We live in
a world of surveillance, moving ever closer to Orwell’s 1984. We are surrounded
by CCTV cameras on buildings, streets and inside shops, some would suggest that
our internet messages and activity is also being monitored under the guise of
national interest and data gathering by software providers on our every click
is commonplace. This new business of ‘big data’ appears to be morphing without
control and is often hidden deep within the small print that we don’t read.
Last year
we reported on Adobe’s collecting of eBook reading information through their
service, which ironically was set up to protect copyright and the interests of
their clients - the publisher, but apparently not their other clients - the
consumer. LG was also discovered to be collecting details via some of their TVs
on their owners' viewing habits and on what devices were connected to their TVs
and was sending this back to the manufacturer, even if the users have activated
a privacy setting.
Have smart devices
now become too smart? Does the technology allow others to look in and to gather
data and who and how can we control what we often can’t see and have not
authorised?
The latest ‘data
gathering news’ is about users Samsung Smart TV users who use voice activation
to control their Samsung Smart TV. It is now claimed that the TV doesn’t just ‘listen’
to commands but to everything that is said and may share what they hears with
Samsung or third parties, which is believed to be Nuance, the voice recognition
specialist. It’s like having a ‘Gogglebox’, or worse still Orwell’s vision in
every home. The users are unaware they are being monitored and although this
story broke via a story in online
news magazine the Daily Beast it questions how big this iceberg may
be?
The Samsung
policy states that the TV set will be listening to people in the same room to
try to spot when commands or queries are issued via the remote. It states: ‘If
your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that
information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.’
However,
like Adobe, Skype and Viper before them, Samsung then send data to third
parties without any encryption!
Samsung in
its defence state ‘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.’
They also go on to state that, ‘Smart-TV
owners would always know if voice activation was turned on because a microphone
icon would be visible on the screen.’
Does this same logic apply to other
voice recognition services which are increasingly being deployed on devices?
But it is not just about gathering
data but also about pushing unwanted data onto the consumer. Recently Lenovo was
caught out installing adware onto new consumer computers on initial activation
of the PC. The Superfish adware which injects third-party ads on Google
searches and websites without the user’s permission has subsequently been
removed.
Data gathering is done for a number
of purposes; to help hone and target product and services to an individual, to
sell behaviour and interest information to third parties and to eavesdrop on
individuals. The problem is that the technology can often be the same and the lines
between moral and not can often blur.
