alt Hacker NewsIn an age where AI can search vast amounts of data having something in your home or workplace turning what it hears into text looks like a problem waiting to happen.
E.g. As soon as someone proves LG, Samsung, etc. recorded and stored credit card details and knowingly have weak security this is going to be a massive business liability.
That's an easy one to put a compensation figure on but there's probably all sorts of other exploits waiting to happen.
I think the most egregious thing here is that if you don't give the TV a network connection that it will actively search for other ways to get the data back to LG such as open WIFI.
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The value of this data to the NSA, Mossad etc is probably the only thing keeping it secure.
Never in human history has a government had the means to simultaneously spy on millions of people, to use everyday private conversations to categorise them into various threats to the state, and better yet these tech companies can still sell the commercially valuable side of this to advertisers.
Based on historical records, I would say not much will happen to these companies. Interested to see what the EU will do though
> E.g. As soon as someone proves LG, Samsung, etc. recorded and stored credit card details and knowingly have weak security this is going to be a massive business liability.
My tinfoil hat believes that they've already accounted for this as the price of doing business. They will have already budgeted for the fines that they might incur, pay them off and continue as normal while people become accustomed to it.
At that point network isolation stops looking like a privacy preference and starts looking like an adversarial relationship with a product you own
>this is going to be a massive business liability.
No. this is going to go "unnoticed" or at least unactioned. These are surveilance devices - compromising their value as source of surveilance is neither in the interest of industry (who are selling and buying the surveilance) or government (who are buying and acting on it). The age of shame is over. Current world goernments have flourished under the premise of being terrible, horrible, awful, evil enterprises that do bad for the sake of either being bad or enriching the bad - a consumer device with a ToS that says it will spy on you spying on people is nothing now. Laws be damned, because laws mean nothing now. These devices bery well may soon be the only lawfully available devices in the consumer market precisely because of their surveilance capabilities. Governments are reluctanty catching up to the capabilities of digital technologies, and they're finding them more useful now than ever before. We will be burning witches again before we ever prosecute tech companies for doing bad things.
You would think that would matter, that they’re basically violating all known PII/HIPAA/GDPR/National security standards and god knows what else, but I expect at most some class action down the line.
At the same time an average citizen can sue and win against these corporations. I never ended up Suing because all companies settled once I showed the evidence. So try it out. Will get expensive for them to use lawyers against ai and still lose.
>In an age where AI can search vast amounts of data having something in your home or workplace turning what it hears into text looks like a problem waiting to happen.
That's understating the problem. With or without AI, this should be cause enough to shut down a company or at least their specific product division.
>E.g. As soon as someone proves LG, Samsung, etc. recorded and stored credit card details and knowingly have weak security this is going to be a massive business liability.
They're going to be fine. A slap on the wrist at best.