Samsung Alarms People with Privacy Policy About Eavesdropping Smart TVs
A provision in Samsung’s privacy policy set off the web tonight over something that sounds, to put it lightly, a little creepy. If you have a Samsung SmartTV, you can control it with voice commands, which sounds nifty, except for one minor thing.
The idea behind it is whatever you say in front of the TV, they record and send off to third-party services. Their privacy policy, TechCrunch reports, 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 through your use of Voice Recognition.”
So in other words, if you just have a conversation around your Samsung SmartTV, it may pick up this information, even if it’s “sensitive information,” and send it to third-party services.
The reaction was obviously not positive, with this tweet from an EFF activist getting lots and lots of retweets:
Left: Samsung SmartTV privacy policy, warning users not to discuss personal info in front of their TV
Right: 1984 pic.twitter.com/osywjYKV3W
— Parker Higgins (@xor) February 8, 2015
Samsung did issue a statement clarifying their privacy policy after the earlier report. Here’s their full statement:
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. Should consumers enable the voice recognition capability, the voice data consists of TV commands, or search sentences, only. Users can easily recognize if the voice recognition feature is activated because a microphone icon appears on the screen.
Samsung does not retain voice data or sell it to third parties. If a consumer consents 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.
[image via 360b]
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