Samsung Smart TVs are Spying on You

The company has announced that their new Smart TVs are going to have the voice recognition feature and they have put in this tool to make their product a little better.

So we all have to admit now that Samsung is being a bit creepy. They say that they have put in a voice recognition software so that they can hear people and claim that this will help them make a better product. This is a huge privacy intrusion and it has upset many Samsung users.

Samsung Smart TV has the ability to connect to the computers and that is how they will be able to send data back to Samsung. Samsung on the other hand say that their voice recognition tool will help the users in interacting with their Smart TV.

They say that the user will be able to give commands to their TV with this feature. With this they also tell their customers that Samsung will collect information and any associated texts and this will help them with their product improvement.

Samsung also warns their customers that whenever you are giving the commands, make sure that you aren’t giving away any sensitive information because it will be among the data captured which will be sent to a third party.

So it is safe to say that we are going to live in a weird future where TV screens will be able to hear our conversations and the fact that nothing we say is safe from the outside world. And Samsung forces its users to agree to its terms & conditions.

If you don’t agree to their terms, you won’t get the voice recognition feature. But then again how can one allow them to give all of their personal data to their own advertisers. It is kind of hilarious how Samsung try to cover their creepiness.

Instead they tell their users to not say something private in front of the TV. So Samsung also allows it users to disable this voice recognition feature.

You can do that and use your Smart TV through a remote control or you can change the TV settings so that you can give the basic voice commands to your TV. But still Samsung will collect some user data and text based inputs for their data mining purposes.

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 issued the below statement to TechCrunch in response to the Samsung Privacy Policy and spying news.

“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.”

Samsung also states that all those consumers that have “product concerns or questions” should contact the company directly.