Are Korean Smart TV’s Spying On Users?
Yes they are and they even admit to it:
Part of the Samsung Smarttv EULA: “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.”
This is part of their speech-recognition tech, which uses third parties (whose privacy policies Samsung doesn’t make any representations about) to turn your words into text. [Boing Boing]
I recommend everyone read more about this over at the Marmot’s Hole.
If you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
Of course it is spying on you… because EVERYTHING is spying on you.
It is the new business model.
The “Internet of Things” is going to make it worse. While there seems to be little reason to have a refrigerator that connects to the internet, it will be standard in less than a decade… and somebody will know more about your lifestyle than you do… eating times, snacking behavior, careless door opening habits, home temperature, ice and water use, ratio of frozen food use, types of food (based on frequency of door opening when cooking), shopping habits (based on the temperature rise profile after shopping), and a million other things I can’t even think of off the top of my head.
Information is valuable… and a continuing stream of it is more profitable than just selling you a product and calling it a day. How much information you can generate and sell is now a part of design considerations on tech products.
Other companies will buy information to help design and market their products… maybe not a completely bad thing (yet). Governments will spend your tax money to buy it… as analyzing it helps better understand the population… good in some ways… and control the population… perhaps very bad, depending on the intent of the government.
The thing that is most irritating is some of the things I have bought from China which plug into USB attempt to install malware… most recently, a cheap little device that is supposed to ONLY use USB for power… as it has no need to interact with a computer. On a stand-alone computer, I found it installed a key logger and sent occasional dumps off to an IP address in China. Since I really wanted to use it, I opened it and scratched the USB data lines on the PCB, leaving only the power lines… and it works just fine… with no ability to interact with the computer.
I wonder how many suckers who didn’t see this coming have innocently plugged some Made in China crap into their USB and been unaware they got infected and, presumably, anything they type into their computer now goes off to persons unknown for reasons unknown.
I presume this was a criminal act… or it could be state-sponsored. No idea.
Anyway, fukk Samsung and their spyware.
Your speaking goes out to a third party which translates it into computer-understandable data. If it is a command like “volume up” it sends a command back to raise your volume… which is crappy, as products that rely on the cloud for their processing are simply bricks when the cloud is not available for whatever reason.
But… if you say you are leaving now to trade a couple of stolen guns for meth, the NSA, which undoubtedly has a financial stake in something so informationally juicy, passes this on to law enforcement and they use “parallel construction” claiming that you made an illegal lane change and then acted abnormally nervous which gave probably cause to search your car… surprise, we just happen to find meth or guns.
The real problem is that if you discuss your business plans, your investment strategy, your desire to rightfully protest, your intent to blow the whistle on unlawful activity, etc., those keywords (and sentence structures, in case you think you are clever by talking in “code”) are automatically flagged by computer.
This is not paranoia… as there are already examples of this which have been exposed.
As NSA workers have already been busted checking out the nude pictures they have scraped, and some of them have strangely made some lucky stock picks, it is not unreasonable to assume this ability will be abused… just as this kind of ability has ALWAYS been abused.
This is not advanced technology… except in the sense that it is being done on a massive scale. A home computer can now do all of this through its microphone… and perhaps through several microphones at the same time.
If I ever wind up with one of these, the first thing I will do is take it apart and physically disable things that I don’t like. I don’t have to talk to my TV. I can use that old-timey remote and push an actual button. Fukk… I can probably get my azz off the sofa and turn the channel if I have to.
…though I own neither a TV nor a sofa… and have no intention to… so I don’t see this as an issue for me.
Protection of privacy is at least as important as fretting over politics… and easier… as there should be NO disagreement within the population regardless of race, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, or political leaning.
Lack of privacy helps those in power and those with bad intentions. It does NOT help YOU.
Consider that. Always.
“If you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”
Say that while videoing a cop. Bonus points if you say it with a sneer.
Tell us about how you get arrested for obstruction or some other bullshyt which then makes it hard to get a job.
NSA has been suspected of using cable boxes and Smart TVs in the US for years (to record anything said in your living room), so the suspicion is only reinforced by Samsung’s open admission in Korea.
http://www.naturalnews.com/046009_Amazon_Fire_TV_audio_surveillance_perfect_spying_device.html