very high.

Having a single central system that learns from a million of us helps figure out what we want and spreads out the errors enough to continue interaction. Having it locally tips the balance in the other direction. Unfortunately, the former system means someone is listening in on us at all times and has enough meta data on us to identify us individually. It is just the tradeoff we must live with. The best we can do is put in enough controls to keep up with the technology and reduce the human greed factor on the other end of the line. That chance for abuse can never be eliminated and just something we have to get used to. On the plus side, the system should work in reverse too... it will let us identify the abusers so we can hold them accountable. That would be the most effective deterrent for abuse.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Siri at least requires a button to be pushed.

Not on the most recent iPhones, it doesn't.

On a side note - I've occasionally used the "Hey Siri" jailbreak tweak on my older phone - it allows you to have Siri always listening, even on older phones that aren't currently plugged in. But that's a conscious decision made under specific circumstances; e.g. I'm waiting for someone to contact me and am washing dishes (so using the button method of activation would be problematic). The vast majority of the time I *don't* want my phone listening in.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[HiThere]

Ah, but how many of them understand commands directed to them by voice? I think that's still beyond local computing capability.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least in the case of Siri (and I'd bet some of the others), nothing is ever transmitted to a 3rd party. More so, nothing is even transmitted to Apple unless the user holds a button down or explicitly says "hey siri" (computed locally). So no, at least in that case, Apple is doing a damn site more to respect the user's privacy than Samsung is.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Error 53.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[JoeMerchant]

Well, that's the rub, isn't it? The TV is not supposed to be a recording device.

It is if you buy this one. Personally, I think this type of product perversion should include a mandatory easy-access hardware disable feature (user accessible jumper on the mic wire?)

Re:who'd have thunk?

[JoeMerchant]

Plot twist: the psychopaths running things are not elected officials, nor even in the public sector or military.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm notionally in favour of this as an approach, but it does rather seem to have the drawback of also punishing all the staff (some of whom, undoubtedly, not only had no idea what the corporation was doing). Perhaps the appropriate tweak is that the corporation (which still has assets) - or the shareholders/owners - must continue to pay all staff for the period of "incarceration". Add something about personal liability in the event of corporation bankruptcy as well as seizure of assets (including from multiple levels of indirection) ... but even that starts to get ridiculous very quickly (should I lose my house because my father invested in a business that turned out to be breaking the law, even though there was no evidence of this happening when I bought the house or he bought the shares?)

After all, a person's bills don't stop because they're in the clink for a week. Why should the corp's?

Re:who'd have thunk?

[JoeMerchant]

Thank the influence of Atlas Shrugged type thinking for influencing Orwell to paint the government as the only spy in your bedroom.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Welp, "they" can already turn on the mic in your cellphone and listen in and those are usually kept nearby wherever you are.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[niftymitch]

Plot twist: the psychopaths running things are not elected officials, nor even in the public sector or military.

AND they are international.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[JoeMerchant]

So in the real present, who is suppressing our free will? We are free to quit our jobs at any time, of course actually doing that would be risking career suicide loss of healthcare insurance, etc. We are free to do as we will in our private homes, unless such activities might show up on a urinalysis or hair sample. We are free to shop, consume, purchase to our credit capacity - even encouraged to do so, but only from a selection of increasingly meaningless trinkets. We are free to use tools of communication, but only if they can be monitored. We (in the US) are free to purchase assault rifles, life is weird like that.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[JoeMerchant]

I have a Google Nexus 5 phone - guess what happens when I tap on the little microphone icon?

Actually, I count Google as one of the good guys in this scenario. The voice recognition obviously breaks down when network connectivity is flaky (which is often in a Nexus 5), and they also get in your face with reminders about things they've read in your e-mails - almost always helpful things, but I think the most helpful part is the reminder that your mail _is_ being read by people (or at least machines) other than you.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

if "smart" televisions are *that* bad, samsung, why the fuck do you insist on making them? how about making dumb televisions with only input ports and a tuner or two... and let the customer decide whether or not to hook up an internet streaming or "app playing" device to it....

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Nikkos]

In the case of the NSA, they just make the companies hold (mine) the info.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Snippy snip! Or for glory points, just rip the fucker out and crush it with pliers.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

sweet naive assumption that if you don't give it internet, it won't call home.
Perhaps it could use other wifi networks?
Perhaps it could reach net relayed via your neighbour's TV?
Perhaps in the absence of your wifi it can use a completely different (invigilation) frequencies and standard?

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actors? You're mean, people like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger?

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Siri at least requires a button to be pushed *or* you to explicitly say hey siri in your voice.

The hey siri trigger is recognised completely locally. Nothing is sent to the server unless you explicitly activate siri.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the intrusion into our lives as of late, living in a Faraday cage (preferably built into the walls of your living quarters) is starting to sound like a good idea. Not to mention the ever increasing issue of bandwidth availability due to over crowded frequencies.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is even better is if you don't give the TV a valid DNS server or gateway on your LAN - just a local IP.

How could you tell a tv with wireless wasn't secretly connecting on a non obvious channel after getting instructions from some guy in a van?

Then again, at that point, they can just bug you directly..

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Fjandr]

No, they'll let private companies continue to do something they are not (publicly) allowed to do themselves. Then they'll simply buy the data using taxpayer money. This is something that's been ongoing for a long time, so it should only come as a surprise to those dipping their toe into the waters of "security" politics for the very first time.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[bjwest]

That's not actually accurate in this case. The product in question isn't a TV. It's a "Smart TV". As in, a television with other functions. A person who buys one of these paid a premium for those extra functions.

You've obviously not been TV shopping recently. You're hard pressed to find one without smarts in anything considered a decent size today (above 32"), and the non-smart models are becoming the premium.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[TheRealHocusLocus]

sweet naive assumption that if you don't give it internet, it won't call home.
Perhaps it could use other wifi networks?
Perhaps it could reach net relayed via your neighbour's TV?
Perhaps in the absence of your wifi it can use a completely different (invigilation) frequencies and standard?

Perhaps it takes in bits of protein from moisture and airborne bacteria on the frame
Perhaps a small insect becomes trapped in the heat bent
Perhaps a gecko loses its tail as a crack in the plastic closes tightly
Perhaps the hinged button compartment closes slowly, trapping the whole gecko
Perhaps a mouse decides to build a nest by crawling into a rear opening, never seen again
Perhaps the kitten is missing
Perhaps Chester and his chair has been mostly absorbed.
We hear his piteous cries for help

They are gathered in the Control Room where hand gesture snapshots and voice command packets converge. There are speakers everywhere emitting sharp mechanical, animal and human sounds. Small blurry photos taken from thousands of TV cameras float on a giant screen. Some people are standing in front of their TVs trying to find the actual controls (hidden in a hinged compartment) and their faces and giant eyeballs fill the frames.

The people who work in this room exist in a brief timeless moment that continues forever, in which countless desperate people are trying to control their TVs with gestures and voice commands without success. Properly executed transactions are logged by the cloud but repeated failures, especially if the algorithm detects angry or anxious voices, are routed here. The Corporation decided that to improve customer experience, real people would staff rooms like these and try to make sense of the commands as a last resort, issuing instructions back to the TVs as best they can.

More than half of the images and sounds are not people trying to operate their TVs however. There is a cacophony of domestic arguments, screaming puppies and wailing children, laughter, someone banging on pots and pans. The employees' eyes dart back and forth, their ears straining to detect some coherent voice command directed at the TV. There! A drunken voice murmurs "off dammit". Fingers tap on a console and OFF command is sent. Sigh of relief, perhaps we'll meet our quota this shift. Then a low growl rising to a scream and a woman's voice: "You never cared about me! Just leave me alone and get a fucking job!" Fingers tap again and a command is sent that will distract them by playing a loud Samsung demo loop showing happy young people leading an active lifestyle. That is good medicine and maybe it will help, but it helps meet quota. Small child facing camera in tears repeating something indistinct. Is that 'two' and 'tree'? Tap command set channel 23, hope it's OK for children.

Everyone in the room is quietly thinking... what were they thinking. Once upon a time people learned how to control their own TVs and once they learned they taught others, even small children. Now everyone is faced with the task of training machines for voice and you can see how much wasted energy and anguish results from it. They pity the elderly who were given these sets to make their lives easier... and everyone all gathered on the first quiet excited day and everything worked perfectly. Then the kids left and a fan was turned on in the room blowing air into the microphone, and from then on those in the Control Room see an old man alone in a room, in tears, shouting some command obscured by the wind. Two technicians gather for this one, debating what to do. It is decided they will make the TV cycle through channels slowly until they see his expression change. But it never does, perhaps he is tormented by something else.

Then the shift is over, and the next set of employees enters the Control Room. We are now approaching the late hour of peak alcohol, when children are gone, voices are slurred and TVs are sometimes knocked over. It will be a long night.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[vux984]

That's the key. It's easy to record an audio clip, and figure out which of a dozen keywords it comes closest to matching.

Something the ipaq did 12 years ago.

It's much, much harder to record an audio clip and try to find a match in a library of 20,000 words.

If only we had proessessors several orders of magnitude more powerful than a 2003 ipaq. With thousands of time more RAM, and multiple cores...

oh wait.

But for the time being, transmitting the audio to a beefy server is the best we've got.

Just how beefy are these servers? I don't need it to service millions or thousands or even 10s of users at once. Just me. I bet my desktop has enough beef to match it. And I bet that my smartphone, several orders of magnitude stronger than an 2003 ipaq, could be a pretty remarkable personal assistant just with its local resources.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for reminding me that slashdot still has greatness in its members.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. First, there are several parts to voice commands. An activation phrase or button push. A translation to text,(we've had this for decades in some form or another,) and an output of a command from the voice recognition program to an execution program. Microsoft put out a voice recognition module for gaming, but it seemed limited to the first syllable. About 15 years ago.

I've got Hundreds of gigs of hard drive space and a relatively fast multicore processor with lots of memory and a good bus. I think it can handle some processing time, maybe use a different core than my main program. It never ceases to amaze me how a spreadsheet can still take 10's of seconds to load, just like it did 20 years ago.

I'm a hardware guy, and can make good computers. It disgusts me that software is becoming so bloated its almost becoming less useful.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

We normally spell it BAA not BAH.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Ihlosi]

Yeah, and 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale for the public, not an instruction manual for the psychopaths running things.

The same thing can be said of Niccolo Machiavelli's "The Prince". And look how that turned out.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again, I note the biggest error of the book 1984: It failed to anticipate the role the private sector would come to play in loss of privacy.

Private sector or government does not matter. It is merely two different roads to the same endpoint: opression. You may be oppressed by a government that comes into power through revolution (like Stalin's government), or through elections (like Hitler's government.). Or a conglomeration of large corporations may turn into de-facto government and oppress you instead - the original government being an interesting memory - similiar to actual justice in the justice system. . .

Re:who'd have thunk?

[MrL0G1C]

On android, voice control has an easy off switch in settings. Whether or not voice control on Android requires internet I don't know, I would guess it does.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

1984 was not about the future, but about the past. It was about the instruction manual written by Stalin.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[NoZart]

I guess the "beefy" thing about it is the database of samples. And that can get pretty big pretty fast if you want confident voice recognition (multiple samples per word to match against)

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Alumoi]

Well, that's the rub, isn't it? The TV is not supposed to be a recording device.

