You watch your TV. But in the near future, your TV may watch you.
NEW YORK - April 3, 2012 - TVs are getting smarter and smarter. Specifically, they’re acquiring cameras, microphones, face tracking and speech recognition capabilities - as well as Internet connectivity. These are features meant to make our TVs smarter and, by extension, make us happier.
However, could Samsung or its affiliates watch you watching TV? Could they listen in on you? If so, would Samsung, or anyone, store this info in the cloud? If so, would it, or could it sell this data? What safeguards were there against hackers intercepting it?
It’s a dizzying list, enough to conjure images meriting the adjective Orwellian - or, if 8th-grade English class is too remote by now, at least memories of that creepy mass surveillance scene in that recent Batman movie.
CIA director David Petraeus recently intimated how downright excited the agency is about connected devices like smart TVs, refrigerators, or dishwashers.
“‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” said Petraeus, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”
There are, of course, considerable legal restrictions preventing the CIA from becoming Big Brother overnight, with the help of the good people of Samsung. But the fact that the technology to make it possible is there, and is soon to enter our living rooms, is unsettling.
Has the Amerikan lust for smarter gadgets created an Orwellian infrastructure that could, in a less enlightened future, somehow be abused? If our smart appliances open us up to an assortment of privacy risks, then just how smart are they?
