NEW SMART TVS OFFER A WINDOW INTO YOUR LIFE

Smart TVs may be get­ting too smart as some now actu­al­ly col­lect and trans­mit your spo­ken words, per­son­al infor­ma­tion, and sen­si­tive data to oth­er 3rd par­ty sources.

In fact Sam­sung, a major elec­tron­ic man­u­fac­ture, admits that they “col­lect, use, share, and store infor­ma­tion through your SmartTV in the ways described in the Sam­sung Pri­va­cy Pol­i­cy.” Mean­ing that essen­tial­ly, pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions and/or Big Broth­er is now able to always watch and lis­ten to you and your fam­i­ly in your home, office, or else­where, wher­ev­er a smartTV is present.

THE DAYS OF PERSONAL PRIVACY ARE OVER

Not only do SmartTVs col­lect and trans­mit “infor­ma­tion about con­tent that you have watched, pur­chased, down­loaded, or streamed” they also use advanced “voice recog­ni­tion” tech­nol­o­gy to bet­ter inter­act with you. How­ev­er this tech­nol­o­gy comes at a price which you now may be pay­ing with your freedom.

“If you enable Voice Recog­ni­tion, you can inter­act with your Smart TVus­ing your voice. To pro­vide you the Voice Recog­ni­tion fea­ture, somevoice 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 Recog­ni­tion­fea­tures 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.”, reads Samsung’s “Glob­al Pri­va­cy Policy”.

It’s also impor­tant to fur­ther note that Sam­sung SmartTVs come embed­ded with a video cam­era that cap­ture your phys­i­cal “ges­tures” and also uti­lize advanced “facial recog­ni­tion” sys­tems which allow “you to authen­ti­cate your Sam­sung Account or to log into cer­tain ser­vices”. More­over “once you com­plete the steps required to set up facial recog­ni­tion, an image of your face is stored local­ly on your TV”, Sam­sung says.

Addi­tion­al­ly Samsung’s Glob­al Pri­va­cy Pol­i­cy states, “Please note that when you watch a video or access appli­ca­tions or con­tent pro­vid­ed by a third-par­ty, that provider may col­lect or receive infor­ma­tion about your SmartTV (e.g., its IP address and device iden­ti­fiers), the request­ed trans­ac­tion (e.g., your request to buy or rent the video), and your use of the appli­ca­tion or ser­vice. Sam­sung is not respon­si­ble for these providers’ pri­va­cy or secu­ri­ty prac­tices. You should exer­cise cau­tion and review thep­ri­va­cy state­ments applic­a­ble to the third-par­ty web­sites and ser­vices you use.”

Are you kid­ding me! For all we know this may give the NSA and CIA direct access into your life as they could be con­sid­ered 3rd par­ties as the pri­va­cy pol­i­cy states. So you may want to think twice about get­ting that new Smart TV as it will open up a vir­tu­al win­dow into your home or office. Unless you sim­ply don’t care.