Oh yes, it is.
A 'smart TV' it's not a TV, it's a general computing device which can display various input feeds to a screen.
The same thing with the current 'smartphones': general computing devices which can, among other things, make and receive voice calls.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[KGIII]

Hmm... Does processing power really need to come down in price to do that? I know this might sound crazy but, couldn't we have a device - say in our own home, that did our voice processing for us and then pushed out and retrieved what was needed - list a server in the middle type of deal? Your phone, computer, television - all those things, they could connect to your own device - even if you're away from home - via the 'net and process it. It might even be better because the refinements and machine learning/corrections would be applicable to you voice profile?

Yeah, I know it's kind of crazy to want a device under my control and all but it seems like that might work. I promise, I'm not a terrorist or anything! I'm not even a subversive! I might be missing something (I don't actually use any of those sorts of things) so maybe I'm wrong but it seems like it could be a fairly cheap dedicated device and just use an API and a network connection (it could even be encrypted) so that any device could work.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you write any fiction? I'd actually love to read it.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[MitchDev]

Sounds like we have wire-tapping laws that need to be brought against Samsung and other companies whose products do this.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[AmiMoJo]

Not all governments are equally as bad. The EU might put a stop to it, but the UK government wouldn't.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

4.5/5 bretty good

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

we need more powerful solutions

Don't buy a Spy TV. DUH.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[DarkOx]

I am not so sure. Humans are by our very nature tool makers. Sure if someone hands you a device that seems to always misinterpret your queries you are going to get frustrated and give up pretty fast, no doubt. If you make it easy to 'train' that devices to do the right thing or just let users add their own commands etc, I expect most users would quite satisfied.

I am not sure where their no buttons to push no dials to turn, no adjustments to make mindset came from when it comes to electronics. I think its stupid actually and a bit short sited. Look at this way in every other product class the more adjust ability something has the more discoverable it usually is. Nobody wants to by a car without adjustable seats and mirrors. Would you choose office furniture that can't be easily configured to store letter or legal size documents? I am not saying sane defaults that don't *need* to be changed should not be a goal but yes I do want to be able to name the inputs on my TV or Receiver, "HMDI-3" is fine, but I'd rather it be able to say "Bluray Player", etc.

So I actually think local speech recognition might be advantageous. If there is a relatively straightforward way to program commands. On a TV that should be simple macro recording of remote control button pushes, or letting the user pick from a list of CEC commands. "Play disk" needs to set the audio settings on the receiver to movie, turn the TV to bluray input and send a play command to the bluray player. Its not hard.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[dcw3]

There's a big difference between completely unregulated monopolistic behavior, and enough regulation to ensure safety, security, and fair competition. I haven't read the book, but did see the movie, and don't think it was pushing the former.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

1984 was not about the future, but about the past. It was about the instruction manual written by Stalin.

True, but posting the phrase "1984 was a warning not an instruction manual" is an easy way to whore for karma points, since it's guaranteed to get you a +5 Insightful rating.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[gglockner]

For the tech minded, you should run your own firewall such as pfSense and block all outbound traffic from the TV except to services you want like Netflix. The rest of the world is screwed.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[dcw3]

there is insufficient local processing power to do the interpretation

There's been plenty of processing power to do it in your PC dating back to the 80s.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[dcw3]

You don't know what's transmitted, and what's not.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a only very few Slashdot posts that I really love and save on my local disk, and this one will be among them (I think the previous one was somewhere in 2009, something among the lines of "Mr Fartbutt Poopypants - google it using site:slashdot.org to see what I mean). I am happy I kept coming every day to this website to stumble upon this post today. Thank you.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[AmiMoJo]

Nineteen Eighty Four is about *how* the state suppresses people. Unfortunately that also means it's a great manual for people who want to suppress others. Newspeak is a great example of a technique that has been adopted by politicians. They often try to phrase things in a way that makes it hard to disagree with them, or shift the frame of reference.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

For in adamant objects,

Inanimate

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is kinda of an insane position for Samsung to take. They need to find away to address the privacy concerns or make it possible for people to 'securely' disable the feature, like maybe be able to unplug the pickup mike!

No, what they need to do is have their executives gently escorted to a walled-in yard, where they will be gently tied to a post, and gently shot by firing squad.

Sound extreme? Not really. We're at war, their devices are deliberately spying on us all, and spies get shot.

If you're too squeamish for that, just withdraw all foreign troops from South Korea, and let North Korea do the dirty work of slaying them all. (Gee, just killing the Samsung execs is looking moderate now, isn't it?)

Re: who'd have thunk?

[hambone142]

Put a.blob of RTV on the front of the mic.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha! Yes.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Maritz]

Have you considered the possibility that the people who are complaining about privacy MIGHT NOT be the exact same people who live their lives on Facebook? Maybe?

Re:who'd have thunk?

[vux984]

Perhaps, but again, if my ipaq in 2003 could handle "open word", and a few dozen other phrases, my phone in 2016 should be able to handle days, months, years, numbers to 100. etc. and 10,000 common words.

So, "phone call 555-1245" or "call X" where X is in my relatively short contact list. or make an appointment July 5th, for 1hr, with John Smith.

or "what am I doing July 5th"

etc don't have to go to the internet.

I'm also ok, with a tier of explicitly authorized commands to talk to the internet. phone go online and navigate to xyz. or phone go online and search for korean restaurants near me...

With a keyword "go online" or something to not just search online but also auth sending the request to servers online.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Maritz]

A good education leads you to a scenario where the plebs might get uppity. Thinking they can run things and such. Bad education gives you a much more manageable pleb. I think the system is working as intended.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[sconeu]

Now here's a thought. What if I live in a 2-party consent state, visit a friend, and say something near his Samsung TV?

Who is in violation of the wiretapping laws? My friend? Samsung? Someone else?

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone remember Dragon Dictate and Dragon Naturally speaking, back on our 486 and Pentium 1 computers? It worked beautifully and was 100% offline.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[ZeroWaiteState]

Actually there is a difference. Samsung doesn't have sovereign immunity. Oh wait, they just got it in CISA. Never mind.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Orwell was only off by about 30 years; what is the statistical margin of error allowed by the Mayans?

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

down the rabbit hole

Re:who'd have thunk?

[HornWumpus]

Newspeak isn't just weasel words. It's a linguistic argument. If you don't even have words for something, the thought becomes impossible to form.

PC is sort of going there with banned words and thoughts.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[minstrelmike]

Yeah, and 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale for the public, not an instruction manual for the psychopaths running things.

The same thing can be said of Niccolo Machiavelli's "The Prince". And look how that turned out.

And to be honest, Orwell wasn't looking into the future. He was looking at post war England
He wanted to title the book 1948.
Read Burgess' 1985

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again, I note the biggest error of the book 1984: It failed to anticipate the role the private sector would come to play in loss of privacy.

That's rounding error compared to what government can and does do. This is a bug, the US government is intent on doing evil.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't think your PC/laptop has already been listening for years? Mic, camera, Internet...third party.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remove mic, cover with spray insulation.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[interstellarsurfer]

Not impossible, but extremely unlikely. At least here in the US. All of the private sector companies who have anything to offer have been co-opted by the government surveillance regime. If every product had a proper disclaimer 'Everything you say can and will be used against you in a secret court of kangaroo-law' - everyone would freak out. If you instead say 'Fortune 500, INC. will sell your information to interested parties, at it's discretion' - everyone is happy to do business with such a forward-thinking, profit minded company. :-)

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch it from cable company to NSA, replace the arguing with rape and violence, replace the actions that defuse situations with inaction, and there you have it.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[david_thornley]

Nope. This stuff isn't easy.

Ever see the 1980s IBM commercial on voice recognition and "Please write Mrs. Wright right away"? The front end to that ran on an IBM PC. The back end included three workstations, a small mainframe, and a baby supercomputer. It didn't actually interpret anything, but it was pretty good at getting the words right (except for the head of the project, who couldn't get it to work correctly with his Czech accent), primarily by looking at a dictionary of common three-word sequences.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[dcw3]

Basic commands don't take that kind of interpretation. And yes, there was voice recognition software for your PC back in the 80s.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say plus or minus 2 ring shaped rocks, or the equivalent in stone head monuments.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best way to explain this is to refer you to Clerks and the scene where Dante and Randall are talking about being a general contractor on the Death Star.

Re:who'd have thunk?

[Jack Griffin]

Not impossible, but extremely unlikely. At least here in the US. All of the private sector companies who have anything to offer have been co-opted by the government surveillance regime.

Yeah but you have some control over that, it's called an election. There is one candidate who is anti-mass-surveillance and I think he is even leading the polls for his party's nomination. Regardless of your political affiliation or religious beliefs, everyone in this forum who is eligible should vote for this guy, just to send the message that this practice is not acceptable.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[david_thornley]

I know. I had a friend in the 80s who used voice control for his Mac, and it worked for the basic stuff. However, we're talking about more complicated things here, where it's necessary not only to figure out what the exact words are but act on them. If the IBM system I mentioned screwed up, it got the spelling wrong, and these things can be found and corrected. (Then again, I'm a very good natural proofreader, and may be underestimating the difficulty.) If my personal assistant software wants me to take my gym bag because I'm meeting somebody named Jim, I may have a problem. I've never talked to Cortana, but Siri has messed up trying to understand what I say, offering to do a web search on something unrelated to what I wanted, and so I'm not confident my phone is powerful enough to do digital assistant stuff by itself.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[epyT-R]

A distinct possibility. A distinct probability in the future.

Re: who'd have thunk?

[JimFive]

That seems a naive comment. How are they supposed to execute your command without recording it? It's not like the computer can process the voice in real time directly from the microphone input. It has to record the command, possibly clean out background noise, split it into component sounds and then compare those sounds to known commands and try to make words out of it. The problem isn't the recording, it's the sending of that recording to the cloud.

JimFive

Re: who'd have thunk?

[fustakrakich]

The problem isn't the recording, it's the sending of that recording to the cloud.

Maybe the TV takes its commands from the cloud instead of directly from the remote.

Neat!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party."

Okie doke, I'll do something to ensure that this never happens... I'll never purchase a Samsung TV.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes please list out all the other major manufactures making TVs not doing the exact same thing.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here, I'll never purchase a Samsung TV.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to hook up my brand new Samsung telescreen.

Re:Neat!

[jbmartin6]

I don't think this is unique to Samsung. Don't all such 'talk to me' services have a similar provision, since they can't necessarily process all voice recognition on the device itself? If you happen to say something personal while the device is sending the data 'home' for processing, well there you go.

Re:Neat!

[sanf780]

Add LG, Sony and Vizio to the list too.

TVs are not the dumb boxes of ye olde times, specially the high end ones. However, they are not smart on what they do.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or how about not purchasing any TVs that have microphone and/or speech recognition built in? That's going to be most models in the future, I assume.

Re:Neat!

[Kythe]

An alternative is not connecting the TV to your network. Of course, you'll end up paying extra for unused features.

Re: Neat!

[bill_mcgonigle]

As long as they don't require voice commands to turn on or switch inputs , then we just don't give them the WPA2 key, right?

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

One other thing to recommend along this path is to set the tv's gateway to a false value. This will allow the tv to connect to network based video sources such as a NAS, while not allowing it to reach out to the internet.

Re:Neat!

