Samsung SmartTV Customers Warned Personal Conversations May Be Recorded 309
An anonymous reader writes Samsung's privacy policy includes details that its Smart TV voice recognition feature may pick up on personal conversations and transmit private communications to third parties. Buried in the privacy policy related to the smart television, Samsung advises users to be aware that any snippets of conversation might be captured by the software which allows them to control their television sets with a series of commands. Questions have been raised about who these third parties could be, what the information is used for, and how the data is being transmitted – with potentially unencrypted voice clips left exposed to hackers.
But surely... (Score:5, Insightful)
...we can trust them not to abuse this. Right?
Re:But surely... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But surely... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if that's how it works as I expect, that's why I don't use it for anything that I'm not already sending over the Internet. As in, I'll use it for entering addresses in Google Maps because I'm already sending the address to Google anyway, but I'm not inclined to dictate text messages because the voice processor people have no business with that information.
Re:But surely... (Score:5, Insightful)
When I got my newest phone, I tried out the voice recognition feature. I set it up and gave it a custom activation phrase that I figured wouldn't come up in normal conversation. What I didn't count on, though, was my phone apparently mishearing half of what I said. Several times a day, I'd hear the beeping noise it made when it recognized me ordering it to do something - but I hadn't said my activation phrase at all. My kids had a good laugh at the weird things that it mistook for an activation phrase. They'll still shout "she has a record" at my phone even though I've long turned off the voice recognition.
Even if you don't get into the "recording everything around you and sending it to the parent company" issues, why not just use a button to begin voice commands? I can voice-search Google by pressing a microphone icon, I don't need my phone listening to me all the time just in case I utter something at the phone. Have smartphones made data-access so easy and have we gotten so lazy that "click this icon and get the weather" is too hard and we need to say "Phone, give me the weather"?!!!
Re: But surely... (Score:2)
For fun make funny noises and see what your phone does. At one point my phone would auto dual my father if I coughed right even though it was trained to his name.
Now siri will randomly call my sister if I don't set the phone down correctly.
Voice control still sucks.
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If it activated and started making phone calls when I farted, that would bring new meaning to the term "butt-dialing".
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why not just use a button to begin voice commands?
My assumption would be that they are trying to sell a product that is advertised as "hands free". It is a TV after all... if you have to push a button you might as well hit the other one or two to set your channel.
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In two words, Star Trek. Reality is we are very used to communicating verbally, we are built for it genetically. Our brain is of course far more complex than any CPU and we have huge problems understanding each other, not just foreign languages but accents as well. So yeah, just like in Star Trek the majority want to communicate verbally with their devices, just like "Sudo Make Me Sandwich", yep, everyone does want that, especially women ;).
Re:But surely... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know right?? Star Trek proves that even after 400 (?) years of voice command optimization, the best activation method is still to physically press the communicator emblem thingy. If Picard isn't too busy for a quick gesture to get beamed out of a warp core explosion, you can push a button when you want to know where the closest chicken nuggets are.
Re:But surely... (Score:5, Interesting)
The other day I discovered a new iOS feature I had no idea existed. While sending a text to a customer, I hit the microphone icon by mistake. Another person in the (parked, idling) car was muttering about how the customer was a moron, which, although true enough, wasn't something I intended to include as part of the text. Not hard to see where this story is going, right? Well, it's even dumber than you're thinking.
I hit the 'Done' button to make the voice input UI go away, finished the text message, and hit 'Send.' As far as I knew, there was no danger that my friend's comment would be added to the text message. The car was too noisy and her voice was too low.for the speech recognition engine to understand, and in any event, the "moron" comment didn't appear in the outgoing text message. No problem.
Except what did appear in the text message, visible only after I sent it, was a small attachment balloon with a waveform. Apparently, iOS now sends the captured audio file as a binary attachment if it can't extract any recognizable speech.
So the obvious question is, what kind of drugs are these people taking? Is no one at a Fortune 500 company capable of thinking anything through these days? Do the programmers who think these features are "cool": and "awesome" not have managers with a three-digit IQ?
Fortunately for me, my phone lost its signal right about then, and I was able to kill the text app while it was still displaying "Sending." I knew from experience that iOS's text app didn't attempt to provide guaranteed delivery, and sure enough, when I restarted it, it had forgotten all about the message it was trying to send. So in a sense, I was saved by the same dumbshit programmers at Apple who tried to ruin my day.
