Those who use Samsung SmartTV’s voice recognition feature have been warned that personal conversations may be recorded and sent to third parties.
The television’s privacy policy tells users to be cautious about what they say when using the voice recognition feature, which is used to control the TV with a series of commands.
How will TV users feel, knowing there may be eavesdroppers?
A sentence in the privacy policy says that “Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features.”
Adding:
“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.”
Who are the 3rd parties?
This has sparked controversy about who the third parties are and how they would use the information sent to them.
A Samsung spokesman told The Daily Beast:
“Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously. In all of our Smart TVs we employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers’ personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use.
“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.”
In addition, even people who don’t use the voice recognition feature have been warned that other data could be collected.
The privacy policy also said:
“If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands.
“While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it.”