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Comment by luma | Hacker News Reader

Dog bark and baby crying detection are advertised features for SmartThings integrations. Door bell and door knocking are also included, this is surfaced directly if you hook the TV or sound bar into SmartThings.

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I had to check this and it's true. Not saying Samsung or 3rd parties don't take advantage of any data they can collect, but the story the tweets tell is super biased against them. Here, the detection seems limited to specific pattens required for a particular feature.

In fairness, they have not earned the benefit of the doubt based on past behavior.

These folks recently did tests on major TV brands, not accepting the on-device consent forms, and then recording how much data they continued to send after consent was denied (which itself is not always possible). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_GK06_3UY8

Samsung was the single brand reviewed which actually stopped sending data after the user told it to do so.

I'm pretty sure it was actually LG?

Yep, lg. After all, they believe that own your living room and their actions reflect this.

In February Samsung agreed to stop collecting the data when opted out in the US after a few lawsuits were lining up. LG was the target of a different lawsuit in Texas which they settled and then wrote up a forced arbitration clause and doubled-down on data collection, even when opted out.

Don't buy LG TVs.

Oh don't worry, shitty WebOS is enough to put me off that (I unfortunately own one). However in this case we were talking specifically about that recent study of the effects of opt-outs, and for LG TVs the opt-out did result in the no longer detecting any tracking.

Still, calling it "PRIVACY HORROR" as per original post is typical twitter-style sensation seeking. It's an opt-in dog barking detection that causes local chip to listen for... dog barking

But does this mean they don't turn this on by default resell that data? X house has dogs or whatever?

We clearly need a whole new privacy framework where everything is optional and opt-in, plus open software to monitor this compliance.

At this point everyone knows you have a cat, dog or baby. Facebook, Instagram can scan your photos and see it. Same with Google via Photos' latest privacy changes. Google also knows if you ever get receipts emailed to you. Your credit card company and bank know, the CC company resells that data too. Shit, Keurig knows because their smart coffee maker scans the network and sees your baby monitor or smart pet food dispenser. All these companies are rediscovering and selling the same basic facts about you and your household.

If they wanted to know if you had dogs or babies and wanted to spy on you, they'd just transcribe the audio. People that have dogs or babies talk about them. Going to the effort to detect these and advertise it as a feature so you can secretly use it for marketing doesn't make a lot of sense.

I will add: Use the TV as a HUB for all IOT, light sensor so you know when the light is on or someone passes in front of the TV and there are some others but I can't remember now. They are all advertised in the Smart Things app.

I hate 2 things about my samsung tv's (I have 4 only samsung): the simplistic remote and ads on home screen. Even with custom dns sometimes they get through.

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