50 Shades of Samsung – Privacy, Security or Convenience?

Samsung has been very naughty. And not the 50 shades of Grey kind.

Over the last weekend we discovered that Samsung has been playing “peeping Tom” in our homes. Through privacy disclosure, Samsung revealed that its TV sets might listen to our conversations and even share them with third parties. All the pundits and defenders of privacy are now racing to find the right adjectives to properly scold Samsung and demand higher levels transparency from the company.

The Samsung case caught people’s attention because the device is constantly monitoring sound in your household and sending it to third party for analysis should the detected sound be an actual TV command, say for instance “TV, turn off”. Still, people find this very disturbing yet this type of monitoring is not a problem when they log on to Facebook, Gmail, Google search, Dropbox and so on. There seems to be much less outrage where people readily share all their contacts, relationships, business plans or life problems. The argument that you in particular are not using the above mentioned services doesn’t work much. Somebody either posted a picture of you there or sent document from that service and you replied.

Let’s not stop there. Who spends more money on Internet security? You or your bank? Ok – most likely it’s your bank. Since you have less money and time to build an internet security fortress, your network at home is much easier to break, which provides ready access to your bank account, Facebook, Gmail, and Dropbox. Adding gasoline to the fire, you just bought the latest gadget that allows you to remotely control the temperature of your home, record movies, control security cameras and of course your new, too smart for it’s own good, Samsung TV. The bigger problem is very few vendors choose to build the proper security measures into their devices so when (not if) any vulnerability is discovered, few possess the ability recognise it and fix the problem.

There should be less concern about where Samsung is sending your conversation, and more concern about what will your TV do when it’s hacked.

When purchasing the latest gadgets connected to the Internet of Things, we are trading privacy and security for comfort and convenience. Perhaps it would be better to buy a dumber TV and get off the couch to change the channel?