“The potential privacy intrusion of voice-activated services is massive,” Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch. “Samsung, which makes a series of Internet connected TVs, has a supplementary privacy policy covering its Smart TVs which includes the following section on voice recognition (emphasis mine):”
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.
Lomas reports, “As an Electronic Frontier Foundation activist pointed out earlier today, via Twitter, the concept of a TV screen that might be snooping on your private conversations — and thus broadcasting a chilling effect by inculcating self-censorship within its viewers — is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984:”
Left: Samsung SmartTV privacy policy, warning users not to discuss personal info in front of their TV
Right: 1984 pic.twitter.com/osywjYKV3W— Parker Higgins (@xor) February 8, 2015
Read more in the full article here.
“The possibilities curdle in the mind,” Chris Matyszczyk reports for CNET. “So much so that I have contacted Samsung to ask how broad this policy might be and what third parties might be informed of your personal conversations. A Samsung spokeswoman told me: ‘Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously. In all of our Smart TVs we employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers’ personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use.'”
“At the heart of all this is, of course, trust. The best and only defense against intrusion from the likes of Google to Samsung is this: ‘We don’t really care about your private life. We just want your data, so that we can make money from it,'” Matyszczyk writes. “It’s inevitable that the more data that we put out, the more will be recorded and the more will be known about us by machines which are in the charge of people. We have all agreed to this. We click on “I agree” with no thought of consequences, only of our convenience.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yikes!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Aldez” and “Mike Walker” for the heads up.]