Back when cell phones were novel, it is a common treachery for eavesdroppers to park near a highway and listen to all those people talking while driving. Soon, the new generation of cell phones scramble all transmissions. Fast forward a few years, we learned that hackers would turn on the microphone and/or camera on the laptop. It is bad enough that the vendors fail to deploy strong mechanisms to protect us. We will be livid if they volunteer our private information to third parties without our consent.
And that appeared to be what Samsung did with their SmartTV. What were they thinking? Really!
Apparently, Samsung’s SmartTV is always recording whatever audible and transmitting them out. The TV must be attentive to whatever sound in the room, lest a command was uttered. It also must learn your voices to tune its voice recognition feature. The unintended consequence is, obviously, the blatant violation of your privacy. Worse, they do this without telling you first.
As a network security person, I am always amazed that how little engineers considered security when they design their products. Yes, security makes everything harder. But that’s only a matter of design discipline: one extra constrain for engineers to deal with — not being convenient has no bearing on this.
Consider security as part of the design, there is no dropping this. When do so, find a real expert. Amateur computer security is usually worse than not having any.