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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."
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."
Physical switch on the mic you can turn off or on. Perhaps with a nice indicator light.
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).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.