“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
As the clock hand strikes the odd number on the dial, the news has arrived about how we might soon be dealing with the digit thirteen on the clock. Recently a leading company that manufactures electronics including smart phones, tablets, televisions, etc found itself caught up in whirlpool of controversy about a specific electronic gadget they manufacture. An online publication published the company’s warning regarding the smart television that they have brought in the market.
The warning (that can be easily found on the web as well) explains to the customers what ‘hazards’ their newly built machine has brought to them.
‘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.’
The warning has opened the flood gates of criticism to a debate pertaining to guarding the privacy and keeping oneself protected amidst the intruding electronic devices. There already are the sims, the smart phones and the GPS systems keeping a track of how we go about our lives. These smart TVs with the warning are just a new entrant to the already established regimes of eavesdropping gadgets engulfing us all. Ever since the smart TV warning became public the company has issued explanations to come clear about the fear it has triggered in the minds of the users.
As a damage control came these words:
"If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search. At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV."
The company has tried to make it clear that if there was no fiddling with the voice recognition system, there would be no data sharing back at the company headquarters.
But this smart phone surely is not the first gadget to tamper with the privacy of common citizens oblivious of the affect of these machines lying carelessly around him/her. Look at Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google's voice recognition software to the Amazon Echo speaker — Samsung's Smart TVs are not the sole spies encircling us.
Experts view that these gadgets do not actually record each word we say or each move that is made around them but they do keep ‘listening’ for their keywords. In case the voice recognition option is on and the keyword slips through the slips of the user. The person should be prepared for the machine to act according to the command. In this case the command can be shared back as well.
Whether we like it or not but once the consumer buys smart devices, gets connected to the internet, then they are actually allowing these companies to monitor them in one way or the other.
As far as the Samsung Smart TV controversy is concerned it is not the first company though to bring this menace to homes. Back in 2013 some IT experts found out how LG TV was collecting data to evaluate the viewing habits of its consumers. The uproar that followed resulted in the company bringing an updated version of their software allowing users to turn the option off, in case they were not willing to share their personal data with the company
So the devices may be slumbering but once the system is on they can transport audio files to a speech recognition service, converting it from voice to text and after performing search function on texts sent, return with results.
George Orwell’s Big Brother never leaves us alone not even for a minute. We are accessible and if caution is not taken while using these gadgets, anyone’s life can be invaded and will be open to privacy violations.