Commentary

TV Convenience: See Me, Hear Me, Spy On Me?

by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, February 10, 2015

We already have TV sets with sensors that can see our living/watching activity through interactive TV exercise games/software.

Now smart TVs have another option: voice activation, which not only hears your extraneous personal information, but can send it to a third party.

Third party? Samsung isn’t interested?

You may want to search new movies/TV shows, or find the latest episode of “The Blacklist” somewhere. That’s all well and good. But if you start talking about your bank account to your significant other during a commercial break, beware.

Samsung has issued a warning about consumers who talk too much: “If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search.”

So you thought only clicking on the wrong attachment in an email could accelerate identity theft? Think again.

Good news: Voice activation grabbing-data doesn’t have your name, address or employment history -- unless you mindlessly volunteer that stuff. Right or wrong, down the road this may be the info TV programmers and advertisers want in on.

With media fragmentation, right now the marketing of TV shows can be based only on some rough algorithms -- your TV viewing history, for example. Netflix and other do this -- and they don’t need Nielsen or other third-party research to figure any of it out.

Truth is, using remotes/keyboards to push buttons can be physically exhausting. Getting a TV show perfectly attuned to one’s fine sensitivity and a related scam may be the price for more convenience.

3 comments about "TV Convenience: See Me, Hear Me, Spy On Me?".

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Douglas Ferguson from College of Charleston, February 10, 2015 at 2:16 p.m.
Further good news: There's not enough money in the world to mine data from poorly understood voice commands. Think how many hours and how many viewers would have to be captured, assuming the voice quality was intelligible. One of my students complained that random comments trigger false information to change a channel and that her family disabled the voice feature as a result.
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Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited, February 10, 2015 at 6:45 p.m.

We are only steps away when all that data will be analyzed in seconds and spit out specific info for the individual and use it against us. Who so you want to own that information ? "We are begging to be controlled?"

John Grono from GAP Research, February 10, 2015 at 10:12 p.m.

I bought my Samsung several years ago and I LOVEEEE it.

I played around with all the features - voice control (it worked well - had to talk into the separate remote), gesture control (didn't the dig get a fright when he looked at his reflection and the TV came on), and 3D (decoding and emulation). I'd say that within a week or two I had disabled them all. Hardly used the, never miss them.