> It's a speaker system. It plays sound. Why could it possibly have AI, tracking, or ad delivery?
To recognize what you listen to, build a profile, feed it back to Samsung, which will use it in deciding what crap to display on your Samsung TV (and any other devices) associated to the same profile. For all we know it's even listening to your conversation in the room, I mean, it's Samsung - they literally do this:
How much benefit could that bring versus burning reputation and losing it all? These companies are so big and powerful but time and time again they keep on forgetting that they can't exist without the users and when users start leaving it's hard to reverse that trend.
It's so out in the open if you know, or more likely, worked in media advertising.
Their competitor, Vizio, owns iSpot[1] which is, in my opinion, the best in the space.
Samba TV[2] is it's nearest competitor and they have their hooks into 24 Smart TV brands globally[3]. These brands are listed on their website as Philips, Sony, Toshiba, beko, Magnavox, TCL, Grundig, Sanyo, AOC, Seiki, Element, Sharp, Westinghouse, Vestel, Panasonic, Hitachi, Finlux, Telefunken, Digihome, JVC, Luxor, Techwood, and Regal.
There is no reputation to burn, they're well known to do this kind of stuff by anyone bothering to look it up, and nearly nobody looks it up anyway.
It's a pity because I liked some of their hardware in the past (an NX camera I still have, hard disks back in the IDE stone age, 3 LCD screens back from when they were a novelty - they only had a VGA connector) but I just stay away from them now. But 0.01% of their customers staying away is completely insignificant when they consider the profit opportunity of violating our privacy.
Come on, did you read more than just the headlines?
> Samsung's spokeswoman continued: " Should consumers enable the voice recognition capability, the voice data consists of TV commands, or search sentences, only. Users can easily recognize if the voice recognition feature is activated because a microphone icon appears on the screen."
So it is not like it was listening without your knowledge. Only when you use the voice features is the data being sent over. Like with every other online service. As much as I don't like samsung, this is a bullshit reason to hate them.
And why provide two links basically saying the same about the same story?
Their competitor, Vizio, owns https://www.ispot.tv/ which is used for ad delivery tracking.
It's much more reliable and precise than the familiar Nielsen ratings: since you know the total audience of X% TV households in a zipcode (which you know demographics of race/income/household size based upon), and Vizio TVs account for Y% of all TVs sold for households with incomes between A and B, and C and D you can get a confidence interval of how many people ACTUALLY saw your TV advertisement.
Samsung was/is probably trying to do something similar: All sound in your TV pipes through their home theater system, so they can "Shazam" whatever media you're watching, regardless of the source (OTT, OTA, hell even YouTube or a Downloaded Torrent on your laptop hooked up via HDMI) and phone home.
on android you can install SoniControl Firewall to "see" the ultrasonics in your house. Try it with all tvs and things off, then try it with the TV on, youtube videos, and so on.
Pixel tracking works better if the TV is connected to the internet. I remember samsung as one of the companies, where, if your TV was not ever given a wifi connection, it would attempt to connect to any open network to do what it needed to do. This sounds unlawful, so i don't know the veracity, but anyhow - if the TV is online, it can just send a half dozen pixels at known locations back home and there is a database of "content pixels at timestamps" and they match the half dozen pixel values to the database and know what you're watching to some degree of certitude.
but for things like dumb panels older TVs and the like, ultrasonics still work.
You can just use regular math to do this. We've been doing it for 30 years now. You don't need a trumped up overpriced garbage LLM to do anything for you here.
Didn't know that, thanks. Then speakers are actually a pretty big data source. I bet most people don't assume their speakers can be listening. I wonder if you can get internet connection over bluetooth aux or what'd be the best way to get someone to let you send data home on a speaker.
i did some cursory digging, but i don't really want to read the A2DP or AVRCP specifications to see how much data is allowed in the non-audio payload. Besides, PAN exists, but i imagine you have to do something on your phone to allow it.
Most of these expensive things also have wifi, though, don't they?
> Connect your devices and control everything with our soundbar that integrates your favorite voice assistants and smart services like Built-in Alexa², Chromecast³, Airplay 2⁴ and more.
Few things over the past few years have infuriated me as much as tracking and advertising being introduced at the OS level, especially on TVs. I'm looking at you, LG! I will gladly pay more for a TV that doesn't try to advertise Roku's streaming service to me or track my kids' watch history. Seems like they are few and far between, though.
The best thing we have been able to come up with is leaving the TV itself disconnected from the WiFi and using an Apple TV for smart features/streaming. I'm sure they're still gathering data but it's at least not as blatant. It's a real crapfest for the consumer at the moment.
This is sound advice for keeping yourself free from malware as well. Many of these TVs end up running super vulnerable junk that doesn’t get updated and has known exploits.
I’ve had two devices end up with malware like this. A Sony blue ray player that was uploading 2gig a month before I caught it and a Samsung tv.
It’s worth mentioning you have to block or change WiFi credentials. The device with malware may attempt to connect to any known wifi even if you disable it on the device. I get 45000 auth attempts a day from my tv.
> I will gladly pay more for a TV that doesn't try to advertise Roku's streaming service to me or track my kids' watch history. Seems like they are few and far between, though.
This just swaps one locked-down company for another. You're still at the mercy of a giant corp, and worse it's unlikely to work well with my linux laptop and Android phone whereas at least Samsung tries (and often fails). A better solution is needed. I buy Sceptre TVs when I can, though for a "big screen" there aren't great options.
Yeah, we do use Apple TV because at the very least if they are collecting our data, they're not using it to advertise directly to us on the same device. My parents have a Roku TV and the number of ads it serves up directly on the device leave me feeling nauseous.
