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?

[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]

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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 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?

[epyT-R]

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

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]

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?

[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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Error 53.

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?

[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?

[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.

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!

[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!

[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!

[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]

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

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?

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....

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.

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.

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..

[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.

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

[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: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."

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

[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.

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.

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*.

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?

Does this mean...

[frogslegs]

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

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.

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re:Not 1984

[ArylAkamov]

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

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.