It seems we have to adopt the same attitude around microphones that we normally apply to firearms. The gun is always loaded, and the mike is always live.
Re:But surely... (Score:4, Informative)
You didn't press the voice-to-text microphone icon. You hit the "Capture a sound" microphone icon, which is a new feature in the iOS 8 Message apps (https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/messages/ scroll to "Add your voice to the conversation").
Now whether having two microphone icons with two different behaviors on a single screen is good UI design is whole other matter...
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If anything in the message text is capable of crashing the app, the debate about who the dumbshit(s) are has already been adequately settled.
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It happened. I don't blame you, I didn't believe it either.
Of course I knew the mic button existed, I use it all the time to dictate text messages. And I sometimes hit it accidentally, being a klutz. But in past versions of iOS, it's always been sufficient to hit 'Done' to make the mic UI go away. It has never decided on its own that, since it didn't recognize any valid speech, I must have wanted to record and attach an audio clip.
Sure, it's a nifty feature, as far as features go, but the failings are o
Re:But surely... (Score:4)
(Shrug) It wouldn't be unreasonable to ask my permission before transmitting an audio recording that I didn't even know was being made.
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However, it only consistently works properly in the *other* universe. And considering that that universe is entirely fictitious to the point of having different laws of physics, I think it's safe to say that, for now at least, voice control doesn't work well.
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I can't speak for Cortona, but I would assume it works the same way as Siri and Google, in that it doesn't start sending data until the local device first either hears a specific key phrase (e.g. "Ok Google" or "Hey Siri") or is purposefully activated by the user by the press of a button.
There's a big difference between speech that I want to have parsed getting sent off to be parsed, and speech that I never knew was being captured at all being sent off to be parsed. Apple, Google, and I would presume Micros
Re:But surely... (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems more plausible to interpret the statement to say that while you are issuing voice commands, either via a keyword that can be recognized locally or by pressing a button, THEN any statements that may be unrelated to the functions of the set may be inadvertently picked up and sent to Samsung's (or partners') servers.
Still, even with a favorable interpretation, it seems like an unnecessary, risky, costly "feature" that has only a marginal benefit to customers. Are we so lazy that even pressing a series of buttons takes too much effort? As an accessibility feature, fine, it makes some sense, but it should be turned off by default.
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(I actually work on stuff about this, thus anon.)
The idea is that the recognition of the "ok, google" or "siri" activator is simple enough that it runs on the device, without needing to send it to the cloud. Once the magic word wakes the device up, it starts sending audio up to the ASR remote service.
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I have a Sony TV in my living room with a built-in camera so it can detect inactivity and turn off if there is nobody in the room, tune the sound to seat position, etc. - I disabled it in the setup but also put a piece of black electrical tape over it to block it so it can't see anything even if it was to be hacked and co-opted.
Likewise, any TV that I buy that has a microphone for this kind of crap will get opened up and the wires disconnected from it to hardware disable it.
I won't have that kind of crap in
What about the second party? (Score:5, Insightful)
The particular beef in this instance seems to be the "third party" bit, since while Apple and Google do exactly the same thing they process the audio themselves, instead of farming it out to a third party.
You're assuming that most people realise the data is transmitted to any external party at all.
I suspect if you did a random survey of people who had bought Smart TVs, knowing that they had voice and/or image recognition included, you would find a significant fraction of those people assumed it was done by the TV itself and had no idea that anyone else was going to see or hear anything.
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And why would you "presume" that??
We already know that Apple and Google are doing it that way because it makes sense for them to do so (it's in Apple's best interests to not have the ability to hand over your data since that improves their hardware sales, and Google's best interests to secure your data against illicit use since using your data is where they make their money) and is trivial to verify. Just run Wireshark or something similar on your network and check to see whether your phone is phoning home constantly or not. Easy peazy to c
Re:But surely... (Score:5, Informative)
I would like them to explain why a recording function is needed in the first place.
Probably for the voice recognition. The way smartphones have been doing it (and the way I'd suspect this TV works as well) is that they record your spoken commands, then send them out over the internet for a more powerful machine to crunch. After a few milliseconds of processing time, the interpretation is sent back to the phone and it performs the commands.
The reality is that this is probably a tempest in a teapot and samsung isn't doing anything more nefarious than apple does with siri or google does with the "ok google" feature on android phones. That said, samsung deserves all the flak they get over this. They should have known better than to leave that kind of blanket statement in their license agreement as it clearly allows for abuse on the part of samsung or their 3rd parties.
