Samsung's SmartTV could 'spy' on your conversations through its voice-command feature
The company's voice recognition software allows viewers to communicate with their television by talking to it. It's enabled when a microphone symbol appears. Basically, instead of using a traditional remote control to change the channel, people can simply ask their Samsung TV to do it for them by uttering a few words.
This is worrying people, largely due to a warning hidden deep inside its "privacy policy." The Daily Beast first spotted this sentence, which reads:
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.
The Daily Beast makes the point that if peoples' living room conversations are being recorded and passed on, privacy is being undermined. Homes are supposed to be places where families and friends can talk about anything and everything.
"Don't talk about tax evasion, drug use," warns the Daily Beast.
It's pointed out that sensitive information, such as "device identifiers," according to Samsung, could potentially be passed to law enforcement, advertisers, and other groups.
Before going further, it's important to note that the function only operates in this way when the voice recognition is turned on. Although, that's probably one of the main draws to the new technology - "TV has never been this smart," Samsung says.
Samsung has responded to the privacy concerns in a statement:
Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously. In all of our Smart TVs we employ industry-standard security safeguards and practises, including data encryption, to secure consumers' personal information and prevent unauthorised collection or use," the company said in a statement to The Daily Beast. "Voice recognition, which allows the user to control the TV using voice commands, is a Samsung Smart TV feature, which can be activated or deactivated by the user. The TV owner can also disconnect the TV from the Wi-Fi network.