Loss of Privacy

In the novel 1984, every television set could not only watch what a person was doing int heir house, but it could also listen to and interact with that person as well. A similar television can also be found in Fahrenheit 451. Today, Samsung has accomplished this task in a new line of televisions already in stores.

Samsung’s 2012 top-of-the-line plasmas and LED HDTVs offer new features never before available within a television including a built-in, internally wired HD camera, twin microphones, face tracking and speech recognition. While these features give you unprecedented control over an HDTV, the devices themselves, more similar than ever to a personal computer, may allow hackers or even Samsung to see and hear you and your family, and collect extremely personal data.

While Web cameras and Internet connectivity are not new to HDTVs, their complete integration is, and it’s the always connected camera and microphones, combined with the option of third-party apps (not to mention Samsung’s own software) gives us cause for concern regarding the privacy of TV buyers and their friends and families.

These Samsung TVs locate and make note of registered viewers via sophisticated face recognition software. This means if you tell the TV whose faces belong to which users in your family, it personalizes the experience to each recognized family member. If you have friends over, it could log these faces as well.

In addition, the TV listens and responds to specific voice commands. To use the feature, the microphone is active. What concerns us is the integration of both an active camera and microphone. A Samsung representative tells us you can deactivate the voice feature; however this is done via software, not a hard switch like the one you use to turn a room light on or off.

Make no mistake, these televisions invade your privacy in numerous, insidious ways. It not only collects personal data, it attaches a face to that data. Along with that data, the voice commands will be attached to the facial recognition data. Given the fact that there is no way to physically disconnect the microphone, there is no way to tell if it’s actually turned off when the television is turned off. It is also unknown whether or not turning the microphone off via the software is a permanent fix or if it only works until the television is turned back on.

The camera in the television is also permanently attached. While the LED models allow you to turn the camera up towards the ceiling, it, too, cannot be turned off. The plasma televisions’ cameras can be pointed towards the rear of the television, but neither solution is ideal given the fact that the functions of the microphone are not completely known.

Samsung has not released a privacy policy for these televisions, raising concerns about what will be done with the information given to Samsung, stored in the cloud, and/or given to third party app developers. Of great concern is what happens when a customer first connects their television and are immediately required to connect to Samsung’s cloud services, then elsewhere for activation.

Samsung induces its new Smart TV owners to register online by offering a free three-month extension of the TV’s warranty. This would couple user names and addresses to their TV serial numbers, if the company so desired.

The TV has a built-in Facebook app. Can the TV make the next connection and access your Facebook account and match other viewers to their Facebook pictures for even more personal data?

Once you give away all this personal data, there are no guarantees that this information will not be hacked. Samsung’s operating system is currently unknown and there is no way to confirm exactly how secure their system may or may not be. Owners of these Samsung televisions should be concerned about the very real possibility of having all their private personal information hacked, particularly since Samsung intends on introducing apps that will allow their televisions to be turned into home security systems.

A Samsung representative said the company is working on apps that will allow its Smart TV owners to turn their televisions into a silent home-security system by allowing remote viewing on a smartphone or tablet via the TV’s built-in camera. This ability makes us ask, “Who else could gain access this video feed?”

Samsung has not said whether or not these video feeds would be encrypted or not. If not, the feed would be widely available to anyone who wishes to stalk a family or an individual. It would then be trivial to figure out daily routines. One could then, theoretically, known when the house would be empty or a person home alone to rob the house or do bodily harm to a person. An encrypted connection could yield similar results, it would only be slightly more difficult.

If you’re looking into purchasing a new television set and are concerned about invasions of privacy, you’d do best to avoid these Samsung televisions. If you are part of the, “I’ve got nothing to hid,” crowd, by all means, put your entire life up for grabs in the cloud and don’t worry about what happens to your data when, inevitably, it gets hacked.

In the UK, the chances are you’re being watched. It has more CCTV cameras per person than almost any other nation on earth. And now the government is planning to cast its intrusive eye over online activity, phone calls and text messages, all under the guise of an anti-terror law. And as RT’s Ivor Bennett reports it’s the taxpayer who may well pay in more ways than one.

In Farmington Hills, Michigan intelligent lights will soon be keeping a watchful eye over its citizens. But is it really for entertainment and safety or a gross invasion of privacy?

“In each lighting fixture or each lighting pole, there is processor very much like an iPhone. And it takes inputs and outputs and talks back and forth. And the poles actually talk to each other,” said Ron Harwood.

When you step come into view of the street light, there is a camera that spots you, and the person on the other side sees you by white specs on a black screen. The camera senses that somebody is there, and if wants, it can even take your picture.

The system is also capable of recording conversations making critics cry invasion of privacy.

“This is not a system with spook technology. It’s much more transparent. It can just talk to you and say, don’t fall over Niagara Falls,” said Harwood.