Re:But surely... (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe it's considerably different from Siri or OK Google in that the TV is probably always listening (I'm assuming even when turned "off" so it can listen for the command to power up).
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Not so different. Siri can be left on with the new iPhones (if they are plugged into power). I'm pretty sure that Google does the same. On phones, you might not want to do that for power budgeting reasons. For a plugged in device, it makes sense although most of us would argue that it is twisted, abusive and unnecessary.
But for a commercial product clearly set up for the lowest common denominator - leaving it on is just too easy a way out.
Re:But surely... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not so different...
As I understand Siri, the phone only activates the voice command function (and thus sends what the phone hears to Apple HQ) when the home button is long pressed (unless "hey Siri" or the older "raise to talk" IIRC is activated). If you want voice commands on a Smart TV, it seems they are eavesdropping all the time. Together with what seems to me to be a bit of a luke-warm statement on privacy of this data from Samsung, this seems to be qualitatively different, IMO.
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Google now in Lollipop will be in always listening mode (by default, once you confirm the privacy statement) if there is a dedicated hardware voice component (like those found on the Moto X, Galaxy S5, and Nexus 6).
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my V3 doesn't do that, everything's done locally. I've never even had a data package on there. Hell, I've not even had calling credit on it for the last four years.
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Presumably also to help train the voice recognition software to the peculiarities of the owners' voice.
I don't think that their intentions are nefarious, but I do expect that logging everything you say near your TV to a remote server will be abused by someone, sooner or later.
I mean, shades of 1984 - your TV watches you as much as you watch it....
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Because the TV's processor is a very low end piece of crap and they send your voice to a server to process then they send back the command to the TV.
There are very few systems that can do good natural voice recognition on the hardware because it takes a LOT of processing power.
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I will confirm this:
My Samsung's CPU seems to be something well-below that of a low-end smartphone. It literally takes 5 minutes to fire up the Neftlix App. It's so bad, that I stream it from my Roku instead.
Now: it doesn't take a LOT of processing power to do onboard speech recognition. Just quite a bit more than is available on your typical "low power" processors that you find on phones and appliances. A low-end desktop will do just fine. (in fact, I can remember when Apple added speech recognition to
Re: But surely... (Score:2)
My concern isn't that conversation is being gathered continuously. That's necessary according to the system design.
I'm concerned that these snippets are being shared with sponsors, advertisers, or researchers for reasons other than improving recognition.
1... 2...5... 9... (Score:3)
6079 Smith W! Pay more attention.
Great, now my teevee is going to rat me out to my insurance company that I spend too much time sitting around and eating pizza.
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I wonder when the footage from these TVs will be considered plain view, so when someone smokes a bowl while watching "Driving over Miss Daisy", it would be considered sufficient evidence for arrest, a search warrant, and conviction.
Re:But surely... (Score:5, Insightful)
not sure. that's why if i had a smartTV i'd dangle my man-bits and hairy behind in front its camera every time i walked past it. "you wanna watch? here you go, mr nsa. claw your eyes out."
seriously, i want my TV to be as dumb as possible and fed content by an easily upgradeable computer.
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Then buy a dumb computer monitor. All we really need is a display with inputs, after all.
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i wouldn't trust it not to connect to a free wifi from a van parked outside. fortunately, this is purely hypothetical for me. i do not own a TV. i set one up for my mother (with raspberry pi) and felt happy with the setup. then i set one up just like that for my mother-in-law. if i were to own a tv, i'd set it up just the same (and then never turn it on). i'm simply too picky about what i let my offspring watch. eden tv http://eden.uktv.co.uk/ [uktv.co.uk] is probably the only tv channel i consider worth watching.
Re: But surely... (Score:2)
I hard wired my tv to the network to prevent that( and to get better bandwidth).
Bye Bye Samsung Smart TVs (Score:2, Insightful)
Looks like the end of Smart TVs right here.
Only an idiot would want this in their home.
Oh wait...
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Looks like the end of Smart TVs right here.
Only an idiot would want this in their home.
Oh wait...
Ho-lee shit! I am so glad I opted for a dumb TV. My TV was $200 less than the "smart" version. I bought a $99 ROKU and little did I know that I was way more than $101 ahead in the game. Short bus television FTW.
