In this case it has taken only six years for science fiction to become reality with Samsung’s warning not to utter personal details within hearing of your TV. In the eBook Videobug written by our own Faultline founder Peter White, still available on Amazon, a communications technologist developed a tiny video device to spy on his wife with hilarious consequences but also an exploration of deeper questions around how much we can trust major Internet companies like Google, Apple and Facebook with our personal information.
Samsung is clearly anxious to maintain such trust now that it supports voice commands for controlling TV operations such as channel change. Samsung was forced to respond after an article in US news and analysis website The Daily Beast accused the company of spying on people via its smart TVs because they could relay conversations to third parties over the Internet and potentially expose users to eavesdropping from hackers. The article was prompted by Samsung’s warning in its privacy statement, “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.”
As far as we know this is the first time fear about eavesdropping voice has arisen in the context of a TV set. But many of the arguments have already been well rehearsed over Apple’s voice-controlled “virtual assistant” called Siri, which has been available on iPhones over three years since its launch in October 2011. This sends voice commands to Apple for transformation into text, so that it is potentially possible to intercept those commands on the return. As part of Apple’s Dictation Siri can be used to write emails and text messages, as well as perform searches and various other tasks. On this basis IBM quickly deemed Siri a security risk and banned its use by employees in 2012.
Eventually civil liberties groups cottoned on to the risk and started warning that Apple was not doing enough to inform its customers of their privacy risks over Siri. That was certainly true, since Apple’s warnings were ambiguous and buried within the small print of its iPhone terms of use.
In some ways people will be more concerned over the possibility of being eavesdropped on by their TV than even their smartphone, especially if it can pick up personal information in the background when in standby mode. Samsung points out that the feature can be disabled, but that is not really the point, since to be of any use it will be active.
Samsung has actually opened a Pandora’s box that it has since tried desperately close but in vain. As so often Samsung erred from its own perspective by being too truthful with that original warning picked up by the media. Samsung has now replaced that in its privacy statement with the more obtuse “To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some interactive voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts your interactive voice commands to text and to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you.” That third party is currently Nuance Communications, but it could be any other company.
Drilling down a bit we find that Samsung actually records voice in two places, through microphones in the TV itself and the remote. The TV is merely capable of hearing and processing a limited set of commands like volume up and as such is a red herring. The remote is the cause of concern, since it has the ability to parse free form speech and process commands like “give me a recent movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch”.
At this stage anyway we are not fearful so much about hacking or intrusion by government agencies, such as tax authorities prowling for tax evaders by analyzing verbal clues in the vicinity of the box. The real risk is of the sort we are already all too familiar with, of third parties picking up personal references which are then used to target perhaps unwelcome or at any rate unsolicited ads.
At present Samsung itself collects voice data only when it relates directly to programming content. According to Samsung this is to learn the viewer’s preferences for TV shows, movies, actors and the like to improve its recommendations. The danger is of mission creep here, although presumably viewers would be asked to opt in to provision of information gleaned from their voice commands to a third party.
There is also the question of whether the voice data itself is stored or transmitted within Samsung’s ecosystem and if so where. Just recording the voice would contravene privacy regulations, certainly in some jurisdictions. That appears to have been the case with Siri, with data it generates carried in some cases across borders in non-US countries, onto servers located in the US.
But while Siri was first to raise many of these concerns it looks like Samsung may be the one to provoke wider debate and possibly trigger US regulatory action – mostly because of home court rule – no-one wants to see a law made because of something Apple has done, but that nasty, big overseas conglomerate Samsung, now that’s another matter.