Be careful what you say and do in front of your TV – it just might be watching and listening to you – and blabbing to others about you. In a scenario that sounds a bit big-brother-ish, it’s been learned recently that certain Smart TVs from Samsung, equipped with cameras, microphones and voice recognition, can capture your words and gestures and send them to third parties.
According to Samsung’s SmartTV Privacy Policy, “If you enable voice recognition … 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”.
The feature has apparently caused a bit of a furor, with the result that Samsung has issued a statement on its official company blog, saying that “Samsung Smart TVs Do Not Monitor Living Room Conversations”, and elaborating that “the voice recognition functions are enabled only when users agree to the separate Samsung Privacy Policy and Terms of Use regarding this function when initially setting up the TV. Apart from initial setup, users are given the choice to activate or deactivate the voice recognition feature at any time”. The clarification also adds, “Samsung will collect your interactive voice commands only when you make a specific search request to the Smart TV by clicking the activation button either on the remote control or on your screen and speaking into the microphone on the remote control”.
The Samsung clarification, however, has not quelled public concern, with privacy advocates moving to take the company to task, including US Senator Al Franken, who expressed his concerns in a letter to Samsung management last week. In it, he makes the point that “it remains unclear … how these third parties treat voice and data and whether they cooperate with Samsung to ensure the protection of this highly sensitive information”. Franken, who is a ranking member of the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, goes on to request more details about what third parties are getting the voice data, how it’s being used and protected, and so forth.
As for the camera, the Policy states that, “… to set up facial recognition, an image of your face is stored locally on your TV; it is not transmitted to Samsung. … Samsung may take note of the fact that you have set up the feature and collect information about when and how the feature is used so that we can evaluate the performance of this feature and improve it”.
Of course, users can turn these features off, or avoid them altogether when making purchasing decisions, but that means certain conveniences won’t be available. Samsung is not alone here: Apple’s Siri, GPS systems and many other devices now routinely respond to voice and other commands and relay that information to a process that is largely beyond the notice of most consumers. Users setting up a new software product are routinely confronted with an onerous End User License Agreement (EULA), and the same increasingly applies with hardware; the Samsung Smart TV, for instance, confronts the user with a 46-page Privacy Policy and Terms of Use statement explaining the TV’s features. Big Data is continually eroding our personal privacy and more people are waking up to that reality. Technology comes at a price; let’s make sure that the cost does not include damaging the rights of the individual. – Aldo Cugnini
