Samsung Confirms ‘Smart TV’ Sets Listens To Customers Every Word

Samsung have admitted that its smart TV sets are listening in on customers conversations, and have warned people not to speak about personal information while near their TV sets. 

The company have said that the voice activation feature captures all nearby conversations and can share the information it collects with third-party services.

Theweek.com reports:

The news comes after Shane Harris at The Daily Beast pointed out a troubling line in Samsung’s privacy policy: “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 has now issued a new statement clarifying how the voice activation feature works. “If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search,” Samsung said in a statement. “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.”

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

The company added that it does not retain or sell the voice data, but it didn’t name the third party that translates users’ speech.