Smart TV Face Monitoring for Children Privacy

Many of the modern Television (TV) sets and digital TV set-top boxes are endowed with Smart TV capabilities. Those include computing and connectivity to online services such as video on demand, online games and even sports and healthcare. A lot of Smart TV devices also have built-in cameras, microphones and other sensors that provide for environmental monitoring and consequent context dependent feedback. Such Smart TV capabilities, however, can lead to privacy violations through unwanted tracking and user profiling by broadcasters and other service providers. There is a concern when underage users such as children who may not fully understand the concept of privacy are involved in using the Smart TV services. To address this issue, face recognition experiments were conducted with the IBM's Watson and the Microsoft's Face Application Programming Interface to reveal the potential of integrating facial recognition in future privacy aware Smart TV services.