Samsung reveals potential for smart TVs to eavesdrop

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Samsung reveals potential for smart TVs to eavesdrop
By Associated Press February 10 at 1:30 AM

SEOUL, South Korea — Watch what you say in your living room. Samsung’s smart TV could be listening. And sharing.

Voice recognition technology in the South Korean company’s Internet connected TVs can capture and transmit nearby conversations.

The potential for TVs to eavesdrop is revealed in Samsung’s smart TV privacy policy available on its website.

“Please be aware that if your spoken works 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,” the policy said.

For the voice command feature to work, third party software translates speech into text and sends the command back to the TV.


Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/samsung-reveals-potential-for-smart-tvs-to-eavesdrop/2015/02/09/9fc5a670-b0d8-11e4-bf39-5560f3918d4b_story.html

[msongs]

1. if one badmouths the TV will it cry lol nt

[MosheFeingold]

14. 1984

1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.

Crap like this will garner great sympathy for the Ron Paul wingnut brigades that think the shadowy government is taking over.

[bananas]

2. It's not a "potential", it IS eavesdropping. nt

[AtheistCrusader]

3. There are ways to get around this.

For instance, the 'Hey Cortana' feature on the latest Windows Phones, has a chip in it that 'listens' for that phrase all the time. It's just pattern recognition. When it picks up the key phrase, even from across the room, THEN it starts recording, and transmitting data back to the mothership for speech to text analysis.

Samsung shouldn't be doing it that way (just recording all the time and sending it in).

Siri has, or will have a similar feature soon, again, keyed off a phrase the phone can recognize without transporting data anywhere.

[Takashi Zara]

4. in Soviet America, TV watches you!! What a country!

[JohnnyRingo]

8. Hahahahaha

Someday I fully expect to turn on a new reality show and recognize myself sprawled on the couch in my underwear brushing the Cheeto crumbs off my chest.

[bananas]

16. DUzy! nt

[C Moon]

5. Why would anyone purchase one of these?

[LittleGirl]

6. we just got one of these tvs

so I am going to look into the settings today. We have not activated the voice recognition software.

[JohnnyRingo]

7. We lay down willingly in our digital bed.

For all our concerns over privacy, consumers demand the convenience of our 21st century electronic gadgets.

We carp about cell phones that transmit a signal through the air to a cell tower, but desire our business not to be broadcast to unknown parties. We love our smart cars and lavish in the OnStar services when we need a decent restaurant, but we don't want strangers to know where we've been. Now we want to speak to our TVs so we won't have to search out tiny buttons on a remote, but we don't want the company to worry about what we call our partner in heated times of passion.

The solution is easy, but don't expect a double digit percentage of consumers to forgo the convenience by disabling such services. As hopeless nomophobes we'll put up with anything to retain the devices that convert our world into an electronic playground at our fingertips, thumbs skimming through recent text messages, even as we mutter the annoyances of our dissatisfaction.

I know this because the mistress who lives inside my Garmin dared me to go back to using road maps. She laughed at my pathetic weakness.

[sybylla]

13. Lol. Sounds like a corrollary to the Franklin maxim.

If it is true "He who trades liberty for security deserves neither" then it folliws that "He who trades security for expedience is proper fucked."

As for the mistress who lives in your Garmin, I have the same love-hate affair with Siri. Usually it's over her inability to give me proper directions on occasion.

[billhicks76]

9. This Is Not Funny

They claim they record all your conversations just for marketing. These include your sex life, business secrets, political secrets, arguments anything and everything you could think of...it's recorded and filed away forever. Algorithms can scan for trigger words or patterns. The Facebook app does the same thing as do some Google applications. This is awful.

[damyank913]

10. And my friends laugh at me...

...because I keep a post it note over my laptop's cam. I've turned on my computer and found the cam had energized itself. It's only happened twice in 6 months but it's enough for me. The ghost in the machine needs info?

[corkhead]

11. I opened mine up and didn't see a microphone

They, or mine at least, have amazingly small and clean circuitry. Perhaps there are other models that have microphones but I didn't see one in mine.

[madokie]

12. No way would I connect our smart tv to the internet

in order to get what we wanted it pretty much had to be a smart tv but I didn't and I won't be setting it up to use the smart part.
I doubt anyone would be interested in anything that goes on in my front room but no matter its not going to be happening

[Xithras]

15. FWIW, iPhones and Android devices do the same thing if voice recog is active.

Voice recognition requires a ton of computing power, and smartphones aren't powerful enough to reliably do it all locally.

When you talk into Siri, as an example, your voice is encoded and is sent to a remote server AND evaluated by the local recognizer. If the command is new, the local recognizer tries to determine what you're saying, while the remote server runs a more powerful set of algorithms against the same speech to determine the same thing. Both systems then create a "fingerprint" for the command. If they match, the local fingerprint is stored and is used in the future when that command is repeated again. If they don't match, Siri adjusts its fingerprint slightly and tries again the next time you repeat it (the goal being to store as many fingerprints as possible locally to reduce traffic to the server). The thing is, even recognized voice prints get transmitted to the remote server for performance reasons (to speed up voice recognition, the speech is transmitted at the same time the local recognition algorithms are running). In other words, every word you say to Siri is broadcast over the network.

Originally, this wasn't a huge problem for smartphones. Both Google Now and Siri required that you hit a button or tap the screen to activate voice recognition, so they only heard what you wanted them to hear. Lately, however, the push has been to keep the voice systems on all the time. The new Google Now with the OK Google feature keeps the voice recognition turned on all the time, which means its always listening to what you're saying. iOS 8 introduced "Hey Siri" support, which did the exact same thing on the iPhone. Amazon Echo is always listening too. The XBox One has it. The LG and Samsung Smart TV's have it. Windows 10 will have it. Apple recently filed a patent to bring Siri to OSX, so we'll be seeing it there. Basically, all of the manufacturers have decided that pushing a button to activate voice recognition is "too much work", so they're moving toward this always-on model. Of course, "always on" actually means "always listening" (with the possible exceptions of Windows 10, XBox One and OSX, which should have enough computing power at their disposal to do everything locally).

It really comes down to this...how much do you trust the company that built your device?

[UpInArms]

17. It's a brave new world .... n/t