The company’s voice-recognition software allows viewers to communicate with their television by talking to it. It is 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 change it for them by uttering a few words.
This is worrying people, largely because of 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 in which families and friends can talk about anything and everything.
“Don’t talk about tax evasion, drug use,” the Daily Beast warns.
Sensitive information, such as “device identifiers,” could potentially be passed to law enforcement, advertisers, and other groups, according to Samsung. “If the transmission is not encrypted, a SmartHacker could conceivably turn your TV into an eavesdropping device,” the website adds.
It is important to note that the function operates in this way only when the voice recognition is turned on. But that feature is probably one of the main draws to the new technology.
Samsung has responded to the privacy concerns in a statement to The Daily Beast:
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. 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.
Similar concerns were also raised about Siri in the US. The service also transmits information to a third party. This blog first pointed out the voice-recognition function when it arrived on the iPhone 4S.
On the blog, Simon Fodden says he spoke to someone at Apple who told him “the Siri dictation feature is sent to servers that reside in the US and that Apple, its related companies and agents have access to the contents of what is dictated.”
This article originally appeared in Business Insider. Copyright 2015.