[Trogre]

There is no reason to think that other "smart" TVs don't do exactly the same.

This is part of companies pushing the IdiOT first as a premium option, now as standard in the mistaken belief that people actually want that crap.

Re:Neat!

[dinfinity]

The whole concept of a 'TV' is antiquated anyway. At this point, I actually just want to buy a display.

Pretty much all the non-display related 'features' the TV manufacturers provide in their devices are painfully obsolete and dysfunctional compared to what (some) set-top boxes provide. Considering that most of the 'smart' features are going to be either ignored or hated (either from the start or within a year), the wise decision would be to focus on creating the best displays possible.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party."

Okie doke, I'll do something to ensure that this never happens... I'll never purchase a Samsung TV.

As other posters have mentioned, they probably all do the same - so no need to single out Samsung. In fact, you probably can't trust ANY sufficiently powerful electronics anymore - phones, TVs, computers, whatever. Even open-source is no guarantee that there's not some firmware/hardware in there doing something nasty.

Also, I have a Samsung smart TV. I suspect like 99.99% of people who have one, I didn't want to buy a smart TV - you just can't buy a decent TV without them foisting "smarts" into the box. My solution - use wired network only & leave it disconnected all the time, unless doing a firmware update ... but I do this to prevent viruses, rather than being worried about being listened to. I know we can have zero expectation of privacy pretty much anywhere these days - fortunately I have nothing to make me remotely interesting (pun intended), so the NSA/whoever can knock themselves out.

Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat? :-)

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just don't say your real gateway address out loud near the TV.

Re:Neat!

[Jack Griffin]

Any TV that isn't a Smart TV.
I bought a cheapo no-name TV from Aldi (budget supermarket chain in case they don't have that where you live). 55" Full HD screen and that's all it does, which is all I need it to do.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

> "Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party."

> Okie doke, I'll do something to ensure that this never happens... I'll never purchase a Samsung TV.

They're being upfront and honest, which in my book gets them a lot of points.

Now other folks also do smart TVs which might do this very same thing, except that they are keeping mum -- neither denying or acknowledging it like Samsung.

If anything, we should discuss the subject and Samsung's credibility just jumped a couple of notches, enough for me to ask them for a model that does not record voice.

Re:Neat!

[MMC Monster]

Or, you know, you could just not give it access to your network.

You want YouTube or Netflix? Buy an Amazon Fire or AppleTV or one of the dozen other options to stream it off the internet.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Any of them without voice control. Any of them that don't use a "third party" to handle their voice commands. Any of them but Samsung, most likely.

Re:Neat!

[Solandri]

This is how speech recognition is done. Instead of being done in-device (which would require a semi-hefty CPU), the sound of what you say is recorded, then transmitted to a server which does the heavy lifting. The text of the recognized speech is then transmitted back to the device.

Samsung is just being up-front about all this, instead of burying the disclosure in a dense EULA like some companies do. You can argue that a smart TV doesn't need speech recognition, but after having used Roku's voice search I can tell you that the time it saves over typing searches with a navigation pad guarantees it'll win out in the long run.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't shoot the messenger. Samsung is just warning you. Our Apple and Google phones, other brand TVs, Xbox, PlayStation, etc. are all doing this.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

The smart thing would be to only buy dumb tvs, or if you must buy one that claims to be "smart" under no circumstances allow it to connect to the net.

Frankly I see absolutely zero compelling features that make me want to buy a smart TV. If I want smarts I'll use a computer (laptop, optionally plugged into a TV). Otherwise I'm just looking for mind-switched-off downtime, so I'm content to zone out and watch whichever channel is broadcasting the least mind-number crap at that given time.

Re:Neat!

[WaffleMonster]

This is how speech recognition is done. Instead of being done in-device (which would require a semi-hefty CPU), the sound of what you say is recorded, then transmitted to a server which does the heavy lifting. The text of the recognized speech is then transmitted back to the device.

I'm sorry I just don't buy what is being sold here. Mobile devices had passible voice recognition at least some decade and half ago allowing users to select songs and artists from music archives, run software and make calls with usable accuracy, no training, noticeable delay or spying.

Free text recognition is more challenging and pushing accuracy is an arbitrarily complex endeavor. Yet reality is simple navigation and title searches don't come anywhere near pushing state of the art.

Samsung is just being up-front about all this, instead of burying the disclosure in a dense EULA like some companies do.

Is Samsung making warnings clear to consumer PRIOR to sale?

can argue that a smart TV doesn't need speech recognition, but after having used Roku's voice search I can tell you that the time it saves over typing searches with a navigation pad guarantees it'll win out in the long run.

This is a false choice.

Re:Neat!

[silas_moeckel]

Funny my band new 4k is dumb. I've yet to fathom why I would want a smart tv, the display I'll keep for more than a decade the smart parts not so much. I use roku's for the smart bits with plex on top of that. I could just as easily use a rpi or any number of things that I've used over the years. But on average I'm keeping screens for more than a decade. I'm snicker a bit as a friend asked me to take a look at a smart tv that wont work anymore, because the manufacturer is not putting out updates it no longer works with netflix etc etc, my roku of a similar vintage has been updated and works perfectly well for 1080p content.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

I advocate developing a solution that doesn't require purchasing my electronics from a grocery store.

Re:Neat!

[camperdave]

Need hefty off-device processing is one thing. Selling the data to third parties is quite another.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't the only reason either. How about the fact that unless you really do your research you could be buying a Samsung TV with a shitty 3rd party panel in it, and the next guy that comes along may get a panel from Sharp or maybe even Samsung themselves. When there is a clear difference between panel quality how can these all be the same model?

Re:Neat!

[ihtoit]

Blaupunkt.

Re:Neat!

[HiThere]

IIRC there was a story awhile back about LG TVs (or monitors?) doing the same thing. The difference is that this was an announcement from the manufacturer rather than from a third party.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

No argument that TV is antiquated in many ways, but for me (and I suspect many others) it's actually the lack of smarts that is the drawcard: at the end of the day when I'm tired I genuinely don't want a billion options and a million interactive bells and whistles, I just want a dozen or so programs (with one or two that I don't actively hate) so I can do a quick flick, then sit back and do absolutely, positively, 100% nothing at all for an hour or so.

Re:Neat!

[beelsebob]

Okay, buy a non-Smart TV from Amazon instead... Shit, Amazon's into groceries now too. Uhhh.. Fry's I guess? There's plenty of non-grocery stores that sell non-smart TVs.

Re:Neat!

[JoeMerchant]

Personally, I'm starting to prefer computer monitors to Televisions. "Smart TVs" aren't nearly smart, nor configurable enough, for my taste - why not just get a simple monitor and hook up a real computer that you have some measure of control over?

Re:Neat!

[antdude]

It's not just Samsung! :(

Re:Neat!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Are Apple, Google, Sony, and Microsoft sending the search requests to a third party?

Re:Neat!

[Jack Griffin]

Personally, I'm starting to prefer computer monitors to Televisions. "Smart TVs" aren't nearly smart, nor configurable enough, for my taste - why not just get a simple monitor and hook up a real computer that you have some measure of control over?

At this point in time, a monitor over 55" is prohibitively expensive eg http://accessories.us.dell.com...
My TV cost less than half this price (even though it effectively a monitor since I don't use the tuner, speakers or anything else).

Re:Neat!

[Ginger Unicorn]

On top of not buying a Samsung TV, you have to spend the rest of your life having a heightened situational awareness of what model of TV is in the room with you, and refusing to speak in the houses of any of your friends who buy a Samsung TV. Or more realistically, just boil like a frog and forget about it after a few months.

Re:Neat!

[JoeMerchant]

Ah, effects of architecture - long story short: my house doesn't have a suitable location for a screen > 44", so we are blessed to live in the luxury of the past with a 42" screen and have no temptation from the 65" beasts.

Re:Neat!

[The-Ixian]

Yeah, tell me about it.

I have a top-of-the-line Samsung "smart" TV from 2013 and within a year I stopped using any of the "smart" features and just hooked up a Roku which works way more reliably.

From day one, I disabled the gesture control and voice commands because how hard is it to press a few buttons? My laziness is legendary and yet I find gestures and voice control to be tedious.

So... lawsuits in...

[Anonymous Coward]

5... 4... 3...

Re:So... lawsuits in...

[jtownatpunk.net]

Lawsuits over what? It's right there in the privacy policy. Are you telling me you didn't read every EULA and privacy disclosure for every device you own?

Re:So... lawsuits in...

[GuB-42]

Probably the reason they stated this in their privacy policy is to protect themselves in case of a lawsuit.
If they have an "OK Google" kind of thing, such a clause is almost necessary. Even though it is obvious that speech is recorded and sent to a server (that's the whole point) there will be people who will complain that they didn't know and seek damages.

Re:So... lawsuits in...

[ihtoit]

Hi, we're from Apple, and we're here to take you for human experimentation.

I think I've read about this one...

[theCzechGuy]

A big screen that tells me what I should think and listens to everything I say... I'm sure I've read about this somewhere....

Re:I think I've read about this one...

[jtownatpunk.net]

20 minutes into the future...

Re:I think I've read about this one...

[Anonymous Coward]

"read?" "read?" what is "READ"?

Citizen: report to miniLove doubleplus quick.

Re: I think I've read about this one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your worst nightmate!

People still buy Swinesung?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Shamesung crap is still bought? With money? Deliberately? Not with a gun to ones head? Wow.

Re:People still buy Swinesung?

[Anonymous Coward]

let me guess. apple fanboy.

Re:People still buy Swinesung?

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't touch anything from Apple or Samsung. What else have you got?

Re:People still buy Swinesung?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you think Samdung is any better than crApple and that Fuckle Assdroid is better than crApple iAnal? You must be a Samdungt/Fuckle Assdroid fanboy.Both are shitty to the point of fucking worthless except to the fanboys and even M$ is shitty as well. This is why I will stick with a normal cellphone and old fashioned analogue TV using a converter box.

Re:People still buy Swinesung?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't believe ya. It's always a Apple fan going apeshit about Samsung.

Re:People still buy Swinesung?

[Maritz]

That was supposed to make sense, was it?

Anyone Else here thinks they should pull these?

[Anonymous Coward]

About time they remove these TV's from market.. or atleast make it very clear when it's recording you.. google records me.. I have to press a button.. followed by a chime. and my entire screen gives you the 'now listening...' Spy TV'S? cmon bro

Re:Anyone Else here thinks they should pull these?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't owned a TV in 20 years. This is hilarious. You are all sheep BAH BAH BAH.

Anti-features

[Anonymous Coward]

The company even warns customers not to discuss personal or sensitive information within earshot of the device.

Then it's an anti-feature and the device is working against my interest. The device is consequently not worth my time or money and is not something I want in my home.

Re:Anti-features

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel an obligation now to buy one on Amazon for a steep discount and hotwire the microphone to a porn/horror/action movie playlist.

Easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

Treat any device that has a network connection to be capable of audio, video or some sort of data gathering and conduct your business around such devices accordingly.

Re:Easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being part of the flock. DON'T buy this crap. Tell everyone you know to do the same. Wake the fuck up sheep.

1984

[Anonymous Coward]

... what more needs to be said?

Problem with ALL technology

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a problem with ALL technology nowadays.

Business is under the delusion that more information collected about their customers is better - regardless of their privacy.

Thanks Big Data!

