I've been waiting for an opportunity to post my first Diary. I have worked in Internet related concerns for the last 20+ years, and I have seen privacy threats come and go.
News I heard last night from Samsung has some rather alarming implications regarding privacy, with the addition of voice recognition being built into their latest "smart" TV's. The new set of features is alarming, but that they think they can get away with it is almost as shocking.
I saw it on http://techcrunch.com/... after my wife saw it and told me...
But instead of my using my political leanings to distort the story, I thought I would tell the story in Samsung's own words:
You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands. If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, 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.
So Samsung is telling you not to have personal conversations in front of your TV at home, as those conversations will be turned into test, and stored by a third party service that sells access to that information.
What?
So some of the context of this in my discussions with my wife was around using this for targeted ads. In my day job, targeted ad insertion is a reality, a customer of my company is deploying targeted ad insertion where what they learn about their customers on the internet is used to tailor TV commercials for the viewer.
Samsung says they aren't selling this data, but Google doesn't sell the data either, but they sell access to push ads to the users that generate that data set, and because you pay for the ads you indirectly get intelligence on the data even if you don't see it. But google is targeting your searches, email and blog texts... Not private conversations you have in front of your computer.
To be fair, Samsung has tried to state they won't do anything bad with this data. And we should believe them, right?
This is enough to launch me into a 20 page essay, covering a range of topics. But I will make my first diary be about your reactions to this. If I try to post everything in my head on this, I may never finish.