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Samsung is ready to release a new model of TV that totally changes the way you treat gadgets and living room electronics. TV has never been this smart – the new motto of Samsung Smart TVs that brings out the best in smart television. In fact, the voice capture has reached a whole new level: the TV hears what spectators chat, record them and can even send the recording to a third party. But right now, the only details of the new project have been spread through the privacy small print offered by the company. The Internet-connected television is used as a sharing feature and if attention is not being paid, some details could get out of the living room when you least expect.
The policy reads as follows:
“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.”
As a consequence, giving commands to your television should remain just that, giving commands in order to plan your free time in front of it. Tax evasion, drug use and other incriminating subjects should be avoided at all costs.
Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation talks about the possible purpose of this new feature. Taking into consideration what is written in the privacy policy, Samsung wants to collect its voice commands in order to improve the performance of their Smart TVs.
“It looks like they are using a third-party service to convert speech to text, so that’s most of what is being disclosed here.”
However, Mr. McSherry specifies that as a customer, he would most definitely want to know what that third party is and how does his information arrive there, mainly if it is secure and if the transmission is encrypted or not. Of course, if not, it would be considered an abuse and a lot of other problems could rise from the idea of a smart TV.
Unfortunately, Samsung hasn’t made any comments about all these concerns. Nonetheless, this is not the first time the company has problems with privacy experts. Michael Price, counsel in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law has written in November 2014 an article in Salon, saying that all the details in his new Smart TV made him become afraid of using it. Even if he didn’t mention the brand, the words used in describing the product were identical to those that Samsung incorporated in his notice to its clients.
“I do not doubt that this data is important to providing customized content and convenience, but it is also incredibly personal, constitutionally protected information that should not be for sale to advertisers and should require a warrant for law enforcement to access.”
Image Source: Kinja