I am becoming a Luddite. Consumer technology has jumped the shark.

It's no longer about making my life better but about collecting information for business to sell us more shit.

It's all about selling. It's not some conspiracy - it's just ape brains wanting to make more money. That is all.

Amazon, Netflix, Walmart, Google, Yahoo! Microsoft, Bank of America, Chase Morgan, etc .... just want more revenue and we're just a commodity to be exploited.

It's just numbers. We're just numbers. And when we buy Samsung's and anyone else's crap, we're feeding it.

Cut the cable as much as you can. Save money and stop buying their shit. Buy basic cars without the crap. Stop buying Android and Apple products. Stop buying.

Everyone who asks for your identity tell them that you don't give that out.

Freeze your credit. It stops identity thieves (it's telling that stealing credit info is stealing an identity.) and it slows down buying crap.

Our society want us in debt. Cars, housing, education medical ... one way or another, you'll be in debt sometime.

Re:Problem with ALL technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats you figured this out. Now have some soma. It's a Brave New World!

Re:Problem with ALL technology

[Anonymous Coward]

We keep telling you about Linux
Maybe now you'll listen?

Re:Problem with ALL technology

[jetkust]

You can't stop big data from tracking you, the best you can do is make it illegal.

Re:Problem with ALL technology

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a problem with ALL technology nowadays.

Business is under the delusion that more information collected about their customers is better - regardless of their privacy.

Thanks Big Data!

I am becoming a Luddite. Consumer technology has jumped the shark.

It's no longer about making my life better but about collecting information for business to sell us more shit.

It's all about selling. It's not some conspiracy - it's just ape brains wanting to make more money. That is all.

Amazon, Netflix, Walmart, Google, Yahoo! Microsoft, Bank of America, Chase Morgan, etc .... just want more revenue and we're just a commodity to be exploited.

It's just numbers. We're just numbers. And when we buy Samsung's and anyone else's crap, we're feeding it.

Cut the cable as much as you can. Save money and stop buying their shit. Buy basic cars without the crap. Stop buying Android and Apple products. Stop buying.

Everyone who asks for your identity tell them that you don't give that out.

Freeze your credit. It stops identity thieves (it's telling that stealing credit info is stealing an identity.) and it slows down buying crap.

Our society want us in debt. Cars, housing, education medical ... one way or another, you'll be in debt sometime.

Here's another if you paranoid freaks are still not getting the point:
https://youtu.be/eQXQsu9XOcU

We are all techies, too. Let's hear some ideas from great minds.

Re:Problem with ALL technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Save money and stop buying their shit. Buy basic cars without the crap.

Better yet, save even more money (on insurance and gas) by not buying a car at all. You really need to spend hours every day trying to travel to a centralized place at the same time as everyone else? You really need to burn gallons and gallons of high density fuel to... sit and wait? Our entire society and 90% of our basic living expenses are designed to EXTRACT wealth (read manufacture extreme debt).

You are almost awake! Keep questioning your reality!

Re:Problem with ALL technology

[Cro Magnon]

^This! Short of joining an Amish community, you can't escape tracking tech. And even there, you'll probably get spied on by microscopic drones.

Dumb TV + Nuc

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll stick to nice quality dumb TVs and use s small home built PC for the smarts

Re:Dumb TV + Nuc

[Jack Griffin]

As long as you're not running Win10, Google anything, or Facebook...

Re:Dumb TV + Nuc

[Overzeetop]

You forgot OSX - telemetry for usage monitoring is already always on, and Siri is due any month now.

This is not difficult folks..

[wbr1]

The only reasons to constantly record and send are nefarious. Period.

It is not hard to achieve the same functionality through a button press. Or like Google does, a locally recognized series of words. Google Now has you train your device as to how you say Okay Google, so that ostensibly it does not send data until you do this and INSTRUCT THE DEVICE THAT IT IS SAFE SHARE AUDIO.

The only reasons for this are greed, stupidity, and gvmnt back doors. It's like anal sex. Once you are desensitized, the door opens for more intrusion.

Re:This is not difficult folks..

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confusing anal sex with alien probing. Or maybe you've just had bad experiences.

Re:This is not difficult folks..

[Namarrgon]

Who ever said it was constantly recording? Where is there evidence for that? It records only when you click the Voice Recognition button.

Re:This is not difficult folks..

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently the ones with built in cameras (ie, the PN60F8500) are always listening for a command.

Re:This is not difficult folks..

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't constantly record, you stupid pile of cuntcheese.

Re:This is not difficult folks..

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reasons for this are greed, stupidity, and gvmnt back doors.

As an American, I believe that it's more the later and less the former. Korean society is remarkably paternalistic and authoritarian in character and the people seem to be somewhat naive and far too trusting when it comes to authority and surveillance. On the other hand, greed isn't the same over there as it is here because it takes a certain amount of individualism and hubris to be greedy and that sort of personality type seems to be both less common and less culturally acceptable in Korean society.

Re:This is not difficult folks..

[Namarrgon]

According to this page, some models do indeed listen for the phrase "Hi TV" after you enable the feature in the settings. When this is detected, a mic icon appears on the screen, and the TV will listen for and send voice data to the recognition servers while that mic icon is present. This isn't "constantly recording and sending", though.

Re:This is not difficult folks..

[houghi]

So it is greed and stupidity. Now what? People still buy it. People still want it. It will no go away and they do not care that you do not want to buy it.

They are aware that they can not sell to 100% of the people They do not want to, Way too expensive. So they are content to sell to the 95% of the people who do buy it and ignore the 5% who do not want to.

This will be seen by others who will do the same and they will start doing it for other devices. Because it is cheaper and they get an extra dollar and there is no protest in great numbers.

"You hold the device wrong" Remember that one? In the end it all means that your opinion does not matter as long as there are enough to make money.

Re:This is not difficult folks..

[chihowa]

...so that ostensibly it does not send data...

It's a sad state of affairs when Google is used as an example of non-nefarious, privacy-respecting behavior.

(Frankly, the level of trust reserved for Google is pretty sad, too.)

Re:This is not difficult folks..

[mrchaotica]

Screw the "button press;" I want voice recognition that processes locally instead of sending the audio to "the cloud" at all.

If that's not feasible, I want an OwnCloud voice recognition engine.

Someone got a lawyer involved

[daq man]

It seems to me that if you but a voice activated TV then you would expect it to listen to what you say. The issue here is where and how the translation of voice into command is done. I suspect the TV is too dumb to do accurate voice recognition on it's own so a sound bite is sent to a server somewhere. The server does the conversion and then either sends the command back to the TV or communicates with another server to stream the requested content. There has to be a certain amount of anonymity because the source of the sound bite isn't (I hope) tagged with the name and address of the source but some numerical identifier. I also suspect/hope that the sound is translated by machine and once that is done it is immediately discarded, also I would also think that anything that doesn't fall into the limited vocabulary that the server understands is immediately discarded and a "huh what was that?" returned to the user. Any other method of doing it makes no sense because Samsung expect to sell millions of the things. Recording millions of conversations is something that costs money and Samsung is in the business of spending money.

I suspect that someone at Samsung got a lawyer involved who said you have to disclose that the thing records sound and sends it to a third party. In the perfect storm where the sound is kept, and a human has access to it, and the same human can figure out who the speaker is, and the human cares, then it's an issue.

A lawyer would write "knives are sharp and can cause personal injury even death" but that doesn't mean I'm going to clear them out of the kitchen.

Re:Someone got a lawyer involved

[daq man]

Typo "Recording millions of conversations is something that costs money and Samsung is in the business of spending money."

should be...

"Recording millions of conversations is something that costs money and Samsung is in the business of making money."

Re:Someone got a lawyer involved

[queazocotal]

Recording millions of conversations is a truly awesome data source to improve your voice recognition.

Note to self...

[denzacar]

Stop talking to yourself.

Dumb TV

[Bert64]

Is it possible to still buy a dumb tv?
I want one that's basically just a monitor, i have an external audio receiver and various STBs, consoles etc... The TV just acts as a dumb display device with switchable inputs. It doesn't even need a built in receiver, just the HDMI and AV inputs.

Re: Dumb TV

[Billly Gates]

I purposefully bought a dumb ons for my Ruko3. Smart TVs are stupid regardless of spying due to obsolescence and being locked in with a TV vendor who has a financial interest to have you buy another TV every year to get Android updates.

No thanks. When my Roku3 goes obsolete I'll just buy a new one. Not throw the whole thing out. Idiots.

FYI I almost dove Mac headfirst in 2010. Why not? Same issue. Video card is obsolete? Throw out $2000 machine and buy a new Mac! Uhm no

Re:Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems as though these days, all the nice TVs are smart TVs. Any dumb TVs left tend to be the cheaper models with the less uniform back/side-lighting, lower refresh rates, no HDR or 4k, and so on. It lets them justify a much higher price, though the added cost to them is just a relatively cheap SoC. I would love to buy a slightly cheaper, dumber version of the latest mid-to-high-end TVs, but alas it's not an option.

Re:Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

You could maybe buy a large computer monitor and an hdmi switch if you need multiple input sources.

Re:Dumb TV

[zm]

Just don't connect the TV to the network.

Re:Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, namely, a standard run-of-the-mill computer monitor. You don't really need a television in this day and age, because everything you might want to watch is available over the Internet.

Re:Dumb TV

[wbr1]

Look up commercial displays. Not all are dumb so be careful, but many are just panels and inputs.

Re:Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer monitors works very well for TV as well. My 27" monitor is cheaper than the living room TV, yet it has a much better colors and contrast. It has both HDMI and AV input and audio output. It needs external speakers, though you can buy some, which attach to the monitor itself if you want to. Even better, the monitor can stay even if the receiver is replaced to some new transmission standard, making upgrading cheaper. You can buy external HDMI switches fairly cheap. They have like 4 input ports and one output and a selector for which one to be forwarded. Using those you can use monitors with just one HDMI if needed, though monitors with multiple ports are available.

I will not buy TVs anymore. I'm tired of the "new format->new TV" and the poor quality/price. I quick lookup reveal that finding monitors of 35" to 40" is possible too, meaning using a monitor for a TV is not even really restricting on size anymore.

Re: Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

The bane of the Internet: not sure if sarcastic...

PS: Leaning towards "Yes".

Re: Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Find the cheapest one that satisfies your requirements and don't plug any Ethernet cables into it nor set it up for WiFi. That usually works.

Re:Dumb TV

[fnj]

It's called a computer monitor. Works fine.

Re:Dumb TV

[OzPeter]

Yes, namely, a standard run-of-the-mill computer monitor. You don't really need a television in this day and age, because everything* you might want to watch is available over the Internet.

*Note that the definition of "everything" is subjective and may also be location sensitive.

Re: Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Your assuming there are no open wifi networks, auto-connect, or other malicious features. Or even private networks and/or behind the scene agreements For instance Comcast has a very large network of wifi access points it's customers can access outside of the home. Anywhere Comcast is available there is a good chance a TV within range of it (even a neighbour) would be able to be setup to automatically conenct and share data you didn't want without your permission even if you don't setup the wifi connection that is built in.

I got a funny look today when I asked about 4K dumb TVs. They didn't understand and proceeded to show me a smart TV.

