The BBC has said that Samsung has issued a warning to its customers over their smart TVs, saying that people shouldn't talk about personal information in front them. When using the voice activation feature of the smart TV, it will listen to everything you say and may share that with Samsung and third parties.
This only came to light when The DailyBeast posted a new story pointing out part of the privacy policy...
"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"
Corynne McSherry, an IP lawyer for EFF, told The DailyBeast that the "third party" was probably the company providing speech-to-text conversion for Samsung. They also said: "If I were the customer, I might like to know who that third party was, and I’d definitely like to know whether my words were being transmitted in a secure form."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @03:38AM
Currently, old cellphones are getting good prices because people who don't want the privacy downsides of the new stuff are willing to pay for older stuff.
I'm wondering how long it will take before simple big-screen monitors will get the same treatment because of this 1984 stuff.
In addition, a manufacturer can simply refuse to offer software updates for your "smart" TeeVee.
If you're still doing TeeVee, it seems to me that the smart way to do this stuff is to have your own box (running non-proprietary software, of course) and have that as a separate item from the display.
...then again, Scott McNeely of Sun Microsystems said in 1999 "You have no privacy. Get over it."
-- gewg_