Sunday, February 8, 2015

Now your TV might just be listening in to your personal conversations

Samsung's Smart TV will hear what you say in front of it if you enable voice commands, and transmit those words to third parties.  Kudos to Samsung for disclosing this, but this really is right out of Orwell's 1984.  Who knows what a hacker could get the TV to do?

From the Samsung TV handbook:

  "You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands. If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. 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"

Keep your voice down, honey, the TV might be listening.

6 comments:

  1. Hell, the lovely missus bought me a new laptop for Christmas and I put tape over the camera before I even plugged it in. Now we have TVs listening to us. Reminds me of the old Outer Limits episode called "O.B.I.T." Like I didn't have enough to be paranoid about...............

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    Replies
    1. Word! It's not so much Samsung i'd worry about, but rather either the government, or hackers.

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    2. I wonder if Big Brother will pay me to listen? Sort of an honorarium?

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  2. I am also blogging about this stuff...

    I am more afraid of little brother

    TVs with face recognition software, voice control software and motion sensors

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  3. Welcome to the Hive Mind.
    You may resist, but eventually will be assimilated.

    Good bye, Former Individual.

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