Terms of Service (TOS) Under Scrutiny - Part V - Haunted Homes With Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), Cameras, and Microphones on Televisions
IN THE previous part (Part IV - Companies Used to Demand You Don't Criticise Their Products and Services) we witnessed TOS "gone overboard" or totally awry - i.e. some companies going beyond what's legal (and/or constitutional) to subject "users" or "consumers" or "customers" to oppressive 'gentlemen's agreements'.
In recent decades we saw more of the ordinary home electronics (or "appliances") being turned into spying monsters. Further down below we'll also revisit cars from these lenses.
Recently, in a public presentation, our contributor introduced the issue (or family of issues) as follows:
Terms of Service
Spying televisions
Smart TV
There are several ways your smart television can "spy" on you. Check settings and configure to protect your privacy.
Automatic content recognition (ACR)
Monitors your usage information, how long you were watching, channels usage, commercials you watch. Disable this in settings. Steps for disabling televisions are found in the reference link.
Mic
Listens to commands, but can be used to actively listen to your conversations and according to the article below in references, send data for processing to third parties. Ever seen the "third parties" clause? Wonder what exactly is shared? Me too. Disable Cameras and Microphones. Voice and video recording capabilities are stopped. Well, that should do the trick.
Cameras
If there is a camera module, you should know. In the article, face recognition and gesture control features could record and collect your private information. If the camera is recording, it could also use emotional recognition to use your responses in marketing or user experience research. Disable camera. This stops recording feature - allegedly. See the reference link to disable ACR, Mic, Camera
The next part will look into some more of the TOS findings in "modern" TVs, i.e. large sets that televise users to advertisers rather than the other way around. Apropos inversion of roles, we wrote about the same thing happening inside cars at the end of 2021 ("Loss of Control Over Cars"). It was a long series.
An associate says that "many countries are reporting that people are holding on to old cars longer and doing what they can to avoid buying new ones when they do change cars this is being (IMHO) incorrectly blamed on 'the economy' in each country rather than on the proprietary surveillance and tracking software new cars are encumbered with".
Apropos the car comment" (above), the associate adds, this is "an example of the distraction away from the surveillance and DRM people might not be fully able to articulate the problems with the new cars but they are aware enough to know enough to avoid them."
"However, one-person boycotts, regardless of scale, are not going to have any effect on the surveillance software and DRM being loaded into cars if the powers that be are able to spin with disinformation about the reasons for the sales 'downturn'."
I stopped driving a long time ago, but the reason for the stoppage was not the surveillance and other similarly-worrying (also growing) abuses. Having said that, surveillance and other abuses give me even less desire to get back to driving.
"With the car comment, there is an economic component to the 'reduced' sales," the associate adds, "but it is only one aspect and, I would argue, the smaller of the factors."
It seems like losing control is now a kind of "normal" (we'll get to data breaches later in this series - they too are becoming a "normal").
There's a new article entitled "American Radio Relay League Paid $1 Million to Ransomware Gang", but "another way to write it," the associate says, "is that they sponsored a ransomware gang to the tune of $1 M of their members' money."
So we see who pays and what for.
Imagine what data reaches will mean to those TV "vendors" and car "vendors" in decades to come. What's their data retention policy? Does anyone know? Does anybody audit to verify compliance? █