Voice Recognition
You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands.
If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice 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 Recognition features 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.
If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands. While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it.
You may disable Voice Recognition data collection at any time by visiting the “settings” menu. However, this may prevent you from using all of the Voice Recognition features."
This is what I don't get. I used to play with Microsoft's SpeechAPI back in 2007 and it was pretty decent at real-time speech recognition - almost perfect, if you limited your program to a pre-defined command grammar. It was all done completely off-line, real-time on a machine that had much less processing power than your average smartphone of today. I don't see anything inherent in speech recognition that would require so much processing power that the phone can't handle it real-time. The only reason I see is that continuous moving of everything to cloud because it's easier to capture revenue stream that way.
Unfortunately, even YCombinator, just like a vast majority of tech companies, are guilty of supporting this notion. There is no respect or regard for privacy and ownership of your person. if it escapes your flesh and bones, it is deemed fair game to harvest by anyone. You and your actions and your speech and your image and your location are a commodity to be optimized for profit. Say moo, mothertrucker.
EDIT: I'm also one of those guys who's like "no I'm not signing up to X service because they don't need more data about me" but I get the double-edged sword and how more of the right data makes certain decisions easier.
I don't think it's trivial, but I hope to see some regulations coming in the way the data are collected and stored.
Of course command grammars are recognized on the device, otherwise you wouldn't be able to turn your TV on using a command or use basic functions in a speedy manner.
And, of course they send audio data to a server -- because your TV does not have a complete language model for up to date web search or even tv guide installed a priori. i.e. good reasons that have nothing to do with "capturing revenue stream".
Sigh...
'TV Install Samsung Super Social Awesome App, Yes, Yes Yes'
The issue is not about the intent of the manufacturer. Noble intent or not, the story is about what is enabled by this device. Any time you rely on noble intent of a 3rd party you are putting a lot of trust in them. Especially when those third parties can monetize your data without you ever knowing about it.
Technology provides the tools for mass surveilance and globally undermining trust, but it also provides tools for removing the need for trust, and apparently this smart TV adopts a "just trust us" approach.
Among other things, running the radios all the time to send audio to the cloud would be a battery-killer.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17616994/offline-speech-r...
Sadly, it appears that Google voice recognition follows yuor network connection, so you can't keep it in offline-recognition mode unless you turn off networking when talking.
More likely: There is a button on the remote to make users believe they have the ability to disable voice data relay to someone's remote servers.
What are the chances such TVs will have network controlled power-up capability? You only think you turned it off.
It's funny that people seem to be accepting always-on GSM network connectivity of the electronics in control of their cars, but oh my god, not the TV!
The TV can't drive you at 100MPH into a palm tree on remote command.
Just to be clear, I think 'smart TVs with network connected microphones' is a completely insane idea. Another on a long list of hanging offenses.
Dude. I stare at my TV. If it stares back, that's scary! And if it's listening to me!?!? All the time?
The messed up part is that ALL of our devices will soon be watching and listening to us. Our thermostats, our smoke detectors, our TVs, our phones ... I just installed a fancy internet connected lock on my door. In fact, I installed a fancy electronic toilet seat too... oh well.
Shit, I'm not. OnStar freaks me the fuck out; one of many reasons I'll never buy a GM car.
Voice recognition for it isn't always-on - I have to press a button on the remote. It's like siri, surely, in that whatever you say to it gets shunted off to a third party API that recognises words?
If you haven't seen Laura Poitras' profile of William Binney recently, watch it again: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur... When this came out (pre Snowden), many techies pooh-poohed the suggestion that phones could be turned into remote microphones. In hindsight everything he says has either been verified or is quite plausible.
So why make it easier for a future big brother by building (let alone buying) internet devices with voice recognition? While they may be cool at a technology level, given the current political path we're building the infrastructure for a future dystopian society.
If I want to provide a real-time audio feed from my home to Samsung, then that is my choice to make.
If government is to do anything here, it's to make sure that there's a minimum standard of notification which is required for these devices. Maybe something like an explicit opt-in for any feature which transmits data to third parties. That's something I could get behind.
But banning it? No way.
For example the choice of accepting Samsung's TOS could be bundled with the choice of flatsharing with someone. Or being a guest of someone. If you need to refuse attending a party because you've made the choice of disagreeing with Samsung's TOS, you're forced.
It is a classic feature of commercial products: Bundle the choice with something much bigger (such as: socializing) so people don't really have the choice of saying no. Worth saying that if phones were invented under a European jurisdiction, they'd be full of infinite more or less relevant option lists. Ironically that's probably why they weren't born there.
You can solve this problem by making consumers being informed – by forcing manufacturers to provide clear information about the services which are being given, and any privacy risks. That's something I thoroughly support.
