{"id":53747,"date":"2015-02-16T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T12:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=53747"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:05","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:05","slug":"your-samsung-smarttv-is-spying-on-you-basically","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/02\/your-samsung-smarttv-is-spying-on-you-basically\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may be loving your new Internet-connected television and its convenient voice-command feature\u2014but did you know it\u2019s recording everything you say and sending it to a third party?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"samsung<\/a><\/p>\n

Careful what you say around your TV. It may be listening. And blabbing.<\/p>\n

5 Feb 2015 – <\/em>A single sentence buried in a dense \u201cprivacy policy<\/a>\u201d for Samsung\u2019s Internet-connected SmartTV advises users that its nifty voice command feature might capture more than just your request to play the latest episode of Downton Abbey<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlease 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,\u201d the policy reads.<\/p>\n

So be advised: If you\u2019re too lazy to pick up the remote, you may want to keep your conversation with the TV as direct and non-incriminating as possible. Don\u2019t talk about tax evasion, drug use. And definitely don\u2019t try out your Violet Crawley<\/a> impression.<\/p>\n

Judging by the privacy policy, it seems Samsung is collecting voice commands mostly to improve the TV\u2019s performance. \u201cIt looks like they are using a third-party service to convert speech to text, so that\u2019s most of what is being disclosed here,\u201d said Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.<\/p>\n

So this may just be an effort to make your SmartTV smarter.<\/p>\n

But, said McSherry, \u201cIf I were the customer, I might like to know who that third party was, and I\u2019d definitely like to know whether my words were being transmitted in a secure form.\u201d If the transmission is not encrypted, a SmartHacker could conceivably turn your TV into an eavesdropping device.<\/p>\n

Samsung didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. And the privacy policy doesn\u2019t identify the third party that\u2019s listening to you scream, \u201cI said Abbey<\/em>, goddamit! Not Annie! Your as deaf as my mother-in-law!\u201d<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time Samsung\u2019s too-clever-by-half TV has set off alarms among privacy experts. Writing in Salon<\/a> in November 2014, Michael Price, counsel in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, said the details in his new smart TV\u2019s lengthy privacy policy made him \u201cafraid to use it.\u201d Price didn\u2019t name the brand, but the wording matches exactly what\u2019s contained in Samsung\u2019s notice to its customers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d Price wrote.<\/p>\n

Samsung\u2019s privacy policy notes that in addition to voice commands being transmitted, information about your device, \u201cincluding device identifiers,\u201d may also be beamed over the Internet to the third-party service, \u201cor to the extent necessary to provide Voice Recognition features to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

McSherry called that bit of qualifying language \u201cworrisome.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSamsung may just be giving itself some wiggle room as the service evolves, but that language could be interpreted pretty broadly,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

UPDATE 6 Feb 2015:\u00a0<\/strong>“Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously. In all of our Smart TVs we employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers\u2019 personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use,” the company said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “Voice recognition, which allows the user to control the TV using voice commands, is a Samsung Smart TV feature, which can be activated or deactivated by the user. The TV owner can also disconnect the TV from the Wi-Fi network.”<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thedailybeast.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may be loving your new Internet-connected television and its convenient voice-command feature\u2014but did you know it\u2019s recording everything you say and sending it to a third party?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}