Re:Bye Bye Samsung Smart TVs (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that Smart TVs have a bad record of having their interfaces/applications updated. If your Smart TV's interface is aging, you need to buy a new SmartTV. If the interface on your Roku (connected to your "dumb TV") is aging, you can buy a new Roku for much less. If another company overtakes Roku and makes something much superior, you can ditch your Roku and buy one of those. Smart TVs are today's equivalent of those TVs that had VCRs and/or DVD players built in instead of hooking up a separate VCR and/or DVD player.
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This was actually the primary reason I opted for the ROKU and a short bus TV. I had read many horror stories of services no longer working in reviews of older "smart" TVs because the firmware was never updated. My ROKU updates all the time. Plus it's got an awesome remote or I can control it with my phone! And way more services than smart TVs. And lots of WAY COOL hidden channels too.
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Smart TVs have a bad record of having their interfaces/applications updated.
Actually, the main apps I use on my Samsung Smart TV have been updated reasonably well. (My Smart TV has the gesture control, but not the voice. I turned it off in the service menu. It's a pain to use and turns itself back on if you turn it off from the regular menu).
Having said that, I'm not happy with the "smart" features of the TV (compared to Roku). I've replaced the other (dumb) TV with a Roku TV, and the UI is just tons better than the Samsung, and surprisingly nicer than adding a Roku to an dumb T
In Soviet Russia TV watches you. Oh, wait... (Score:5, Funny)
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They required many spies listening in on telephone lines (even though not everyone had a telephone or could use the line exclusively)
That's why it was called a "party line." In Soviet Russia, party line spies on YOU - even after you've hung up.
Only an idiot would buy one of these (Score:3)
Which proves my point - only an idiot would buy one of these.
I have nothing to hide but am mortally offended that some asswipe wants to bug my home. It's my home, not yours.
Selling one of thee thigns is no different from going up to random hot women wearing a light summer dress and asking "Hey, can I take you picture with an infrared camera designed to see through thin clothing?"
It's legal to do, but it should also be legal to punch the slime bag trying to do it.
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Oh, I'd say it's one hell of a lot worse - this potentially listens in on everything I say in the privacy of my own home, while Facebook only "hears" what I tell it ("like"-button embedded surveillance aside - that's hardly unique to FB).
We really need to get some updated privacy laws in place for this sort of shit - somebody should burn for this.
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So that means that you don't own a laptop with a builtin webcam?
I've got one of these TVs and although the article is accurate the headline is not. When you issue a voice command you have say "Hi TV" or one of two other phrases. These are simple enough to be recognised by the TV itself. Normally you repeat this about 10 times in varying pitches and speeds because the recognition is crap. At this point a big microphone appears on the screen and what you try to say next it records and transmits over the inter
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If it's anything like the voice recognition on my smartphone, it will mishear the activation phrase (turning on when something completely different from the activation phrase was spoken), silently listen in on the conversation, and then "helpfully" suggest results based on what it heard.
(My smartphone's voice activation is now disabled.)
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I think the reason a lot of people have TVs with these features is that once you get to a certain size of TV, a very lar
I recently bought a new lcd tv (Score:4, Informative)
and I went out of my way to AVOID samsung. at costco, almost all the sets (in the store) were sammys. sucks! 2nd popular brand was vizio and I decided to give that one a try.
anything over 39" was ONLY avail in 'smart' tv format.
fortunately, I was not forced to accept an eula and I never enabled the smart mode. good, actually, since when you give it IP connectivity, it auto updates itself and the current version is bad (no one likes it).
I hope that by continuing to deny it access, it won't ever decide on its own to go snooping for open wireless APs. that would be really bad.
then again, at some point when the new firmware is worth getting, I'll have no choice but to enable IP ;( I don't think you can just carry the firmware over with usb; they don't give you firmware, they only update it 'live over the net'.
its sad that you can only buy smart tv's at a certain size or bigger. I expect the only a few really low end models will be non-smart, as time goes on. nothing I hate more than paying for stuff that I don't want and refuse to even enable.
my htpc does all the 'smarts' I want. my files have no drm and so I don't need or want anthing smarter than vlc on win7, for example.
samsung is bad news, though. pretty evil as a company. they have the rep of building things that last 'the warranty period + 1 day'. its almost literally true, too; they try to use parts that will last a very short time (eg, electrolytic caps). samsung has no ethics at all. its sad that they have so much market share in so many things these days.
