Ride the Lightning

Is Your Smart TV Watching and Listening to You?

February 11, 2015

This question certainly has dominated local/national news in the last couple of days.

Though many smart TVs can watch and listen to you, the attention has focused chiefly on the Samsung Smart TVs, many of which come equipped with voice recognition. The good news is that you can issue voice commands to the TV – the bad news is that what you say is sent over the Internet and is transmitted through a third party.

Creepy. Yes, there is a microphone on the screen when the voice recognition feature is on, and you can opt-out. But there are pre-programmed commands and it will collect those commands (but not your voice itself) even if you opt out.

Make sure you watch the CNN video on this topic. There is a way, with a little extra code, to get to the browser and get access to the camera and then watch you. You would be completely unaware. Imagine that as you watch TV undressing in your bedroom. You can cover the camera lens of course or unplug the TV from the home network when you're not using Smart TV features. Users tend not to take security measures even when available to them so this doesn't strike me as likely. They should also be using encrypted wireless access points – sometimes they are, but they are using older encryption that has been broken.

Remember that a smart TV is a computer and therefore vulnerable to hackers.

As people use the Internet on their TV, they will inevitably and stupidly do online banking via their television. Hackers are lusting for this – because, with relative ease, they can present a site that looks like your bank's site, but is controlled by them.

Once again, we'll be asking the ever popular question, "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?"

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