Samsung SmartTVs May Record Conversations

A line in the privacy policy states the television may record conversation and send it to a third party

• By Matt Holden
• Feb 10, 2015

According to reports, a sentence in the privacy policy for Samsung’s SmartTV advises users that its nifty voice command feature might capture conversations in the living room.

“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 policy reads.

SmartTVs connect to the internet in order to use applications such as Netflix.

“It looks like they are using a third-party service to convert speech to text, so that’s most of what is being disclosed here,” said Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

McSherry says if she were the owner of one of the televisions that she would like to know who the third party is and if the conversations were being transmitted in a secure form.

Samsung’s privacy policy notes that in addition to voice commands being transmitted, information about your device, “including device identifiers,” may also be beamed over the Internet to the third-party service, “or to the extent necessary to provide Voice Recognition features to you.”

Samsung has since released a statement, saying. “Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously. 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."