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from the and-who-thought-that-this-was-a-good-idea? dept.
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: 5, Interesting) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday February 10 2015, @06:28AM
German news site Heise [heise.de] asked Samsung for clarification and reported that audio data is only sent to external servers after voice recognition was manually acttivated by the user, when actively performing a voice search. Other voice commands, e.g. to increase/decrease volume etc., are handled locally. The TV recognizes some voice tags like "O.K., TV" or "Smart-TV" with a local processor, which then activates the local voice recognition to handle specific commands. Obviously this means the microphone has to be active all the time, but the data is not stored and only scanned for the keywords afore mentioned.
This is the official story. After verifying I'm still holding a decent amount of shares in some tinfoil-related businesses, I'd like to point out nevertheless that the basic algorithm could obviously be used to listen for more sinister keywords like "liberal", "terror" or "evolution", and that a device as complex as a TV could easily hide some internal battery and storage to store conversations for later transmissions even after the plug was pulled and the TV was temporarily disconnected from the internet. (However, if I were to work for a 3-letter agency, I'd probably leave these features to smartphones. It's more reliable to associate the recording with a specific person, the smartphone is more likely to be allowed internet access by it's owner, and usually the smartphone has more built-in storage for when it's temporarily offline.)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:31PM
Apparently voice commands are sent to the TV trough the remote control (with a Push-To-Talk button).
This makes sense, because you want the microphone away from the loud-speakers for voice recognition. Apparently the simple commands you mentioned still work through an internal mircophone.
http://global.samsungtomorrow.com/samsung-smart-tvs-do-not-monitor-living-room-conversations/ [samsungtomorrow.com]