Samsung Privacy Policy: Watch What You Say Around Your Smart TV

[Kaido]

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/08/telescreen/

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 through your use of Voice Recognition.

 

[VirtualLarry]

No surprise there. What about the embedded cameras in Smart TVs and game consoles? Any news on them.

It's all getting piped to that massive data warehouse in Utah anyways.

Consumers should outright boycott so-called "Smart TVs" anyways.

 

[lxskllr]

I don't have, and will never have TV, but I also won't own any "smart" devices. If I can't buy without, or disable its brain, I won't own it.

 

[mmntech]

Remember when everybody freaked out about the Xbox One's all-seeing Kinect eye? I suppose they weren't so foolish.

The problem with voice recognition is that it needs a lot of samples to really be effective, which is where cloud comes in handy. However, why does it need so much data. Once calibrated, the software should be able to tell when you're talking to it. It shouldn't need to record transcripts of every conversation talking place in the room.

Secondly, Samsung states that the data is being transmitted to an unspecified third party. You don't know where that information is going, and who has access to it. The company states that it's encrypted, but we've heard that line before from many others who have been hacked.

Third, The Register pointed out that it seems to link data back to the user. Not through a MAC or IP address but via an account. Which potentially means they have a detailed record of who said what.

Fouth, you can turn this off, which everyone should. However, there's no mechanism in place to completely opt out of data mining.

Fortunately, this story is attracting the attention of the mainstream media. So it might scare people away from buying Samsung smart TVs and force them to change their data collection policy.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Scary stuff but in today's world it does not surprise me. Governments probably pay companies to put this stuff in. Goverments want total eyes and control over it's population and they can do it through things that people are suckered into buying by today's consumerism world.

Sadly most TVs are smart now, whether you like it or not. I have an earlier smart Samsung but it does not have voice recognition as far as I can tell. I don't use any of those features and it's not plugged into the network, so I *should* be fine but would not surprise me if these things use a government reserved wireless range and just talks directly to the government satellite network.

 

[SlitheryDee]

I wanted to be outraged for a second, then wondered why smartphones that probably do more or less the same thing don't anger me. The stuff you say to Siri and Google voice is going somewhere too right?

 

[Jeff7]

"Futurama: The show that watches back."


That happened sooner than they were expecting.




So where's this going to go?

"Hey, I feel like getting something to eat. You want to head out in about 20 minutes?"

A quarter of a second later, your thermostat, microwave, refrigerator, phone, tablet, pictureframes, and air conditioner all start making recommendations. Then a store 10 minutes away, which received a Google Alert notification, texts you another ad.



You know how bird calls or frog croaks are really just the animals screaming out that they want sex? Or how plants put out these big, flashy flowers for the same reason? We're doing the same thing for the sake of selling each other things, but with less dignity.

Samsung has responded to the public backlash against its privacy policy, claiming it takes such concerns “very seriously.”

Yes, there's a very seriously large amount of ad revenue to be made.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I wanted to be outraged for a second, then wondered why smartphones that probably do more or less the same thing don't anger me. The stuff you say to Siri and Google voice is going somewhere too right?

Actually even when you're not using it they can pretty much go in at any time and activate the mic. We really don't have privacy any more. We pretty much live in what would have been conceived an evil science fiction type movie.

 

[Imp]

Saw this today... Not just Samsung, apparently.

Ummm... I thought about taping my laptop's webcam, but I never used it enough. There shouldn't be any microphones on my old dumb TV or computer, but who knows what they decided to put in.

 

[Red Squirrel]

It's stuff like this that makes me want to learn electronics more. Being able to open up something and identify what's going on could be a good asset to protect against these things. At very least you could bypass all the brains to only use the basic functions. Or simply disabling the mic or any hidden cameras along the frame would probably be enough. Or if you find the antenna used to transmit the data you can probably just connect it to ground.

It could be tricky though as they could easily disguise things like microphones as SMD resistors or something. They wont make it easy to find this stuff especially if you don't know it's even there.

 

[lxskllr]

I wanted to be outraged for a second, then wondered why smartphones that probably do more or less the same thing don't anger me. The stuff you say to Siri and Google voice is going somewhere too right?

Yup. I don't use any of that stuff. If I'm talking to my phone, there's someone at the other end listening. Hopefully, it's only the person I intend on talking to :^D

There, of course, from the beginning, the assumption was that robots would be humanoid. And as it turns out, they’re not. We do after all live commensally with robots now, we do, just as they expected. But the robots we live with don’t have hands and feet, they don’t carry trays of drinks, and they don’t push the vacuum cleaner. At the edge condition, they are the vacuum cleaner. But most of the time, we’re their hands and feet. We embody them. We carry them around with us. They see everything we see, they hear everything we hear, they’re constantly aware of our location, position, velocity, and intention. They mediate our searches, that is to say they know our plans, they consider our dreams, they understand our lives, they even take our questions — like “how do I send flowers to my girlfriend” — transmit them to a great big database in california, and return us answers offered by the helpful wizard behind the curtain.

Who of course is keeping track. These are our robots, and we have everything we ever expected to have from them, except the first law of robotics. You remember how that went right? Deep in the design of the positronic intelligence that made the robot were the laws that governed the ethical boundary between what could and could not be done with androids. The first law, the first law, the one that everything else had to be deduced from was that no robot may ever injure a human being. Robots must take orders from their human owners, except where those orders involve harming a human being. That was assumed to be the principal out of which at the root, down by the NAND gates of the artificial neurophysiology of robot brains, down there where the simplest idea is, you remember for Descartes, it was “cogito ergo sum”, for the robot it was “no robot must ever harm a human being”. We are living commensally with robots but we have no first law of robotics in them, they hurt human beings everyday. Everywhere.

Those injuries range from the trivial to the fatal, to the cosmic. Of course, they’re helping people to charge you more. That’s trivial, right? They’re letting other people know when you need everything from a hamburger to a sexual interaction to a house mortgage, and of course the people on the other end are the repeat players whose calculations about just how much you need, whatever it is, and just how much you’ll pay for it, are being built by the data mining of all the data about everybody that everybody is collecting through the robots.

But it isn’t just that you’re paying more. Some people in the world are being arrested, tortured, or killed because they’ve been informed on by their robots. Two days ago the New York Times printed a little story about the idea that we ought to call them trackers that happen to make phone calls rather than phones that happen to track us around. They were kind eough to mention the topic of today’s talk, though they didn’t mention the talk, and this morning the New York Times has an editorial lamenting the death of privacy and suggesting legislation. Here’s the cosmic harm our robots are doing us, they are destroying the human right to be alone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udDx7leQguo

I quote Moglen a lot, perhaps too much, but he's one of my favorite speakers, and always on point regarding abuse of technology.

 

[pcgeek11]

Easy. Don't use the voice recognition. Disconnect the TV from the internet.