Is the government listening into your private conversations? What about private companies? Recently there have been headlines splashed across the media about Samsung Smart TVs that listen to your personal conversations. It sounds infuriating, at least it did to me. That is, until I did a few minutes of research. I found out that this is not a new issue. There is no new TV that suddenly is capable of listening to sound. Versions of this TV have been on the market since 2012.
So why is this suddenly an issue? Someone decided to actually read their owners manual to find out what the TV is capable of doing. Unfortunately, people did not stop at reading the owner’s manual, but proceeded to post about it on social media without stopping to consider the consequences of their lack of discerning thought.
According to major news outlets including CNN, Fox and Forbes, there is not even a potential threat for your TV to listen in and gather personal information. Not only is it not happening, but the TVs are not even capable. They are not equipped to hold any substantial amount of data, and the artificial intelligence struggles to understand the basic commands it is designed for, let alone storing and processing conversations worth of data.
As to the rumor that Samsung was allowing an unnamed third party to keep data, Samsung has stated that data is only stored for research in improving their services. This is the same process that Apple uses with Siri. Keep in mind that smartphones actually are capable of saving and sending data, yet no one is up-in-arms about them.
There are countless recorded incidents of smartphones getting hacked and personal information being scattered on the Internet, but still people, including myself, use them daily, hourly and even on a minute-to-minute basis. Yet a device that is not even a threat makes headlines.
We have become a people that are fed by the media with media that is fed by whims, and information goes viral without being based on fact. If the first person who viewed the information on Reddit had done a few simple searches, this never would have found its way to major news outlets to begin with.
The lesson to learn here is to fact check. Make your own decisions. Do not let anyone else decide where you stand. This is the age of transparency, but only if we choose to utilize all the tools we have been given.