It may be able to just make a stupid joke about Niagara Falls, but the fact that it can spot you, track you, and record your conversations is, indeed, spook technology. It’s worrisome that people are simply accepting a program such as this as the normal course of events. If no one in Farmington Hills fights against it, it will start showing up elsewhere in the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security has moved its “see something say something” program into the hotel industry in an effort to stop all the terrorists that are, apparently, staying in hotels.

The PSA, which will be interspersed with other messages on the welcome screen, will be the same in all 5,400 hotels that LodgeNet serves. It ends by telling viewers to contact “local authorities.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says that reaching the “millions of guests that stay at hotels and motels each year is a significant step in engaging the full range of partners in our Homeland Security efforts.”

The federal government gained access to hotel TV sets by forming a partnership with the hotel industry’s largest association — the A
American Hotel & Lodging Association — which connected DHS with LodgeNet, the industry’s largest TV-content provider.

By entering hotels at a time when the hospitality industry is on the rebound, the government has the power to tap a growing, captive audience. Recent research from LodgeNet says 98% of hotel guests turn on their hotel TV, and the average guest keeps it on for more than three hours per day.

Ann Parker, a LodgeNet spokeswoman, is completely behind the new initiative.

“It’s about everyone doing their part to help keep each other and the country safe,”

But critics of the campaign point out potential pitfalls. Josh Meyer of the Washington-based National Security Journalism Initiative predicts it will generate “a huge amount of potentially baseless tips that will inundate local, state and federal law enforcement authorities.”

DHS spokesman Peter Boogaard, however, cites successful citizen interventions, such as the May 2010 incident in which two street vendors helped thwart a car bombing attempt in New York City’s Times Square by noticing a smoking vehicle and reporting it to police.

The difference here is that you are unlikely to see overly suspicious behavior in a hotel. What you will see is people acting normally and going about their day. You do not know who the employees of the hotel are, so there is no way for you to report if a person is doing something wrong. Comparing a smoking vehicle to people in a hotel is like comparing apples to oranges. This program is only used as a way to instill fear.

Out of the ordinary doesn’t equate to terrorism. Stepping into other people’s private business under the pretense of preventing terrorism, however, seems to be the modus operandi of the government.

H.R. 358, also known as the Protect Life Act, has passed in the House of Representatives and now moves on to the Senate for voting. This new piece of legislation would remove women’s rights that go back to the Reagan Administration.

The bill is officially known as the Protect Life Act, but it, sadly, restricts women’s access to reproductive health care services. Those who support the bill say it is merely changing a small part of the Affordable Care Act so that US taxpayer money will not be used to fund abortions. The fact is, this is already prohibited under the Affordable Care Act. H.R. 358 goes even farther than the Hyde Amendment as it restricts women who have have private insurance from spending their own private money on health insurance.

“Extremists prevailed today in the House of Representatives,” said Debra Ness of the National Partnership for Women and Families, “proving again that they are badly out-of-touch with the majority of Americans who want lawmakers to focus on economic recovery, jobs and promoting, rather than restricting, affordable, quality health care ­– not [on] an extreme, anti-woman agenda.”

The bill, H.R. 358, about which we have written extensively, revives the earlier failed Stupak amendment, which would force health plans to drop comprehensive coverage in state health insurance exchanges, cutting off millions of women from the benefits they receive today and prevent women from paying for health insurance with abortion coverage with their own money.

H.R. 358 contains other provisions revealing complete disregard for women’s health and lives. It permits states to enact sweeping refusal laws that would allow health plans to refuse to cover women’s preventive services, including birth control, without cost-sharing — undoing a new protection under health reform supported by 66 percent of Americans.  It also codifies and significantly expands an already expansive refusal clause (also known as the Weldon amendment) without any regard for patient rights or protections. Under current law (through the 2004 Weldon amendment), hospitals, health care facilities, and insurance plans can refuse to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.  The Weldon amendment has no protections for patients to ensure they have access to care and information in a timely manner.  H.R. 358 codifies this unfair and discriminatory provision.  H.R. 358 further allows health care entities–hospitals, clinics–to refuse to “participate in” abortion care.  This could mean that a hospital employee with no medical training or role in a patient’s treatment decisions could refuse to process bills, handle medical records, or even set up an examination room for a patient seeking abortion care.

And finally, it overrides protections for pregnant women under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.  EMTALA was enacted in 1986 to ensure public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay, including women in active labor. Under EMTALA, hospitals must stabilize a pregnant patient who, for example, is facing an emergency obstetric condition or life-threatening pregnancy and either treat her–including an emergency abortion–or if the hospital or staff objects, to transfer her to another facility that will treat her.

H.R. 358 overturns decades of precedent guaranteeing people access to lifesaving emergency care, including abortion care and says its ok that a pregnant woman fighting for her life be left to die.

The president strongly opposes H.R. 358 and it is likely to fail in the Senate, but it is important to understand that the republicans continue to push for this type of national policy. By doing so, they are telling women that they no longer matter in this world and are merely baby carriers.