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.)

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