One of the technology stories that crossed over into the mainstream media last week was the news that Samsung’s Smart TV were listening out for conversations — part of its voice recognition features — and transmitting them to an un-named third party.
Now Samsung needs to do this because the TV itself doesn’t have enough grunt to do the voice recognition. It’s the same reason that Google Translate needs to send your words off to their servers, do the translation there, and send the translated words back.
And there’s a reasonable argument to be made that the TV needs to listen the whole time, so it knows when you’ve started talking to it.
The audio information is sent to a third party because they’re the ones providing the speech recognition technology.
But Samsung’s big mistake was to have this feature turned on by default, so that customers were unaware it was happening — unless they happened to read the lengthy privacy policy and understand its implications. And who does that?
I ended up doing two radio spots on this topic, and this is the first — a chat with Will Goodings on 1395 FIVEaa in Adelaide.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (16.6MB)
The audio is ©2015 dmgRadio Australia.
Bonus link: My ZDNet Australia piece from late 2013, Smart TVs are dumb, and so are we.
On Friday I was interviewed about Twitter’s latest quarterly results by ABC Radio’s lunchtime national current affairs program, The World Today — and in particular the potential future impact of bullying and trolling. And here’s the result.