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I'm also wondering the same for when i'll buy my next tv. I don't want some smart tv, but will i find something decent that is not smart? I would love high end dumb a as a brick tv's/screens, but us technical minded folks are probably a minority? I can't really imagine who uses the smart tv functionalities. All i've seen from it so far is tv's being able to play a lot of files, but still a lot of other files don't work for any number of reasons. They'll support a lot of services, probably not all the ones y
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Well, what is a TV? A screen with some speakers and a tuner, right? That's what you needed a long time ago. Your VCR and cable box "broadcast" the signal over channel 3 or 4 so the tuner could decode and display it.
No more.
If you don't want a TV, don't get one. Buy a computer monitor with HDMI inputs and a tiny shelftop stereo for the sound. That's all you need these days.
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Good news: Panasonic do a 65" 1080P LED panel with none of the spy stuff in it. It's just a panel with a few inputs like an RS232C, HDMI, VGA...
The bad news: it's over three thousand Dollars.
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Well, at least it's not over nine thousand dollars.
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Very have a Luxor 65" LED HDTV for less than US$1000 (equiv.), it's got Freeview and Smart voice features built in.
Same as I've said elsewhere, you start unbundling and these people have less incentive to sell you the hardware, hence the price goes up to try and put you off. If you're really determined to have the panel without the shit attached to it, they will make you pay through the nose for it, because that extra shit is VERY difficult to remove (it's fabricated onto the mainboard).
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You're half-right... You either press the voice button on the remote, or say "Hi TV"... It's always listening for the latter, but not sure whether that processing is done locally or remotely.
(I have a Samsung smart TV... Tried out the voice recognition, decided it was useless and stupid, and disabled it.)
This is hardly a surprise ... (Score:4, Interesting)
All of this crap which wants to be connected to the interwebs, and which wants to have voice control, and which wants to be a platform for ads ...
This stuff has been created to benefit the company who made them.
They want ad revenue, they want analytics, they want to share that with third parties.
None of this stuff is trustworthy.
The Interweb of Stuff is a marketing gimmick, which has been built to maximize corporate profits .. it isn't secure, it isn't private, and it's probably been hastily written and rushed out the door according to the weenies in marketing.
Sorry, but a 'smart' TV, with voice recognition, hooked directly to the intertubes? If that isn't a recipe for violating your privacy I have no idea what is.
Trusting the makers of consumer electronics to give a damn about your privacy, or your security ... well, that's just naive and stupid.
My DVD player, my TV, my XBox, my toilet, my fridge, my thermostat .... I have zero interest in having ANY of these devices connected to the internet. And this is precisely why.
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Yes, it means that you are paying good money to acquire devices that are not intended for your benefit.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Don't buy the fracking TV's (Score:3)
Don't buy the blasted TV's - or, if you do, don't connect them to the Internet (and put some metallic tape over the camera).
It makes me feel like an old codger to say it, but I really don't understand why this is even an issue, or why anyone on the planet would want these "features," except maybe for use in prisons.
That's how today's voice recognition WORKS. (Score:5, Insightful)
Competent natural-language voice recognition is still too hard for a handheld or embedded device. So, these devices digitize your voice (OMG recording!), ship it off to a server farm for interpretation, and receive the results. Because voice recognition is still a challenge, it's usually farmed out to one of a few firms (Nuance comes to mind) that do this as a third-party service. These firms can "retain" that information in the sense that it trains their voice-recognition algorithms, but they probably aren't building a huge dossier of your private conversations.
I'd certainly like to know if Samsung retains the voice information it collects. I'd even more urgently like to know if they sell it to other "third parties" besides whoever's doing the voice recognition. The initial panic I'm seeing around this looks ill-informed, but Samsung definitely has to get out in front of it. If they can't -- if they can't provide a simple, clear explanation of what they are and aren't doing -- it's going to cost them.
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The initial panic I'm seeing around this looks ill-informed
On the internet??! In America?!? Surely Sir, you must be joking.
Re:That's how today's voice recognition WORKS. (Score:5, Informative)
Competent natural-language voice recognition is still too hard for a handheld or embedded device.
I disagree.
First, doesn't the XBox One do it without internet access?