There was a disturbing encounter I had once with police and another person who overheard a conversation where I was talking about not owning a cell phone. "If you see suspicious activity, report it." resulted in this person calling the cops. The cops showed up and started questioning me on my I wasn't carrying my cell. Apparently they didn't get the complete gist of it. I don't even own a cell phone. When I told them that it took them by surprise and they got really suspicious of my intent. They thought because I wasn't carrying a tracking device I must be up to no good. I must be berrying a body, planning some terrorist attack, or something. They basically left me alone because they didn't really have anything to arrest me on. They basically said there was a loophole in the law-else they'd have arrested me. Not because they thought I was actually a terrorist or committing a crime. But because they thought it should be a crime not to have or carry a cell phone!!!!

Re:Dumb TV

[Master Moose]

The problem with this is the purchase.

Buying a "Smart TV" whether you plan to connect it or not provides sales data to the retailer and manufacturer that people indeed want T.Vs with these functions.

Its positive reinforcement by those protesting the cause - Like everyone that buys a Windows P.C. only to wipe windows and install an alternate OS. HP and Microsoft have just received your $$

Re:Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Not without a TV license :)

I can buy a gun without a license, but I cannot buy a TV without one :)

Re:Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

It is absolutely possible as I did it this weekend; you save some money too.

Since I have a mythtv setup so I have a computer hooked up to the TV, I just didn't need the smart featuers. My wife may have liked them, but after seeing this story she agreed with my decision.

Re:Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy. Just buy the cheapest one with the features you want and never, ever let it anywhere near a network connection. Just make damn sure it is willing to work in dumb mode without any annoying "help, I can't spy, take me to your interwebs" messages.

Re:Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't plug in an ethernet cable. Don't setup the wifi. Presto chango - you have a dumb tv.

Re:Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

It is only a positive reinforcement if dumb tv's are still sold. If so then no problem - buy the dumb one. If not then it can't really be a discriminator now can it?

Re:Dumb TV

[BitterOak]

Not without a TV license :)

I can buy a gun without a license, but I cannot buy a TV without one :)

Where do you live that you need a TV license but no license to buy a gun. The only place I know of that requires TV licenses is the UK, and I don't think guns are readily available there. In the US you don't need a TV license to own a TV.

Re:Dumb TV

[ihtoit]

Richer Sounds have a 22" LED HDTV that's JUST a TV. HDMI and digital freeview tuner. £109.

Re:Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

For the time being most of the microphones for "smart" TV's are only in the remote control. Very few have mics in the TV itself but if you care about that it's something to look out for. Since I do the same thing, only use the TV as a display, I don't need the remote that came with it (so it sits in a box without batteries).

Re: Dumb TV

[Anonymous Coward]

You made the mistake that every american does: When the police asks you a question, you try to answer....

In Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

In Russia they watch television, in United States television watches you

Re: In Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

Yakoff Smirnov's career is about to have a great rebound. All he has to do is move back to Russia and reverse his jokes.

It's called a "Twonky"

[Okian Warrior]

It was an originally a science fiction story called The Twonky, later made into a movie of the same name.

Re:It's called a "Twonky"

[OzPeter]

It was an originally a science fiction story called The Twonky, later made into a movie of the same name.

I tried watching that movie last week and gave up on it half way through. And its not often that I give up on watching bad TV

Re:It's called a "Twonky"

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

He was talking about "1984".

how about a

[Revek]

Physical switch on the mic you can turn off or on. Perhaps with a nice indicator light.

Re:how about a

[fnj]

Physical switch on the mic you can turn off or on. Perhaps with a nice indicator light.

Cut the motherfucker out altogether and throw it in the trash. The same for the camera.

Re:how about a

[Namarrgon]

They provide a Voice Recognition button, on the remote and on the screen. It's off at other times.

Re:how about a

[Burz]

Physical switch on the mic you can turn off or on. Perhaps with a nice indicator light.

These are showing up on at least one laptop brand: https://puri.sm/librem-15/

Would be interesting to see if any old laptops from 15-20 years ago had such switches.

As for 'airplane mode' radio cutoff switches, those are going away in favor of purely software controlled transceivers. On Thinkpads, I think the 2012 models were the last to have the switches.

Re:how about a

[Anonymous Coward]

Psh..
They would let you flip that switch all you wanted, and they'd turn the TV"s light out but it would keep recording anyway.

Re:how about a

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s-PiIbzbhw

Re:how about a

[antdude]

Even if they had them, how do we know if they are really off?

Re:how about a

[threephaseboy]

Unrelated to the topic at hand, but they say it's "A laptop that respects your rights" then turn around and have an Intel CPU.
I notice the CPU is missing from the picture shown below "Every hardware chip individually selected", and no mention if they've somehow disabled AMT or whatever the replacement is.

Re:how about a

[harl]

How do you know if the switch turns off the light but not the mic?

Re:how about a

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I am sure someone has a patent on a mic and a camera where the light is physically tied to the hardware being powered, so it cannot be falsified with software.

That probably adds 4 cents to the device, so won't be used.

Re:how about a

[Burz]

They claim the specific Intel CPUs they picked do not support AMT: https://puri.sm/forums/users/t...

They have also been very up-front about the ME binary blob used with Intel CPUs. The hope was to eventually get Intel to open their code.

Re:how about a

[threephaseboy]

At least they're acknowledging it. It's too bad there aren't any good processors (from a freedom perspective) that aren't just terrible performance-wise when compared with Intel.

The hope was to eventually get Intel to open their code.

I wouldn't hold my breath on that, but stranger things have happened.

Do not connect the TV to the intenet

[Anonymous Coward]

Use one of the many cheap boxes instead (Raspberry, etc.).
I have an older Samsung TV with no camera and microphone, but I got sick of the crap apps on th eTV and the bandwidth hogging for continuous "updates" and I disconnected. Only connect through HDMI to another device.

Alright, thanks samsung!

[Anonymous Coward]

You've just saved me a bunch of money for not purchasing one of your overpriced "smart TV".

There's an easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't convince manufacturers to stop putting this on their Televisions, but you don't have to boycott a model or brand just because it comes with this onerous "feature". I'm just saying this because occasionally you may see a great quality TV at a great price, but then your gonna go into a moral tizzy because it happens to have those "smart" features.

There's an easy fix:

Don't allow these "smart" televisions access to your internet connection. Tell friends, family, and acquaintances not to give it their WiFi password. Instead, hook up a Firestick, Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, Intel Compute Stick, or whatever device you feel most closely matches your needs, and just use the television as strictly an output device.

Of course there already exists the possibility that your cell phone or laptop may already be spying on you, but by not giving the smart TV access to your network, you can keep another unnecessary snooper out of your business.

Re:There's an easy fix

[fyngyrz]

The Firestick (and Fire) both include Alexa; which is voice-to-cloud and thence to...

Of course, you have to press a button so that it will obey your commands. There's no particular reason to assume you have to press a button for it to listen to you without pressing a button.

Other than... Amazon says no. Amazon is a corporation that has chosen many times over the years to do the thing that earns them money instead of the right thing. They're right up there with Google for being extremely disingenuous with the consumers that interact with them and their products. So you might want to take that "no" with at least one grain of salt. Also keeping in mind that what they do today with their hardware does not in any way predict the future employment of said hardware.

It is much worse than that

[ewibble]

Although this is bad I would be more concerned with that internet connected recording device your pocket, that you install random software on.

Re:It is much worse than that

[JoeMerchant]

Although this is bad I would be more concerned with that internet connected recording device your pocket, that you install random software on.

If I hadn't already posted, I'd mod Insightful. If I could, I'd give all my mod points to this ^^^.

I remain hopeful that the truly bad stuff is being mostly identified quickly and sort of auto-scrubbed from the soup that is the Appiverse, but I'm sure that nefarious villains can still replace your common apps with modified versions that do all kinds of bad stuff, starting with recording all available audio from the mic, compressing it and sneaking it out when you transfer data for other reasons. Geo-tracking and random snapshots also uploaded clandestinely come a close second.

Re:It is much worse than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Although this is bad I would be more concerned with that internet connected recording device your pocket, that you install random software on.

I don't install random software on mine, I've got a Windows Phone..

Totally not creepy.

[drolli]

What is so fucking difficult about local voice recognition? The number of word a TV set would need to distinct could easily be downloaded completly every day an the TV could recognize these, and if it does not understand what i say *do nothing*.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[fnj]

Right. We had 4 MHz Z-80s running speech recognition and synthesis in the 1980s.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what is hard about it, but it apparently is. My cell phone has speech-to-text (beaming to the cloud) and that thing is scary accurate. Occasionally it will goof, but I'd say it's getting 95% + accurate. I've been through several 'training sessions' on my Win 7 speech-to-text engine, which I believe is local, and it is horrible. I may get a 2-3 word phrase to register, but then it just seems to go off in la-la land showing, "What was that?"...even though I try to speak in a clear, unstressed, 'news caster' tone.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[JoeMerchant]

What is so fucking difficult about local voice recognition?

Your wallet. The device is already cloud connected for other reasons, a sunk cost. Upgrading the local processor and memory to do local voice recognition might cost an extra $3 per copy, hurting either profit margins, or sales- neither of which is acceptable.

In the early 1990s I raged about in-car CD players that had like 5 seconds of buffering - that didn't improve until MP3 decoding got added and there was already a strong processor with lots of memory onboard for that, suddenly in-car CD players didn't skip anymore due to 30+ seconds of buffer being available. Cost to buffer 30 seconds of 44.1kHz stereo audio in 1993 - maybe $2 per device, and not a single manufacturer did it.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[JoeMerchant]

I think in the cell phone scenario, the justification is battery life. Plus, it doesn't hurt to have the raw speech sent to the cloud for machine learning purposes, but they'll stress the battery life aspect during PR events.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[thegarbz]

What is so fucking difficult about local voice recognition? The number of word a TV set would need to distinct could easily be downloaded completly every day an the TV could recognize these, and if it does not understand what i say *do nothing*.

Accuracy. Like it or not the huge database of learning voice commands that companies have do absolute amazing wonders for accuracy of voice recognition.
Of course that comes with obvious downsides.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[drolli]

160kB*30 = 4.8MB

in 1993 that was on the order of $100.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[drolli]

Yes, but the TV need to understand a set of about 20-100 words, not a semantic sentence.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[JoeMerchant]

1993 DRAM costs were ~$2/Mbit, so ~$8 for 4MByte. I suppose I was remembering 1997 or so pricing before they finally started putting in decent sized buffers, and a whole CD/MP3 player unit sold for less than $100 retail.

http://phe.rockefeller.edu/Log...

Still, call it $30 system cost - in a 10 disc CD changer that retailed for $900+ they couldn't increase system cost by 3% of retail to have a player that doesn't skip?

Re:Totally not creepy.

[drolli]

a) The source you give states $3/Mbit

b)You forgot a factor of 8 between bits and bytes
  4.8Mbyte = 8*4.8MBit ~ 40Mbit, corresponding to $120, according to your sources. And lets not forget here that this requires space for 8-10 4Mbit drams.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[JoeMerchant]

This is why I post on /. early in the morning, instead of doing work that matters. Thanks. I'll document my math this way:

44.1KHz * 30 seconds = 1.323M samples to store.
16 bits per sample, stereo, so 42.336MBit required, round to 48Mbit of storage, 6MBytes - so that math makes $144, after coffee time. (yes, two ticks up from 1 on a log scale graph is 3...)

