Turning Off Voice Recognition May Be Smart Move..
They may be just over 30 years late, but have the ‘telescreens’ that spied on Winston Smith in George Orwell’s classic 1984 started arriving in our living rooms?
Eagle-eyed Internet watchers have combed through a new privacy policy for Smart TVs published by Samsung and been understandably alarmed by what they found. As a result, a furore has been unleashed.
The Concerns surround voice recognition capabilities built into some models and the implicit revelation that these TVs built to record and pass on anything they hear.
The new policy includes the staggering statement: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data capture and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”
Given what happens with Google searches these days, when a casual enquiry about a product can lead to weeks of bombardment with web ads for it, we can picture what this proclamation might mean.
We might imagine one family member turning and saying to another: “Did you see that Eddie Redmayne won a BAFTA for Best Actor.”
With a Samsung TV listening, that could easily result in an onslaught of suggestions from Netflix to watch The Other Boleyn Girl, Les Miserables and the other hit films that Eddie has graced.
Something tells me the voice recognition is going to be firmly switched off on a lot of Samsung Smart Tellies.
However, even that may not stop the insidious intrusion.
One might presume that the ability to note what programmes are watched and/or recorded and report them back to advert placement central has also been built in.