But in general, we had competent natural-language voice recognition in 2002 on single-core x86 CPUs. Today's embedded ARMs are just as capable as those. I personally worked on a project where the software could recognize phrases such as "Patient presents with acute myocardial infarction caused by necrosis of myocardial tissue..." with very good accuracy. I know this is harder to do without context, so that same program might not get "Okay Google, show me pictures of Tom Cruise in his new car." But it sure as heck should be able to get "Samsung Play movie" and "Samsung volume up" every time.
We even had "dumb" phones in the 1990s that could recognize "Call Kathy Smith" where it could recognize a name from your contact list. That's not so different from "Play Game of Thrones."
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True, the PlayStation 4 has voice activated commands too that work without an internet connection. For a fixed set of commands there is no need to send audio or audio signature to a remote server, current hardware is powerful enough to do that. In order to get good voice dictation is better (for now) to send the audio to a remote location with a lot of power and "knowledge" about voice and language patterns. But we aren't talking about dictation, those "smart" TVs recognize a predefined set of commands, not
Re:That's how today's voice recognition WORKS. (Score:4)
The issue here isn't simply that the audio is being sent off to be parsed. The bigger issue is that the audio is being sent off to be parsed without the user's awareness. In the case of Siri or Google, I have to press a button or use a keyphrase (e.g. "Ok Google" or "Hey Siri") before the device will start sending audio off to be parsed at remote servers. And having read through Apple's white paper over how they secure and use that data, a user can be reasonably confident that their audio isn't being used by third parties, whether via a business deal or via illicit capturing of the audio as it's en route. If Google has published a white paper over their technology, I haven't seen it yet, but I can at least be confident that they're taking steps to secure the data, given that data is their bread and butter, even if they might be looking for ways to monetize that data.
Samsung though? We can't safely make any assumptions regarding their efforts or success at protecting me from third parties of any sort.
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And that's why you cannot take such devices into a SCIF, or other secured location.
One's home, IMHO, should be a secured location.
Re:That's how today's voice recognition WORKS. (Score:4)
The initial panic I'm seeing around this looks ill-informed
Not really, I've seen a number of explanations (like yours) that state exactly why and how this is happening. What I'm also seeing is that, post Snowden, we can no longer trust that any of our personal data will not be collected and misused, period. I'd be surprised if Samsung even took the rudimentary step of encrypting this data, or if they did, probably used a fixed key burned into the firmware. Internet Of Things companies have been historically bad at security. If so, it would mean that data would be immediately available to anyone who wants to grab it. It would be trivial for the government to match up the data to known IP addresses pointed at by other metadata for a given date and time.
Five years ago, I'm not sure how much I would have worried about this. This used to be tinfoil-hat sort of stuff. Nowadays, it's almost guaranteed that this data will be collected by the NSA and stored indefinitely. I'll bet they're training their own systems to listen in on key "phrases of interest" from these sorts of smart TVs. If I was in the NSA trying to figure out ways to snoop, I sure as hell would be looking into how to exploit an always-on microphone in every house. Seriously, with all we've learned about what's happening, is the worst case scenario all that implausible?
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Samsung says. An always-on microphone that transmits your voice from the living room across the internet is a bad idea in today's world, I'm sorry to say. There's a reason the phone company is heavily regulated. As they say, "this is why we can't have nice things."
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Everybody is doing this (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is this so different from what Google Chrome, Google android, Apple Siri, Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Cortana are already doing for a while.
I hate it as much as anyone but most people are already recorded 24/7
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Siri and Cortana require button presses to activate. Google Voice (OK Google) sits there and monitors your microphone which to me is DODGY.
I just want a monitor (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/... [bhphotovideo.com]
Looks good.
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damn, forgot to drop the tilde in. Good catch, there. That's where they suck you in - you start unbundling "features", they have less incentive to part with that expensive hardware. This is the same reason why an unbundled phone costs £600, whereas you can get the same phone on contract for the cost of the contract. Only thing you have to give up for the next two years is your choice of carrier. Or why a laptop with Windows might cost £750 but the same laptop without Windows costs £175 mor
OK Google? (Score:2)
How much of what you're saying in the same room as your LAPTOP is being picked up by the Google voice process, encoded ot converted to text (why else would it be sucking up CPU cycles like Billy-O?) and transmitted to who-knows-where?
Chrome is getting the fuckoff biscuit from me and I'm looking into alternative browsers. Preferably one which is not compatible with Google Voice service. I don't need the "functionality" and I do not welcome the intrusion.
