So this week everyone's passing around the same paragraph from Samsung's Smart TV privacy policy, the one about voice recognition. If you haven't seen it, it says roughly this: if you talk near the TV and your words happen to include personal or sensitive information, that information "will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party." Somebody put it next to a line from Orwell's 1984 about the telescreen and it's been all over my Twitter feed since Saturday.
Normally I'd roll my eyes at the 1984 comparison, because everything gets compared to 1984 eventually and it usually means the comparison has stopped meaning much. But I actually pulled up the policy myself last night instead of just retweeting the screenshot, and I get it now. It's not even hidden in there. It's a plain sentence, sitting where a normal person would read it if they ever read these things, which nobody does, including me, most of the time.
I've got a confession here that regular readers will find funny: I almost bought one of these TVs. Right before Christmas I was standing in a Best Buy staring at a 55-inch Samsung, something like $1,100 with the voice remote bundled in, and the sales guy would not stop talking about "just tell it what you want to watch." I didn't buy it because the price didn't feel right for a TV I'd replace in three years anyway, not because of any privacy instinct. In hindsight that's a little embarrassing. I dodged this one by being cheap, not by being smart.
Here's the part that actually bugs me, and it's not really about Samsung specifically. It's that "voice recognition" on these things almost never means the TV itself is doing the recognizing. The processing happens on a server somewhere, which means the audio has to leave your living room to get turned into a command. So the moment you enable the feature, your TV is a microphone with a network connection sitting a few feet from wherever your family actually talks. Samsung says you can turn it off in settings, and sure, you probably can. But the default assumption baked into the product is that a TV listening to your room is a feature, not a problem, and that's the part that's new. My laptop has a microphone too, obviously, but nobody designed my laptop's business model around it overhearing my dinner conversation.
Timing-wise this is landing right after Obama's cybersecurity summit out at Stanford on Friday, which I only half followed because summits like that tend to produce a lot of handshake photos and not much else. Tim Cook was there. Notably, the CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Yahoo were not, which several people online read as a pointed absence given the ongoing fight over encryption backdoors. I don't think that's a coincidence, but I also don't think one photo-op tells you much either way. Two stories running the same week though: one about the government wanting companies to share more data with it, one about a company's product quietly shipping a way to collect more data from you. Feels like the same conversation from two directions.
I don't have a tidy fix for any of this, and I'm suspicious of any blog post that pretends it does. I'm not going to tell you to unplug your TV or start reading every EULA line by line, because I won't do that either, not consistently. What I will say is that "read the actual policy instead of the pull quote" turned out to be worth the ten minutes, which is a low bar and I still almost didn't clear it. If a decade from now every appliance in the house has a mic and we've stopped noticing, this week is probably going to look like the point where it stopped being a surprise and started being Tuesday.
Anyway. Valentine's Day today, which around here mostly means my wife made fun of me for spending the evening reading a TV's terms of service instead of getting her a card on time. Fair.