I guess that roughly adds up, full PC systems built in 1993 were shipping with 4 or 8MBytes of RAM (even in 1987 my workstation had 640Kbytes, all you'll ever need),

Maybe back in the day I was wishing for 10 seconds of buffer ($48) instead of the 2 (or less) that they were providing. It's been awhile.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Recognition? no we did not had. we had pre trained systems, for a specific user at a specific distance and with a very limited number of words.

Somethign capable of recognizing a whole family, when one is givign a command while others are discussing weather in the room is quite complex. It indeed coudl be doen if they increase the damm TV price by some 50$ for extra CPU power.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[thegarbz]

Yes, but the TV need to understand a set of about 20-100 words, not a semantic sentence.

Firstly a sentence is easier to translate than an out of context word.
Secondly you have about 20-100 words with many thousands of possible accents in which to say them. You may not care about this American, but as a true blue Auzzie bloke voice recognition fails me for even some of the most basic words.

I wish that this video were actually a comedy sketch, and not a real life situation for many people around the world.

Re:Totally not creepy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that perhaps one legitimate reason to do it remotely is in order to build up a nice big data set on which to train the software. If they did it all locally, it would be much harder to get it working nicely out of the box. Having already collected that data, it is probably less necessary to collect more, but now they have a large body of intellectual property that provides a competitive advantage against new market entrants, so they probably want to keep it safely on their own servers rather than distributing it (or the results of processing it) to client devices.

That said, I myself would rather have less-well-trained local speech recognition, or no speech recognition at all, than creepy remote speech recognition.

Amazon Echo

[Anonymous Coward]

If it isn't already, chances are Amazon Echo will be listening to everything within its earshot, and sending the data to the mother roach, where it is dissected to learn what you're watching on TV, on your computer, or listening to on radio, and whether you're ignoring or listening to commercials and how you respond to them.

Fuck Samsuck.

[zenlessyank]

Always expected Russian and Chinese hardware to revolutionize these technologies. That is what I was taught in school in the 70's and 80's. But I think it is better that an American backed country push through. Solidifies the Great American 2-Faced Stance.

Unhook the network

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless it has a sim card, unhooking the network should be sufficient.

Why are we buying TVs that are more than dumb displays these days?

Re:Unhook the network

[epyT-R]

because that's what they're willing to sell to us.

Re: Unhook the network

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. These are the features a TV needs: 1x hdmi input, 1x power button.

Re:Unhook the network

[toddestan]

Many of of these devices have wireless, and some will connect to any open access point it can find. You may have your wireless locked down, but you can't really control what your neighbors do.

Re:Unhook the network

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why are we buying TVs that are more than dumb displays these days?

Some of are not, and will not.

Re: Unhook the network

[righteousness]

That would be a monitor.

Re:Unhook the network

[KGIII]

I suppose that's true but I'm gonna notice some guy standing on my lawn with an antenna. Even if he's using a cell phone in his pocket, I'm gonna ask why he's standing on my lawn. I guess, if my elderly neighbors, about a half mile through the woods, decide to start hacking a powerful wifi access point to make it so that my data's shunted over to the 'net it could be a problem.

Meh, it's a moot point anyhow. I don't actually own a very smart television. I do own a television. It's even a fairly nice television, or it was - it's a few years old now. I don't have it connected to anything fancy. It's just attached to a laptop and I stream documentaries to it from across my network. It can actually browse my network by itself (it doesn't have get a public IP address) but it will only play one movie and won't queue up a list and doesn't support playlist formats. So, a laptop it is. I do think it advertised itself as being smart. It doesn't do playlists so it's not nearly as smart as I'd hoped.

Illegal & Warrantless Interception

[Anonymous Coward]

You get mad at the NSA for doing it.

This constitutes interception without a warrant as far as I'm concerned and is no different than someone planting a recording bug in your home.

When are these companies going to be held accountable for their unrestricted data gathering?

Re:Illegal & Warrantless Interception

[ihtoit]

the Constitution does not apply to private companies or individuals.

This is why the British Government are employing companies like G4S to perform such tasks, as well as running prisons and childrens homes.

It removes the burden of public accountability when people start dying.

This is also the nightmare scenario of a fully privatised National Health Service.

To be fair...

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, this isn't much different than other things we happily live with:

a) Siri (for example) sends a compressed version of your speech to a remote server in case it can't recognize the speech locally.

b) You do actually have to push a button on the remote to turn it on. So it's not recording every word you say while the TV is turned on.

I agree that it's not nice that both Samsung and Apple don't clearly state what happens to your speech - but that in itself isn't much of an issue.

A bigger concern is all of these live microphones and open Internet connections that are now out there - hooked up to machines that are still powered when "turned off". It doesn't take much imagination to see how a hacker or some unsavory government agency might not get into your TV and start recording absolutely everything. But since laptops and phones have had that capability for decade - I'd say that ship has already sailed.

Re:To be fair...

[justMichael]

b) You do actually have to push a button on the remote to turn it on. So it's not recording every word you say while the TV is turned on.

Note true in this case, these new TVs are always listening

New sophisticated Smart Interaction technology enables you to operate your TV without pushing a button. You can easily control functions such as turning on/off your TV, changing channels, accessing apps and navigating the web using simple voice commands.

http://www.samsung.com/ph/smar...

Trivially make your n00 tv less "smart"

[Anonymous Coward]

This can only work if you actually voluntarily connect the thing to a computer network.

Who green-lit this?

[taniwha]

How did anyone think this was a good idea? it wasn't just that some lone hacker snuck this in .... there were committees, marketing buy in, engineers who did the work, management who OK'd the budgets ..... and no one stood up and said "this is not a good ioea"? no one?

Re:Who green-lit this?

[JoeMerchant]

How did anyone think this was a good idea? it wasn't just that some lone hacker snuck this in .... there were committees, marketing buy in, engineers who did the work, management who OK'd the budgets ..... and no one stood up and said "this is not a good ioea"? no one?

Obviously no one who counts. Kinda like the NASA engineer who warned about the O-rings before Challenger went poof.

Does this mean...

[frogslegs]

...they'll be giving away t.v.'s for free, now?

If a problem, It's honestly your own fault

[Trax3001BBS]

Didn't RFA, this is a /. repost of a year ago, when Samsung warned users they can hear your every word.

I read TOS's. I have a 32" Samsung smart HDTV I use as a monitor. The third TOS in explains to you that this is what it does and if you have a problem with it to take it up in some South Korean Providence. Yes, the Samsung warning screamed they didn't understand their own TOS.

They monitor everything you do (keyboard, site wise), everything you say (for voice commands) to more anticipate your future needs.

I don't connect the HDTV to the Internet (I've never accepted that third TOS), and would purchase Samsung products over many others.

It records only when recognising voice

[Namarrgon]

From Samsung's privacy policy:

In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Samsung will collect your interactive voice commands only when you make a specific search request to the Smart TV by clicking the activation button either on the remote control or on your screen and speaking into the microphone on the remote control.

Emphasis mine. Check the source, people, not the clickbait blogs.

Re:It records only when recognising voice

[Anonymous Coward]

They lie. If a recording advice exists, the only safe assumption is that it is always on.

The simplest solution is to refuse to buy these smart TVs. A TV really shouldn't be smart anyway.

Re:It records only when recognising voice

[Namarrgon]

Better avoid every connected device with a mic then, including both mobile and landline phones. Or maybe limit your paranoia to the available evidence.

Re:It records only when recognising voice

[Alumoi]

either on the remote control or on your screen and speaking into the microphone on the remote control.

For now. Wait until the next update when the wording will be something like:
Samsung will not collect your interactive voice commands unless clicking and holding the activation button either on the remote control or on your screen.

Of course, this will be only for your convenience and you can opt out of this after completing a short form on Sammy's website with a couple of mandatory items like name, given name, date of birth, marital status, name of partner, date of birth of the partner, number of childs and their name, phone number, e-mail, facebook and twitter handle, anual household income, personal interests and such.

Re:It records only when recognising voice

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you be sure that they do this? LG was already caught for spying on their users despite the privacy settings user had used on TV. Usually the EULA does have some vague clause that they can do something really evil if they want to improve experience or solve technical problems.

"In Russia TV watches you."

[Anonymous Coward]

In America too.

What??

[AndyKron]

You have to watch what you say near your fucking TV set now? No thanks, I haven't watched TV for a few years now, and don't plan to start.

George... the optimist

[fyngyrz]

Two things:

First Orwell was an optimist

Secondly, the specific concern alluded to in TFS is why one of the most important things the tech community today could accomplish is to achieve a solid voice-input capability that runs entirely locally (and is not user specific or require particular training out of the box or out of the compiler.)

Alexa, Amazon's commercial voice savant, sends very word you speak "to the cloud" which is, of course a "third party" (and potentially, a 4th, 5th... Nth party.)

Mycroft, the "open" voice savant, holding so much promise because it doesn't use Amazon's excreble model of "you must provide anticipated result phrases for everything you want to do, and set up and maintain (and probably buy) a secure server", wraps that promise in... you guessed it. Sends everything you say to "the cloud."

Both suffer from "if the net is down, I become a deaf idiot" syndrome as a side effect of the cloudy thinking that went into their design.

The day I get a real "can listen and produce cleartext locally" application (or device) is the day my home (and car, and boat) gain significant automation.

I know this issue doesn't concern a lot of people, particularly young people. The net is "always there" and privacy "WTF is privacy?"... but I think that's a function of them being young and not really understanding either the depths that some people will sink to, or the relative fragility of the network. After they've been stepped on enough, and lost their connections enough, I suspect they'll modify their stances somewhat.

Re:George... the optimist

[Burz]

Orwell and his mentor, Huxley, were trying to describe very different or even opposite dystopias. What we're ending up with is "mostly all of the above".

Re:George... the optimist

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I'm not really young anymore, but my wife is still in her 20's. I wanted to buy a new TV and I explicitly avoided smart TV's; at first she was shocked but when I explained why, she was quite freaked out. I have no idea how the college students at work would react though.

Re:George... the optimist

[MobSwatter]

Perhaps Lockheed Martin has a Samsung TV in the break room, this would explain a few things.

Re:George... the optimist

[Anonymous Coward]

You "forgot" to mention Cortana. Identical to both of your examples, with a heaping dose of Microsoft goodness dolloped on top.

Captcha: crotch

Re:George... the optimist

[Anonymous Coward]

Both suffer from "if the net is down, I become a deaf idiot" syndrome as a side effect of the cloudy thinking that went into their design.

Which is exactly the kind of thinking that you get from spoiled young technologists who have never really been without fast internet since the left for college or even at anytime in their lives these days. They assume that everyone has an always on 100 gigabit connection with lightning fast access to just about anything on the Internet. After a while, that tends to color one's thinking about how software and services ought to be designed and built.

Re:George... the optimist

[jasno]

Just remember, a closed-source device that can do TTS locally, and one which can connect to the net, can possess nearly all of the same nefarious capability as one which sends everything to the cloud.

It would be trivial to load(and even field upgrade) a list of watch words which trigger steganographic(or just overt) communication back to a server regarding what is being said. Uploading the raw data to the cloud just makes it easier.

Re:George... the optimist

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno... When the speech-to-text can run entirely locally, probably the only thing that will change will be that the transmission of everything you say will be much smaller, meaning that it will require only tens of bytes per second. That can be hidden rather well in the form of some mystery data in an otherwise clear-text transmission, giving the impression that nothing nefarious is going on at all.