What do people think the Cloud is? (Score:2)
Android and iOS do the same thing. Natural Language Processing is difficult so its done in the cloud most of the time. I don't care if the recordings go to 2nd Party or 3rd Party having cloud based LNP on any device is a security risk. I would expect this disclaimer to come on every smart device that requires a net connection to function.
What can we do? (Score:2)
I been shopping around for a new TV for a while now since my 46" fried last summer (amazingly 1 month after the extended warranty expired /sigh).
At first I wanted a smart tv because I do watch a lot of netflix and youtube. I have a WD Live TV and Chromecast hooked up figured why not get it built in from the get go. Then during the course of my research I realized that a lot of these manufacturers actually spied and reported on what you watched. I would assume WD and Google do the same, however only when I u
Physically disable the microphone (Score:4, Interesting)
If it bugs you enough, like it did with me and my H7150 Smart 60", you can open casing and disconnect the microphone. Took about an hour due to all the screws and the button panel, but the silly microphone can just be unplugged from its source board once you get to it. Smart View Voice Control just complains "it can't hear" now.
Problem solved.
I do know what this info is collected for (Score:2)
I have a Samsung HDTV I only use as a Monitor as I've read the Privacy Policy long ago.
Why does it collect what it does? To warn you of upcoming programs you might like. Not only does it monitor what you say (if a microphone is attached) but watch you (if a web cam in attached) the video is for gestures. It also keeps a record of every key or button you press this is also included for the program you might miss other wise.
I've written of this many times, but people are meant to ignore common sense or lookin
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
how is it remotely avoidable when your tv has voice recognition? like systems like siri it'll send it off to a remote server for analysis and to see what it has to do :). It will pick up random conversations and try to see if it's a command. I'm not endorsing things like this, i would never want a smart tv, i'll attach a htpc or raspberry pi or whatever to it if i want such features. But i can understand that things like that are pretty unavoidable with voice commands, and don't sound that much like a spying nightmare, just a logical result of voice recognition...
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Its pretty easy if the voice recognition never leaves the television.
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if my 4 year old dual core netbook can do it, I'm pretty fucking sure a spanking new quad core phone or TV can.
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in fact, my flip phone from 2003 can process voice commands.
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Building a TV with no voice recognition in it; permitting the user to completely disable recognition; having a module which interprets voice commands offline; having the offline learning feature which allows you to link "Gimme a Bierbitch" voice command to change channel to whatever.
Just some random examples sprouting from my tired brain.
Siri is different. Siri doesn't always snoop on you. It is designed to take ANY voice command in and transform it into something it recognizes, so remote servers are needed
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I can't deduce from the article how it works with these tv's.
But even if it has that feature, it's bound to fail from time to time, and send personal conversations to its server. So even with that feature i would expect the EULA to mention this.
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Re: We are officially sliding down the slippery sl (Score:3, Informative)
A TL;DR: Samsung TVs use voice commands and like most other voice command services they outsource voice recognition to their server park. Unlike other services, however, they continously listen and send this data, they don't wait for a button press or keyword.
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A TL;DR: Samsung TVs use voice commands and like most other voice command services they outsource voice recognition to their server park. Unlike other services, however, they continously listen and send this data, they don't wait for a button press or keyword.
You mean "unlike other services, ... , they don't pretend to wait for a button press or keyword." (I especially love the latter, which basically says "they wait listening for a keyword before listening to you").
Re: (Score:2)
We will not sacrifice our freedom. We've made too many compromises already; too many defeats. They spy on us and we let it happen. They add spyware to our devices and we let it happen. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And *WE* will make them pay for what they've done!
Re:Smart (Score:4, Funny)
Have you seen "Smart Cars" ???
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Basically, I tend to agree. I think as a society we have gotten to the point where anything that's "new" or "smart" or whatever is just accepted as "good" and everyone buys into it wholesale, without actually taking a second to critically examine the essence of the functionality and think about whether or not it's actually a good thing.
Re:What's wrong with this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I'm not worried about the government finding something out. I'm worried about a criminal organization finding ways to hurt me and/or my family, be it directly or indirectly.
Sure, one might argue the line between criminal organizations and governments has become very blurry nowadays and to that I say... I say... damn, I got nothin'.
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fuck. right. off.
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I guess we are ALL toast then....
Imagine you buy a toaster... (Score:2)