Keep your voice down – The TV is all ears

Come close, dear reader.

Bit closer. I’m going to have to whisper this bit you see. Whoa – back up a touch. Right. Ready? Your TV is listening to your every word...

As we power purposefully along the information superhighway with our foot firmly on the virtual gas pedal, it appears we may have forgotten to put our seat belts on. Or the lights.

To say we’re a bit reckless when it comes to privacy in our wifi-ed modern lives is a massive understatement.

Most of us are so tied to our mobile phones and desperate for data, we’d happily connect to an available hot spot even if it was called “WhatsYourPIN”, just so we could Tweet a picture of our sandwich, or complain about how our bank account had been robbed yet again, and when ARE they going to do something about that? LOL.

Watched by security cameras that can tell what time it is from my watch even if I’m a quarter of a mile away on a foggy day (I saw that on CSI, so it must be true), or work out who I am using facial recognition algorithms, even when I’m so massively hung-over I wouldn’t recognise myself in a mirror, being outside can be pretty alarming nowadays.

Plus, your mobile phone is telling The Man where you are every second of the day, shops know what you want to buy and advertise it at you online using information from cookies, and I’m pretty sure my desk lamp has been looking at me a bit disdainfully recently.

Latest addition to the parade of privacy-invading horror-tech is Samsung’s Smart TV, which sits there, listening to every word you say, waiting for you to give it a command.

To be honest, the likelihood of any such set in our house surviving a week without a nervous breakdown is pretty unlikely. The constant stream of me asking Mrs G who the killer is during detective dramas would get on it’s pixels pretty fast, whilst singing along to the BBC News24 music in my underpants would probably invalidate the warranty.

Samsung’s privacy policy for net-connected TVs quietly points out that voice data may be transmitted to a 3rd party, to help improve the recognition technology, and that means everything; You shouting at the dog, having an argument about whose turn it is to wash up, or reading out your name, date of birth, mother’s maiden name and bank details just for the fun of it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (weren’t they on Star Trek?) rather brilliantly pointed out the striking similarity between Samsung’s notification and George Orwell’s “1984”, where Winston never knows if someone might be listening to him through his screen.

Try not to panic about it though. Especially as the toaster is reading your thoughts anyway, and letting your gas supplier know your fantasy about Benedict Cumberbatch and a bucket of custard. Sweet Dreams (which may be monitored).

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 13th of February 2015. They altered the title slightly, to "Keep it down - the TV is all
ears", and you can view the version they published on their website here, which is the first time the column has shown up there for quite a few weeks.

This sort of column comes quite easily for me - I do enjoy a spot of indignant outrage about technology, especially when you think how hopeless we all are at keeping thing secure online most of the time. It appears you actually have to press a button on the remote to give the Samsung TV a voice command, which presumably means that, if you've gone to the trouble of reaching for the remote in the first place, the whole point of voice activation is somewhat defeated.

(Cassette-based trauma at the moment - the Sony hi-fi in my teensy "office" has a tape deck, but seems to be playing all the tapes increasingly slowly recently. As I'm from the dark ages,
there is still a radio-cassette in the kitchen, but what to do? If this one fails, do I get a replacement one? Do they even make them still?! Anyway, notably deeper-voiced than usual, tonight's TDK CDing2 is straining it's way through Paul McCartney's "Run Devil Run" from 1999.)

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog