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posted by janrinok on Tuesday February 10 2015, @02:41AM   Printer-friendly
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."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday February 10 2015, @08:36PM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 10 2015, @08:36PM (#143291) Journal

    I understand what you are saying, and I cannot honestly say that you are wrong, but to whose internet will these devices connect? Not to mine. They will not have the password for the WiFi, and I'm damned if I'm going to be wiring them up. Who would pay for the data being sent? Again, not me! And if they just connect to the first available WiFi then they could well connect to a completely different household than the one in which they are located.

    The manufacturers may be having hot flushes about how much data they think that they will be getting - but it won't be getting it from me!

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  • (Score: 2) by MrNemesis on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:26PM

    by MrNemesis (1582) on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:26PM (#143315)

    Similarly I understand what you're saying. These things won't be connecting to my internet or your internet because we're aware and we're educated in the ways of blocking this kind of thing. I'm thinking of the sort of people that accept whatever router and whatever setting their ISP graces them with, the sort of router where the ISP might say to GadgetCorp "sure, pay us $5 per router and we'll make sure all of your Gadgets can connect through our routers without any user intervention".

    Even amongst my geeky friends, many of whom are capable of building their own routers (with blackjack and hookers) from toilet rolls and sticky-backed plastic, only about 30% of them actually don't use the ISP-supplied router. True, we have less shenanigans about that in the UK (here it's generally "free" as opposed to explicitly rented as I understand they are in the US) but the way to making mass-market sensorship commonplace is through people like that. And when these 95% of people "have accepted" incessant surveillance people like you and I will be looked at as even weirder and more eye-rollingly paranoid than we are already. "What do you mean my Z-Eye isn't allowed to connect to your internet?! What's wrong with it?"

    It'll all be a moot point eventually of course, because each of those "internet of things" devices will eventually come with its own GSM chip and aerial once power and bandwidth are no longer a constraint.

    --
    "To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."