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Naive Acquisition of Dual-use Surveillance Technology (Part #3)

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Privacy policy: Subsequent to the early reports, the flurry of recent news coverage was triggered by a report regarding the legal small print associated with the Samsung Smart TV (Watch Your Mouth: Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically, The Daily Beast, 5 February 2015):

A single sentence buried in a dense "privacy policy" for Samsung's Internet-connected SmartTV advises users that its nifty voice command feature might capture more than just your request to play the latest episode of Downton Abbey.

The Daily Beast noted a sentence in Samsung's privacy policy and framed it as a smoking gun. "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."

Based on previous customer references, that "third party" converting speech to text is Nuance. Nuance provides voice recognition software and services to a host of companies. It offers its wares on-premise and through the cloud. As most of us know, the deployment model in favor is the cloud, also known as a third party unless Samsung buys Nuance.

Warning from Samsung: This report appears to have been immediately followed by a warning from Samsung itself

These were apparently immediately followed by a modification to that policy statement (Samsung tweaks policy after eavesdropping freak out, CNN, 11, February 2015; Chris Matyszczy, Samsung changes Smart TV privacy policy in wake of spying fears, CNET, 10 February 2015). It had originally stated:

If your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be captured and transmitted to a third party

As noted by Natasha Lomas (Samsung Edits Orwellian Clause Out Of TV Privacy Policy, TechCrunch, 10 February 2015), it now includes a section explaining how voice recognition works. It says in part:

If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some interactive voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service provider (currently, Nuance Communications, Inc.) that converts your interactive voice commands to text and to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, 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. Samsung will collect your interactive voice commands only when you make a specific search request to the Smart TV by clicking the activation button either on the remote control or on your screen and speaking into the microphone on the remote control.

Commentaries: The issue was then the subject of commentaries, many of which appear to have been quickly "updated" (presumably following legal advice). A number made comparisons with the novel of George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) , which depicted a nightmarish world of a state listening into its citizens. The following titles speak for themselves::

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