Samsung Warns Customers : Avoid Discussing Personal Info In Front Of Your Smart TV

Pic From Samsung

Welcome to 2015 mums and dads. It seems these days that private discussions in your front room may not be so well, private, after all as anyone with a Samsung TV may be having their conversations recorded and passed on.

The warning from Samsung applies to people who control their Samsung Smart TV using its voice activation feature.  These sets will “listen” to every conversation held in front of them, pick up on key words, and then may share details with Samsung or even third parties. Scary stuff eh?

The warning came after excerpts from Samsung’s privacy policy were circulated online, with the notable sentence being :

“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 have responded by stating that customers will know if the voice activation is on as a “microphone icon would be visible on the screen”. I realised that on my smart TV but thought it was just that, not that everything discussed in my home may be being recorded and potentially passed on.

If these recordings are used to improve the service from Samsung, as some people have suggested does it really matter? Surely this information should be clearly displayed and not buried in masses of text in a privacy policy, that let’s be honest very few people read?

As a parent another of my concerns is conversations that have taken place in the privacy of my home, or so I assumed, about my daughter. There’s legislation in place to protect minors in the UK and now it seems everything that has been discussed could have potentially been listened to and read by a third party. More worryingly, no one even seems to know who they are.

Samsung have confirmed that they “do not retain voice data or sell the audio being captured” All well and good but enough? I’m not convinced. Who is reading what’s been said in my home? Where does it end up? And perhaps most importantly, Why didn’t you make this clearer from the outset Samsung?