Are you watching TV, or is it watching you? | ABC Local Cairns
On the back of a report that Samsung TV’s new voice-activated features have the ability to capture, store and send your voice and words to third parties, Phil Staley of ABC Far North Queensland jumped on the phone to say “tell me it isn’t so!”.
The reality is that voice activated tech, which we’re seeing lots of, does do what it claims to do, hear, understand and act on your voice and to do this it records you and if required sends your voice to a third-party to trigger service or information to be sent back to you.
This is not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last.
Samsung was caught out in 2012 when its TV webcams were hacked and viewers could be watched at home without knowing it. This was quickly fixed with a patch, but the spy tech is out there, it is capable of spying on you and if you’re paranoid about it, simple don’t enable the feature.
This is not just a Samsung issue, most tech can be hacked into nowadays. Microsoft Xbox One was tapped not so long ago as were Apple, Google and Amazon and lets not get started on the whole Sony tapping debacle.
It isn’t that there is some Russian or North Korean spy listening into your every word, but rather that there is a potential for it that worries most of us.
Simple solution – don’t say or write anything online that you wouldn’t go down to the local market and shout.
On a more serious note, as we use more gadgets that are voice activated or have access to our whereabouts, or store private stuff about us, we become ever more vulnerable to being spied on, this is just the beginning of these possibilities and personal cyber-security is set to become a big issue over the next year or two.
Listen to the segment now:
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What data does a smart television collect about its users, and where does that data go?
Smart televisions collect substantially more data about viewing behaviour than most users are aware of: Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology can identify what content is being watched (not just through the TV’s own apps but via any HDMI input, including cable, gaming consoles, and streaming sticks) and reports this data back to the manufacturer and their advertising partners; voice-activated smart TVs that are always listening in standby mode create a persistent audio monitoring capability in the living room; and usage pattern data (when the TV is on, what content is watched, how long, and with what interaction) creates a detailed behavioural profile that is commercially valuable for advertising targeting. The data destination is primarily the TV manufacturer and their advertising and analytics partners, and the data is typically covered by a privacy policy that most users have never read.
Q: How did the smart TV privacy issue reach public awareness, and what happened as a result?
The smart TV privacy issue reached wider public awareness in 2015 when Samsung’s privacy policy for its voice-activated TVs included language about the TV capturing voice conversations in the home and transmitting them to third parties — language that was widely interpreted as describing a domestic surveillance capability. The controversy resulted in clarified privacy disclosures from multiple TV manufacturers and increased regulatory attention to the data practices of connected home devices. It also introduced a new question into consumer electronics purchasing that had not previously been prominent: what data does this device collect, and is the privacy trade-off acceptable for the convenience offered?
Q: What does the ‘TV watching you’ signal reveal about the broader privacy architecture of the connected home?
The smart TV privacy issue is one instance of a broader pattern: the devices entering homes under the framing of consumer entertainment and convenience are simultaneously surveillance infrastructure that generates commercially valuable data about domestic life. The same pattern applies to smart speakers, connected thermostats, home security cameras, and the growing range of IoT devices in domestic environments. The privacy architecture of the connected home is built on a fundamental asymmetry: manufacturers and their partners have detailed visibility into domestic behaviour; residents typically do not know what is being collected, do not have meaningful control over it, and have agreed to collection through terms of service that were not meaningfully read or understood. This is a governance gap that regulation has been slowly and partially addressing since 2015.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a data privacy, consumer technology, or trust and surveillance keynote?
Contact the booking team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
On the back of areport that Samsung TV’s new voice-activated features have the ability to capture, store and send your voice and words to third parties, Phil Staley of ABC Far North Queensland jumped on the phone to say "tell me it isn’t so!". The reality is that voice activated .
When signals like Are you watching TV, or is it watching you emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether Are you watching TV, or is it watching you will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
