If you’re too lazy to pick up the remote, you may want to keep your conversation with the TV as direct as possible. Don’t talk about drug use or tax you haven’t paid. If we Judge the privacy policy, it seems Samsung is collecting voice commands to improve the smart TV’s performance. It looks like they are using a third-party to convert speech to text, so that’s most of what is being disclosed here.
Samsung takes consumer privacy seriously. In all of our TVs we employ standard security safeguards and practices, including securing consumers, data encryption, personal information and preventing unauthorized collection or use, we don’t sell the voice data to third parties.” the company said in a statement to a local news agency. “Voice recognition, which allows controlling the TV using voice commands, is one of the Samsung Smart TV features, which can be activated or deactivated by the owner. The TV owner can also disconnect the TV from the Wi-Fi.”
You don’t need to be paranoid to see the imperfections in the system. Samsung is recognizing that its voice recognition feature may transmit information that it shouldn’t be transmitting. Samsung doesn’t hold that information straightforwardly, yet it’s still sent to the third parties who they use to perform searches and transmit content back to the client. The feature has gone from an optional opt in, to something that clearly must be disabled by the user.
What limitations are set upon third party information collection? Samsung doesn’t say. What security practices are those sellers needed to follow? Samsung doesn’t say. Which organizations really handle the information collection? Samsung doesn’t say.
All of the research on the internet on “smart” gadgets focuses in the same direction — generally speaking it is extremely insecure. Nor there is much expectation of changing this, given that the companies that need to offer smart gadgets are ordinarily appliance merchants not committed security organizations. Until companies exhibit much more eagerness to security test and patch their supplies, the crucial risks are going to keep on existing. It’s important to pay attention on the features buyers don’t need as the functions they do.
It’s still conceivable that Samsung can’t see the forest through the trees. People may be more prone to become tied up with idea like Smart TVs if these gadgets kept information locally and took care of the transforming on the TV SoC, or if the terms and services made solid guarantees about exactly which data was captured, imparted, and transmitted to third part services.
