Samsung Smart TVs are recording personal conversations: report

Samsung is warning its Smart TV users not to discuss anything private in front of its televisions, because the conversations are recorded.

Samsung’s Smart TV privacy policy states: “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.”

Samsung explained that if a consumer consents to and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search.

“At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV,” said Samsung.

Samsung has now released a statement, saying that its Smart TVs do not monitor living room conversations.

Samsung said its privacy policy has led to confusion, and that it has clarified its privacy policy to better explain what actually occurs.

You can control your Smart TV, and use many of its features, with voice commands.

If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some interactive voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service provider (currently, Nuance Communications, Inc.) that converts your interactive voice commands to text and to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you.

In addition, 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. Samsung will collect your interactive voice commands only when you make a specific search request to the Smart TV by clicking the activation button either on the remote control or on your screen and speaking into the microphone on the remote control.

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.

You may disable Voice Recognition data collection at any time by visiting the “settings” menu. However, this may prevent you from using some of the Voice Recognition features.

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