Re:George... the optimist

[phorm]

The day I get a real "can listen and produce cleartext locally" application (or device) is the day my home (and car, and boat) gain significant automation.

I was under the impression that many of the newer Android (possibly also iOS) devices do have this functionality (albeit for a limited subset of commands).

Re:George... the optimist

[Anonymous Coward]

Alexa only sends things to the cloud once you prompt it with it's activation word.

> one of the most important things the tech community today could accomplish is to achieve a solid voice-input capability that runs entirely locally (and is not user specific or require particular training out of the box or out of the compiler.

You are completely deluded, and don't know what you're talking about. Are you a markov-chain bot that someone let out of their lab accidentally?

Re:George... the optimist

[budgenator]

Perhaps Lockheed Martin has a Samsung TV in the break room, this would explain a few things.

Now imagine Samsung Smart TV's in patient's room in a hospital with HIPPA violations going for $50K per violation.

Re:George... the optimist

[mrchaotica]

And Siri and "OK Google." Every major tech company has jumped on the "send all your private communication to us" bandwagon.

Re:George... the optimist

[MobSwatter]

And cell phones on doctors. I think about the only way to fix it all is roll back the laws for about 50-60 years, at least it was somewhat manageable at that point but these old bastard elites have to go. They have been making too many fundamental mistakes, and screwing things up even further trying to preserve their power structure as people want the republic back.

Re:George... the optimist

[MooseTick]

"TV's in patient's room in a hospital with HIPPA violations"

If you talk where you and the patient are knowingly being recorded, then it isn't really a HIPPA violation. They just need little disclaimers on the TVs. Or better yet, not connect the TVs to the hospital's network.

Re:George... the optimist

[Grishnakh]

I know this issue doesn't concern a lot of people, particularly young people. The net is "always there" and privacy "WTF is privacy?"... but I think that's a function of them being young and not really understanding either the depths that some people will sink to, or the relative fragility of the network.

Nope, you're confusing "young people" with "Millenials".

The young people (Generation Z, college-age and lower) are eschewing stuff like Facebook precisely because of privacy concerns. They actually realize that everything they put on there stays there forever (or until Facebook dies), so they're not using it.

The people still using Facebook are the Millenials (around 25-35), and worse the completely idiotic Gen-Xers (which I unfortunately have to count myself among). They don't understand the privacy problems at all. Remember, the Gen-Xers are the idiots who largely vote for our political leaders today and believe all the Big Brother bullshit about "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about" in regards to NSA spying.

Re: George... the optimist

[Anonymous Coward]

At least you can turn off OK Google. Can Siri be turned off?

Re: George... the optimist

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, siri can easily be switched off from settings.
And siri doesn't listen all the time, unlike google.

Apple actually appears to care about the privacy of people, and they're the only ones standing up against the gov for their encryption policy!

Unlike Google, who only acquire comparies for the sake of spying or data gathering and tagging individuals.

Re: George... the optimist

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not bad rapist, I'm a good rapist. I mean I'm still going to fuck you whether you want me to or not but I'll never hit you and I'll only put the tip in. I never cum inside my...friends so if you'll just lay there and let me do my thing, I'll make it as painless and quick as possible.

In case you didn't know, this is allegory.

Re:George... the optimist

[budgenator]

If patient identifiable healthcare information is being transmitted in a way that allows exposure, it's a HIPPA violation. Even if the Hospital enters an Agreement with Samsung, the data is traversing the net which allows exposure unless the stream is AES256 encrypted; and I really doubt that's the case. HIPPA concerns were a big part of the Flint Water Débâcle, it turned the sharing of data between researchers from a matter of hours to months; agreements had to be sent, cleared by legal signed and returned, wash rinse repeat.

Physical micro switch on mic?

[vpness]

Musing if a simple micro switch on the mics (and cameras) of devices isn't the right, and perhaps legislative, way to go. Ditto gps.

This is not new.

[thermowax]

This has been discussed on Slashdot before. Just don't configure the WiFi.

Re:This is not new.

[Anonymous Coward]

This story is a year old (all of the links in the article are from Feb 1015), but I'm glad it's still being discussed.

The Best Reason Not to Buy a Samsung Smart TV

[shubus]

Yes, folks, it's not only NSA reading your email, but your iOT devices, and your TV are spying on you. Samsung has got tons of well deserved negative publicity for this and also because this spying could not be disabled. Anyone suspect that Apple TV with Siri does the same thing? It won't belong before iOT enabled toasters and toothbrushes will be telling NSA why kind bread you toast and the brand of toothpaste you use. I solved this problem by disabling voice commands on all my devices and using Snort with pfSense to block all these devices from calling home. Yes, it makes by devices dumber....but more secure. By the way, this works great with Win10, too. So if you can't disable this spying within the device itself, it seems like an external gatekeeper is the only solution.

Boycot Samsung

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for a laser printer, I've seen stupid corner cutting done in Samsung products. I'm too poor to buy Samsung gear. Especially when I can buy from the competition for the same cost and actually get quality stuff.

NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

The third party being the NSA.

Stopping "smart devices"

[fyngyrz]

set the tv's gateway to a false value

When your IP is 192.168.1.100, it's not exactly challenging to find the gateway...

Perhaps a firewall between the device and the network that won't let the device anywhere BUT the NAS. Might require a secondary WiFi network, if WiFi is involved.

Of course, then you might see something like the following on the display:

"Sorry, presently unable to establish a connection to the net. Please correct the problem in order to continue using this device. Click here to retry connecting."

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[Lumpy]

It is if my firewall is set to never allow any traffic from the TV set's mac address to leave the LAN.

If you want privacy, you need to educate yourself in the use of technology that empowers you.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[Opportunist]

Returning TV because it doesn't work. Huh? Oh, I don't have internet, just a local network, and it doesn't seem to work as advertised, so you can keep it.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[fyngyrz]

Your TV could compromise other devices on your network, such as your net-connected thermostat, or the very computer you are typing on, either directly or via another "smart device" you've allowed to access your computer. Hence neatly stepping around your mac ID block. Your firewall will simply go "oh, ok, it's Lumpy's computer, out you go."

And if you're going to say "but you can actively allow / disallow every network request on your computer, then yes, I agree (and do in fact, even though my main computer isn't on the net at all and this one is just a surfing platform) but (a) a safe network request long-term approved today (ok, thermostat, you can talk to my machine) may not be safe tomorrow, and (b) most people won't know what they are looking at anyway. The nature of intentional compromise is to be a subtle as possible and to look as innocent as possible.

If you want privacy, you need to educate yourself in the use of technology that empowers and compromises you.

A separate, wired network is the only decent answer at present. That's generally quite secure until / unless you have physical intrusion issues. For that, you need the 2nd amendment -- arms.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[fyngyrz]

Yes, excellent, if you were prescient enough to establish an isolated network.

Re: Stopping "smart devices"

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't need a separate wired setup. A vlan works just fine. Put the TV on there by itself, write the ACL's or configure a private vlan to prevent talking to devices on other vlans.

Want to go crazy with it identify what addresses you'll allow the TV to connect to ( Netflix, Hulu, whatever ) and block the rest using whatever technique you're familiar with. Assuming it needs net access of course. If not, don't provide it.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[thegarbz]

But then how do you watch Netflix on your TV?
Youtube?

The problem with education is that you need to be pretty much an uber hacker these days to get devices to not lose desired functionality while preserving privacy. It's out of the scope of even most educated home users.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[phorm]

Yes but in that case why would you pay extra for a "smart" TV?

(in fact, why bother anyways, most "smart" TV features cost more than a reasonably-price Android box which can do so much more)

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[dargaud]

And what when it goes through an integrated 3G card, like the Kindle or many other recent IOT devices ?

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[Lumpy]

I use the Roku... you do know that there are devices out there that you can plug into HDMI and your network and dont have microphones and cameras in them.
I also use a Raspberry Pi running linux and XBMC/Kodi that does not spy on me.

But only a PHD can use my TV set for I have 3 remotes... and that makes people cry in the corner in terror. It's probably why I don't have friends wanting to come to our house anymore.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[houghi]

Isn't that sad that privacy will only be avaialble to a lucky few? If you they "Then they must educate themsleves" it would sounds like "why don't you stop being poor".

Luckily if you are only one of the few who does this, they will be able to get enough data about you from elsewhere. You visit friends, you are in places that have a device that listens in, you sit in a taxi or uber that has listening devices.

Yes, you will be able to avoid all this. You will not be able to have a normal life like the rest, but that is just the price you pay for privacy, right? Something that should be free and is so obvious, it was not even mentioned in the constitution or anywhere else.

FYI: privacy is the basis of all other rights. Without it, all the others become useless.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they just use their TV as a display? If they hook a computer up to it, the TV never needs to communicate anything on the internet - the computer can handle all that.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? With another device using the screen as a simple display. Roku, for example.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[Maritz]

So these TVs are spoofing other devices' MACs with a bit of gratitous ARP or something? This doesn't sound at all like a thing that is actually happening or likely to happen. Don't get me wrong, the TV's are creepy. Just not that creepy.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[thegarbz]

Devices that plug into hdmi for the sole purpose of adding smart functionality? Why would anyone do that? My TV is already smart, and it's from a reputable company like Samsung not the noname Roku who could be doing all sorts of nefarious things.

^^ Reaction of the average person to your comment.

Also +1 to Raspberry Pi and Kodi. Especially with the Raspberry Pi 2 it's an awesome combination.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[Opportunist]

What this is supposed to mean is that a TV that doesn't work if it cannot phone home is broken by design.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[shione]

Don't use the TV as the brains to watch netflix, get a separate tv box which doesn;t take voice commands. Using the tv for netflix sucks anyway because as soon as netflix changes their api like youtubre has many times the tv apps become dead.

Another thing you could do is disconnect the microphone from the tv (why does it need a microphone anyway?) or cover the microphone hole with sound dampening material.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[Anonymous Coward]

^^ Reaction of the average stupid person to your comment.

FTFY

That same type of person is A-OK with samsung listening in on their home.

Re:Stopping "smart devices"

[thegarbz]

Don't use the TV as the brains to watch netflix, get a separate tv box which doesn;t take voice commands.

A separate box? Why? The TVs are smart, why would I want to *pay* for a separate box, and one from likely a shady manufacturer, not a big trusted reliable brand like Samsung.

^^ Consumer reply to your post. The problem still stands. Us techies have a solution. The general population don't.

Old confused guy here

[fyngyrz]

You are all sheep BAH BAH BAH.

Dammit, I can't keep track any more. I was just getting used to the idea that we were all cows.

Re:Old confused guy here

[Anonymous Coward]

Not me. I'm male, so I'm a bull.

Very Fishy

[fyngyrz]

My fellow slasher, computer technology is the shark. :)

Let me project a bit

[fyngyrz]

Projectors are still in the running. Perhaps not for much longer, but I have a recent one that produces a stupendous image and has no provision for "connectivity" at all (I say that as an obscenity, btw.) Plus, I pretty much run in the front of the pack in the "big TV war." Not a lot of 204" displays out there... :)

Anti stalker labeling

[WaffleMonster]

What is needed are mandatory privacy related (non)compliance labels or central clearinghouse where consumers can quickly check the creep factor of products they are about to purchase.