But I absolutely reject the idea of outright banning technologies. It's not even a slippery slope – it's a vertical cliff.
The problem is they live in a completely self centered world where profit must be maximized. This is why this results in less secure devices by design. This is why you need regulation.
You leave it to the companies, they will almost always decide based on profit. Even if it results in a totally insecure product. See:http://iss.oy.ne.ro/Aether
People like you infuriate me to no end. The fact is that a lot of consumers are willing to trade privacy for convenience, price, etc. Privacy just doesn't weigh much in those people's list of priorities. I'm glad we still have a semblance of free market capitalism because if people like you had their way, a lot of modern technologies simply wouldn't exist. That being said, I personally won't be getting that TV.
* Edited for grammar
Second, I wouldn't personally feel OK with that outcome but I would also recognize that most people do (given your premise) and that I have no authority over their personal choices.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/...
Simply because you don't personally have the wealth to purchase a congressional seat of your very own doesn't change the fact that when 85% of them are essentially decided by the money spent that they are basically "buying" the win at that point.
So to claim the free market doesn't create an Orwellian total surveillance society is pretty much false across the board.
1) In the "free market", you have Google, Amazon, and a number of other businesses that try to build that sort of capability to profile their customers for advertising and sales purposes.
2) In the "government where majority power is purchased through the application of money", we have the NSA which engages in both commercial and military espionage.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz... http://www.bbc.com/news/25907502
etc.
So when you say the NSA is divorced from the free market, I think you are delusional and/or ignorant. I find it scary that people don't seem to understand that the majority of power in government is essentially paid for and if your sponsors don't like you...the money dries up. So unless you are independently wealthy [on the scale of being a billionaire] and can just self-finance every single campaign, you aren't really an independent agent but instead doing your best to balance who "bought" your vote to minimize the damage.
Will you have a choice? If they profit enough, there may not be any non-surveillance models left in a few years.
The free market does wonders, but sometimes laws are a better tool. Eg, you can't sell a house that doesn't meet fire code, whether the buyer would accept it or not. There's too much danger that they don't understand, or that the next buyer won't, or that they're coerced by having no other options, etc.
For example, if you send an always-on sound feed from your living room (or phone) to Google for voice recognition purposes, should it be subject to fourth amendment protections? Because this isn't possible by technical means or through market competition - it can only be achieved by legislation.
Or you could just, you know, not buy that crap, and let the market sort it out?
Samsung Smart TV's have this feature, so you can turn them on by voice. My wife's parents, sister and brother each have one.
I can. In an eCommerce app we were thinking of building, we wanted voice search and voice "buy" so that people only had to tap images of what they wanted. We weren't planning to give them an option either. It was scrapped because of a lack of budget and it seemed like the gimmick wouldn't be enough for anyone to care.
The technical limitations of the TV market makes sending the audio data to a 3rd party [e.g. Google's voice recognition servers] a necessity.
That said, I fully expect this feature is capable of remote activation for "tech support" purposes and that it can be enabled at the request of law enforcement. But honestly, if you are getting pissed off about the TV over law enforcement concerns...they can do the same damned thing with your cell phone. Are you keeping it inside a fridge or something? No?
They can't guarantee what you or anyone in range of the microphone will say while giving the TV a command, which gets sent off to be processed.
That's enough to warrant the warning.
Voice makes a good interface for these devices, but I do agree that privacy is a concern.
I am saddened that the data needs to fly off to the other side of the world, particularly when dictation and speaking to a device can be done offline: see Dragon Naturally Speaking, Apple offline dictation on OSX, and a Nokia from 15 years ago that would respond to simple voice commands like BLUETOOOOOOTH (yes, you had to shout it), plus the dumb Bluetooth interface in my car that I have to stop and speak to in order to pair devices with it etc.
People are buying a TV because they want a TV, not a mini computer. Why would TV manufacturers want to jack up the price of their product with non-essential TV components to have onboard voice recognition?
I guess if you want more features the smart tv provides this is something you have to get accustomed to.
"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."
I don't think there is a prison horrible enough to send these people to. There is NO legitimate reason that an always-on audio feed from your home should be sent to third parties. People shouldn't even be allowed to opt-in to something like that. No one would EVER knowingly allow this, regardless of the functionality it enabled.
I cannot envision a circumstance in which this "feature" was not put in at the direct request of law enforcement. I am extremely disappointed that he did not name the manufacturer of this TV in the article (unless he made it all up to get clicks). If this is legitimate, he needs to post the manufacturer's name and they need be boycotted, immediately, forever. Consumers need to adopt a scorched earth strategy with companies like this.