It’s been nearly 70 years since George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 was published, but some of its premonitions are starting to sound straight out of 2015. Take this passage in Samsung’s privacy policy for its data-collecting Smart TV services:
Samsung’s Smart TV privacy policy sounds like an Orwellian nightmare
Quiet, your TV can hear you
Quiet, your TV can hear you
Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.
In other words, don't say anything around your TV that you wouldn't want recorded and sent off to a faceless "third party." As TechCrunch points out, this is more than a little unsettling and invokes visions of one of Orwell's all-knowing telescreens.
Left: Samsung SmartTV privacy policy, warning users not to discuss personal info in front of their TV Right: 1984 pic.twitter.com/osywjYKV3W
— Parker Higgins (@xor) February 8, 2015 Any technology capable of voice recognition or predicting the needs of a user is likely to run into this same issue. Samsung’s privacy policy is not unique; its rhetoric just happens to be similar to that of a well-known sci-fi novel. For now, here’s hoping the Internet of Things isn’t too nosy.
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