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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: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday February 11 2015, @03:07AM
I think smart people just have to come to terms with that you are surrounded by sheep in large quantities. And that you have to protect yourself from their foolish decisions.
Let's hope someone writes a self propagating piece of software that will block microphones, camera and other uncontrolled input devices. But for the aware user it seems the solution is to physically destroy the aerial and don't connect the Ethernet jack. The next step is to flash the smart-TV with free and open source software that does work the right and secure way. Beware of Ethernet over HDMI too.
Warranty will be void if you open the TV to disconnect WLAN, microphone or camera. Any solution?