Shhhh.... Not in Front of the Kids TV

Fortunately, my Samsung TV is not that smart, but it makes you think!

News this week that Samsung smart TV sends data about your livingroom utterances to every man and his dog is yet another example that we have surrendered our privacy to consumerism. Once your privacy is gone, you'll never get it back.

Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition."

Sources & References:

• The Register: Your Samsung smart telly: WATCH IT, it's watching you watch it

Quick Tip - Identify Sites That Share Your GMAIL Address

A fascinating article on MaximumPC gave me a heads up on a little trick to keep my gmail address private (or, at least, find out who's sharing it without my permission).

When signing up for online accounts, append your normal gamil account with a unique identifier, thus: john+xxx@gmail.com. Where xxx is a unique string of arbitrary length that identifies a particular supplier or website.

For instance, if your email address is john.komphix@gmail.com and you want to sign up for komphix newsletters, you could append your email address to be john.komphix+komphix@gmail.com

Brilliant!

The whole article is worthy of your time if you want to make the most of your gmail account.

Sources & References:

• Maximum PC Magazine: 35 Cool Gmail Tips You Probably Don't Use (but Should!) - Updated! Paul Lilly (see page 5)