Huge schocker /s
Pretty sure that Samsung does very similar things. I've been interested in actually capturing outgoing pcap data for this purpose. Looks like I have a new project to add the pile.
Pretty sure that Samsung does very similar things. I've been interested in actually capturing outgoing pcap data for this purpose. Looks like I have a new project to add the pile.
For example, can you disable the wireless interface, or will it keep asking you to connect it to the internet? Does the TV itself ask you to agree to a EULA?
I've been interested in the Samsung hardware, but only as a Dumb TV. This kind of data collection is not what I'd want.
Why wouldn't that data be encrypted? All you would see is packets going to specific IP addresses. No way to analyze the contents.
Of course, the data might not be encrypted. Why go thru the effort? Because of the large quantity of data being passed back and forth by almost all Internet connected devices, it's tedious to interpret what's happening even if the flows are completely open.
Why wouldn't that data be encrypted?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/samsung_smart_tv_pri...
It's true that a lot of IoT devices communications are not encrypted.
But what concerns me is that they'll start encrypting everything so that we can't analyze what's being transmitted. Not for our privacy but to prevent us from knowing what they're doing.
If they're capturing the image and sending it back to themselves for classification ... arn't they breaking their HDCP license?
( See comments about said Samsung TVs ) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581771
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/19/samsung-s...
Not sure if they were selling any of those data, anonymized or not, either.
edit: It's also worth pointing out that while technical people (e.g. us) may see voice recognition tech and immediately suspect that it involves phoning home, most people probably have no idea that anything of what they say is leaving their living room.
"Interest Based Advertisement. Samsung provides the ability to obtain and view interactive and interest based advertising on your Smart TV. Interest based advertisements will rely on your TV viewing history and Smart TV usage information. Your viewing history includes information about the networks, channels, and programs viewed on your Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them. We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture this information."
It is opt-out, and it's buried a couple levels deep in the menus.