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Barometer

What Samsung’s new TVs owe to Jeremy Bentham

Plus: How far did Japanese prices deflate? And just how dangerous are lorries?

14 February 2015

9:00 AM

14 February 2015

9:00 AM

Watching brief

Samsung warned users of its voice-activated televisions that what they said in front of the TV could be transmitted to other people. The story attracted comparison with the telescreens in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the principle of keeping a population under control by surveillance was foreseen a century earlier by Jeremy Bentham.

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