The problem is rarely people don't care about these issues. Nobody wants conversations conducted in their private homes uploaded to the Internet.

The problem is exclusively lack of visibility. Consumers simply have no idea or no options. If companies can no longer get away with hiding bullshit under the radar it shall either pressure them to change behavior or create a market for new entrants to fill demand.

This is really no different than energy efficiency labeling. Without it nobody knows and inefficient hardware costs the manufacturer nothing. With it and widespread consumer recognition efficiency becomes a selling point that costs the manufacturer market share.

Perfectly legal

[fyngyrz]

Illegal & Warrantless Interception

The constitution constrains the government as to requiring warrants. It does not constrain the citizen or the corporate pseudo-person in like manner. Something similar (probably still not requiring warrants) requires specific legislation. There isn't much of that at present, either.

But keep yelling. I like it and agree in spirit.

Re:Perfectly legal

[camperdave]

Does the constitution forbid the NSA from requesting/buying the data that Google collects?

Fairness isn't the issue. Awareness is.

[fyngyrz]

I don't want to be "fair." I want privacy. I clearly don't want a Samsung TV. I appreciate the post as it made that crystal clear.

New development? Nah.

[brec]

This is pretty old news. I’ve had one of these TVs for more than two years — I don’t use the voice recognition feature. There’s a Salon piece from Oct. 30, 2014 on the security aspects of the feature.

I want a big monitor, not SpyMachine2000

[Sax Russell 5449D29A]

This is the problem. Most of us don't need half (way more than half, actually) the features found in modern TVs. It took me a long time to find a TV without 1) "smart" capabilities, 2) 3D crap and 3) one that *actually* has a 100hz panel. It's in fact incredibly difficult to find out the actual refresh rate of the panels used in most TVs today. They tend to mention something along the lines of "3600hz" which any sensible nerd knows to be absolute bs and not the actual refresh rate of the panel.

Considering the crap we get in the TV today, my next TV will probably be just a big-ass monitor with a small factor PC running Linux beside it. A wireless keyboard with a touchpad instead of a remote, and Netflix etc. instead of TV broadcasts.

Cynicism in me is reaching critical mass in polynomial time...

Samsung

[Anonymous Coward]

You stupid assholes. There goes your TV business.

Open Source is the answer.

[DMJC]

The problem here is a rogue device turning on the user. The answer is Open Source. Samsung TVs use an embedded Linux distribution. it is up to the Open Source community to lobby to get the rest of the device Open Sourced to the point that you can run an Open Source Graphics stack on the TV and give the user full control of the device. Without intense lobbying, or hardware jailbreaking, the manufacturers will not change their behavior on this issue willingly.

Old news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't this discovered immediately upon release, like a year or more ago?

I.m not for more laws, but

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe a required big pring disclosure sticker on the tv screen would be useful here.

This seems a no-win for the consumer.

yeah, I think twice

[Trailer Trash]

Like, when I'm at Costco looking at TVs, and don't buy a "smart" one.

Isn't This Kinda Well-Aged News?

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to remember reading about this early last year.

Let's see...

Oh yeah. Here we go.

physical switches

[Anonymous Coward]

Not going away soon. Any laptop purchased by the US military is required to have a physical switch to turn of any wireless capability. Oh and most vendors also sell a version of their laptops without cameras due to military sales. You have a hard time finding these models at the local store or on the Internet but if you call Dell or CDW-G you can get the same models that I order.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The voice control is designed to allow you to control the TV with your voice... I can't think for the life of me why Samsung would need to share your voice files with a third party outside of R&D

Within the company for improving the voice system "accents/ inflections" I understand, or to a vendor making the voice system with am agreement of not sharing the data further otherwise "ruin your company", clauses go into effect

Software nonfreedom says we don't know details.

[jbn-o]

You have no idea when it records; "it records only when recognising voice" is an assertion that goes beyond what you know. Anytime nonfree (user-subjugating, proprietary) software is in control of a computer, that computer is not really under the user's control and we can't tell what it will do or when. That's the power of the proprietor at work.

Trackers (aka cell phones or mobile phones), most people's laptop computers, and now some TVs, all have microphones in them under the control of proprietary software. There's simply no way to tell when the mic is active, where the data is going, or to get consent that the recording only goes where the user wants it to go. Privacy policies change, software updates happen (and sometimes without user control or vetting), and software behavior doesn't always conform to stated policies (not that the user would have any chance to know what proprietary software is doing anyhow). The same applies to cameras, GPS units, tracker/cell phone towers, and more.

Ultimately regardless of whether the policy matches how the software works, when the device is under the control of nonfree software that device is a threat to a user's privacy and users are not in control of the device.

Re:Software nonfreedom says we don't know details.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure someone at some point will test this by putting some sort of packet monitor between the TV and the router (or on the router I suppose) to measure if audio data is being transmitted any time apart from when you explicitly tell it to.

We know about the dangers of proprietary software. The problem is that you're speaking to the choir, and despite the issues raised we've seen little indication that companies will stop implementing proprietary software anywhere, because there's not enough push-back from people who care. So articles like this can be useful to alert people at least given the fact the world isn't really moving in the direct RMS envisioned.

Re:Software nonfreedom says we don't know details.

[Namarrgon]

I agree, but this is a potential issue for any device with a mic (even those with FOSS code, unless you're extra careful), and it's been a potential issue for many decades now (with the advent of landline phones at least), so these kind of trust questions are nothing new. I only mean it didn't suddenly become an issue when someone with a Samsung TV noticed their privacy policy.

In Capitalist America...

[Anonymous Coward]

TV watches you!

Not 1984

[Etherwalk]

It's not 1984, it's brave new world. It's the people who let this be done to them, while the few with futility to empassion the many to fight the worst parts of the system.

Re:Not 1984

[ArylAkamov]

Jesus fuck. My dad told me to watch that movie many years ago, not quite what I expected.

Re:Not 1984

[thegarbz]

Ok you just messed up my brain!

Re:Not 1984

[fustakrakich]

It is not "incompetence"

Just one more reason

[FrozenGeek]

to scrap my cable service and toss the TV out the window (SCTV had it right).

Not 1984

[ArchieBunker]

The world is more like the movie Brazil. Trying to be like 1984 but failing due to incompetence.

In another news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Old fashioned net users have been warning people to think twice before they buy a TV to out-smart themselves.

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung announces a new company logo:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/06/12/article-1192484-054FBEE9000005DC-392_468x551.jpg

Boiling Frogs

[Anonymous Coward]

Kwaaak (but don't utter that in front of a Samsung TV).

Lighting level affecting voice control?

[fintux]

The disclaimer on the page http://www.samsung.com/ph/smar... says:

Voice Control performance may vary depending on language, local dialect, pronunciation, voice and ambient noise and lighting levels.

Is this a mistake? How can lighting level affect voice control performance? Or does the TV also use lip reading and also send video capture to third parties all times?

Cable cutting? I'm sorry Dave, but I'm afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't do that.

I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.

Old news?

[wilsonmark]

Didn't this hit the headlines a year ago? It doesn't seem as though anything has changed, so I'm not sure why this stroy has suddenly resurfaced

So I can never buy another telivision.

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally will be happy the day the world ends in a hail of Nukes.

Better Idea

[sjames]

Think twice before bringing a spybox into your home. Never buy an appliance that demands an internet connection.

Re:Better Idea

[Kardos]

So what are you going to do about the ones that don't demand an internet connection because they use the cell networks?

Re:Better Idea

[sjames]

Naturally, those are right out. It's part of why my current TV is a dumb TV with a Linux box connected to it. It's job is to display the video I send to it.

Ummmm wasn't this last year?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the same "statement" from Jan 2015 as I can't actually seem to find the statement anywhere, just lots of articles from last year, oh and a few facebook posts on Facebook resurrecting it as if it's this year, surely our beloved /. Haven't become sharetards ? If it's a genuine statement anyone got a link?

Hardware safeguards

[Dereck1701]

Yet another reason why there should be built in hardware based safeguards, In the case of cameras/mics they should have a noticeable LED that is illuminated (for 2 seconds minimum) when they are active and of course should not be active unless being directly used. In the case of voice commands it shouldn't be too difficult to design a separate controller that would recognize a simple command ("Hey TV") before it began relaying the audio to the main board/internet at which point the LED would illuminate.

Just bought a Samsung TV & disabled voice cont

[rippeltippel]

During the initial setup I didn't agree with some T&C, including the one for voice control.

As a result those features are turned off.

Easy peasy.

Isn't this old news?

[WebGangsta]

Isn't this the exact same story that we heard about last year?? If so, how is this news again, other than "if you missed it, it's news to you"? ex link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

Mycroft?

[HalAtWork]

Wasn't that the evil software company in a seaQuest DSV episode?

Re: Mycroft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? What the hell? Someone actually watched and paid attention to that show? Well fuck me running.

Re: Mycroft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup it was neat.

i still have a crt

[Anonymous Coward]

not for the conssspiracy, because i only watch tv while eating, i developed an habit of eating while listening to crap and lies, nowadays if im not hearing bullshit, lunch and dinner is not the same

i link eating with havind a crap later on, within 30 minutes i will crap, maybe listening to the news is what makes me poop so regularly, maybe thats why i actually need a tv for

i should make an experiment about this

to hear bullshit and watch bullshit you dont need a smart anything

easy fix

[hardburlyboogerman]

Use a screwdriver(to open the device )and a small pair of wire cutters( to cut the camera and microphone leads)
  - problem solved

But does it know where I am, who I am?

[fygment]

It's one thing to record words, but they're only meaningful if you know who said them and/or where they were said.

Also, my radio, visiting friends, the dog, the neighbours, etc. all contribute to the noise pollution that the Samsung device might detect.

I'm not sure whether this is the big deal people are making it out to be.

No monitor of mine

[h4x0t]

will ever be connected to the internet directly. AV equipment does not need its own OS.

dangers of proprietary software?

[MooseTick]

"we've seen little indication that companies will stop implementing proprietary software anywhere, because there's not enough push-back from people who care"

Are you suggesting all code should be pubically viewable and verifiable in its precompiled state? If you are really that paranoid, why don't you only use devices that run open source code that you have personally vetted? Really, the easy solution to this is to not connect your TV to the internet. Problem solved.

Re: dangers of proprietary software?

[cyber-vandal]

Pubically viewable software is not something I want in the public domain

Say good bye to privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Smart cars, Smart TV's. They should rename them to "dumb" devices because if you use the features you are a complete idiot that has no privacy.

There's already cases of cars "telling on" their owners who have committed hit and run driving offenses or have just driven slightly off the road. These features are cool and interesting but are they worth trading your privacy for?

The best way to handle a smart TV is to disable it's internet access all together. Most of the smart TV functionality is pretty primitive in comparison to what you can get from another device. The interfaces are clunky and features such as file sharing are intentionally hobbled because of the streaming and media industries.

If you have a smart TV. Just go in and pull out it's network access. Even better would be to ban it's MAC address on the network in case it "keeps" and uses your wifi info without your knowledge. Changing the wifi password is another good way to keep it from phoning home.

In U S and A television watches You

[Anonymous Coward]

Ted Rall turned out to be correct

:X

[ajarin]

Stunned, I don't know for sure about SAMSUNG :( but I think, it's fine as well as there are no problem with the users, giggle