Not a lot here is any sort of surprise to anyone in the industry.
Always on audio is common on a whole swath of devices - any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it. ACR is table stakes for modern TVs reselling viewer data has driven down TV prices to the point where there is no going back.
The policy file here is how you build Tizen apps. It’s a list of specific features your app needs access to and certain levels of access (controlling the TV For example) require different levels of contractual relationships with Samsung.
Everything Samsung collects should be covered in their, very dense, TOS.
> any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it
Not technically true. More modern smart TVs (~post-2021) put speech recognition models for the hotword only onto the DSP, and then have the DSP wake up the CPU for further auditory processing when it detects a hotword or remote button press. There are major power-efficiency benefits to this, because the DSP uses a fraction of a watt and can easily keep running while the TV is sleeping, while the CPU, Internet, and rest of the circuitry is a major power hog. Your smart TV or streaming dongle would basically never sleep if it were forever running the audio capture.
For that matter, it's pretty rare for the device to actually run the speech recognition models on-device. Smart TV manufacturers are very sensitive to BOM costs, which means that their hardware is only powerful enough to run machine-learning models at the extreme high end of their product range. Most of the time the full audio gets streamed back to the Internet and the speech recognition & voice assistant gets run in the cloud, with commands streamed back to the TV.
I won't say that it never has always-on audio listening; a significant number of devices I tested did. But I'll say this comes because they're poorly implemented. The DSP hotwording approach requires coordination between hardware and software developers, oftentimes across companies, and it's more complex to implement and a lot of executives don't care about the marginal consumer benefit it gives. Many smart TVs just guzzle power when they're off instead.
If I use a TV like the ones you’ve worked on, and never ever connect it to any WiFi network since the day I bought it, is there any way they still call home and pass their payload? Like searching for and connecting to an open WiFi network, some kind of relay through another device over Bluetooth or any other way I haven’t thought of yet?
Really? There’s no “spyware free” marketing angle? Even Amazon has always sold a Kindle variant with no ads for $20 more.