Feb 24, 2015 Posted by AGA Editor

Yes, Your Samsung Smart TV Does Listen To Your Private Conversations

The revelation that Samsung’s Smart TV can and will listen to your conversations, and will share the details with a third party is just more proof we are ignorant about what is going on around us.

Yes, you read that right. Samsung’s Smart TV can will listen to your conversations. Here’s the actual language from the privacy policy itself:

Voice Recognition: You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands.
If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. 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 through your use of Voice Recognition.

This is direct from Samsungs privacy policy and can be viewed here…
http://www.samsung.com/sg/info/privacy/smarttv.html

While the privacy policy statement is disturbing in its own right, the extent of how crazy it is has to do with the fact that this information will be shared with a “third party.” This begs the question, who is this third party?

You should have concerns. First, this seems very vulnerabal to hackers. So even if we can be assured that Samsung and the third party isn’t up to anything sneaky, is the entire process secure enough to protect ourselves from hackers, or an intelligence agency like the NSA? I have my doubts.

Beyond this, there is an equally important concern regarding how this trend might progress into the future, and how it will future erode personal privacy if we don’t address it now.

Take Facebook for example. In its early days it was a seemingly benign, efficient and enjoyable way to stay in touch with friends and reconnect with old ones. It lured in over a billion users and then essentially decided to turn on all of them without really ever letting anyone know in order to make an incredible amount of money.

Although it might be completely innocent right now, that in no way, shape or form means it will remain that way. In fact, once everyone is hooked on SmartTVs and forgets about this whole hubbub, these companies could eagerly turn around and sell all of your private conversation details to advertisers or worse be used against you.

Something too think about anyway.

Are you awake Yet?