Skip to main content

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.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...