f*ck you, Samsung. I buy your product and it comes with a warning that it's listening to everything I say and transmitting it to some unknown company?
I'm not buying one of these f*ckin' things, or any "smart TV" for that matter.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31296188 (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31296188)
Samsung is warning customers (https://www.samsung.com/uk/info/privacy-SmartTV.html?CID=AFL-hq-mul-0813-11000170) to avoid discussing personal information in front of their smart television set.
The warning applies to TV viewers who control their Samsung Smart TV using its voice activation feature.
Such TV sets "listen" to every conversation held in front of them and may share any details they hear with Samsung or third parties, it said.
Privacy campaigners said the technology smacked of the telescreens, in George Orwell's 1984, which spied on citizens.
In response to the widespread sharing of its policy statement, Samsung has issued a statement to clarify how voice activation works.
It said the privacy policy was an attempt to be transparent with owners in order to help them make informed choices about whether to use some features on its Smart TV sets, adding that it took consumer privacy "very seriously".
Samsung said: "If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search. At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV."
It added that it did not retain voice data or sell the audio being captured. Smart-TV owners would always know if voice activation was turned on because a microphone icon would be visible on the screen, it said.
The third-party handling the translation from speech to text has not been named.
No surprise, scum all of them.
Now they're trying to backpedal and claim that's not what they meant, but it is.
Also, Samsung just got caught inserting ads into movies and other video on their new smart TVs...and they act like that was an accident too.
Yeah, they just accidentally wrote adserver software and accidentally loaded it into the firmware on their TV sets and whaddya know they also accidentally had a dedicated internet site with ads that the firmware could retrieve and display.
I mean, shit like that happens to me all the time when I write software. Why, one time I meant to write a program that made the screen blink and instead I accidentally coded a hospital billing application.
http://mashable.com/2015/02/11/samsung-tvs-insert-ads-into-movies/
http://www.cnet.com/au/news/samsung-smart-tvs-forcing-ads-into-video-streaming-apps/
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2015/02/11/samsung-blames-australian-smarttv-pop-ad-fiasco-error
So yeah, see, it's just an "error".
The fact is they've been planning this and looking at rolling it out in European and possibly North American markets, and they f*cked up by accidentally enabling it before they had a chance to tell us about this great new feature.
By the way, Samsung's televisions are far from the only seeing-and-listening devices coming into our lives.
If we're going to freak out about a Samsung TV that listens in on our living rooms, we should also be panicking about a number of other emergent gadgets that capture voice and visual data in many of the same ways. ....
Samsung's competitor, the LG Smart TV, has basically the same phrase about voice capture in its privacy policy:
"Please be aware that if your spoken word includes personal or other sensitive information, such information will be among the Voice Information captured through your use of voice recognition features."
And it isn't just TVs, as Microsoft's xBox Kinect, Amazon Echo, GM's Onstar, Chevrolet's MyLink and PDRs, Google's Waze, and Hello's Sense all have snooping capabilities.
Welcome to the world of Stasi Tech!
Even walls have ears.