 In the 1980s, singer Rockwell went to the top of the charts with “Somebody’s Watching Me,” a synth-pop, R&B celebration of unrestrained paranoia. In one verse, he asks: “Can the people on TV see me, or am I just paranoid?” On that point, you can relax. The (truly) odious Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses and the passive-aggressive aliens on Pluribus cannot see you. But if you have a smart TV equipped with a camera for recognizing gesture control, or for making video calls, your TV itself might be watching you – although manufacturers are dropping this feature after being hit with a tsunami of consumer outrage. After all, who is at their best sitting on the couch at 9 o’clock at night? The real danger is Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology, which can capture screenshots of a user’s television display every 500 milliseconds, monitoring your viewing in real time, and transmitting that information back to the company without your knowledge or consent. Your personal information then becomes a commodity on the consumer data market. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement that this technology can put private and sensitive information – from passwords to bank information – at risk. Consumer activist and privacy expert Louis Rossmann explains that if your TV is connecting to home security cameras, if you use your TV as a computer screen for searching the web, or if you send videos and photos through your TV, ACR captures all that information. “The television is, unfortunately, a form of spyware,” says Rossmann. Paxton is now suing Sony, Samsung, and LG, as well as Chinese-based Hisense and TCL Technology Corporation for secretly recording and harvesting consumer data. “Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans’ devices inside their own homes,” Attorney General Paxton said. “This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries.” Watch Rossmann for detailed descriptions of these companies’ labyrinthine concept of informed consent and the technical ways you can try to sidestep surveillance. As Paxton’s lawsuit matures, we will see if courts will find actual law-breaking here, or just another abuse of consumer trust. Stay tuned. Comments are closed.
|
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed