The voice-command feature of the Samsung brand SmartTV comes with a disclaimer that has privacy activists alarmed, according to reports about a previously little-noticed passage in the paperwork for the advanced appliance.
"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," users are informed about halfway into the
SmartTV's almost 1,500-word "privacy policy."
The Daily Beast first reported on the provision in a story headlined, "Your Samsung SmartTV is Spying on You, Basically."
Samsung is the second smart-set maker to catch flack for the snooping capabilities of its products, after
LG was found to have put a data-recording feature in its televisions.
LG has since made the feature optional.
Collecting voice data for the SmartTV appears to be intended "to improve the TV's performance" in recognizing and correctly responding to voice commands such as requests for channel changes and particular programs, The Daily Beast reports.
But a privacy activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Corynne McSherry, told The Daily Beast, "If I were the customer, I might like to know who that third party was, and I’d definitely like to know whether my words were being transmitted in a secure form.”
Samsung issued a statement to The Daily Beast on Friday in response to the uproar assuring people that all SmartTVs employ "industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers' personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use."
Samsung also gave a
separate statement to the BBC explaining how the voice-command feature works, but it did not disclose who or what the third party is beyond saying, "the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV."
A SmartTV owner, Peter Kent, told the BBC that he was "a bit annoyed" at Samsung for putting the information about what gets recorded in an obscure place.
"Nobody reads the terms and conditions," he said.
"It makes me think twice" about using the voice recognition feature, he said.
In its privacy policy and public statements, Samsung says the feature can be de-activated in the television's settings menu, and is only switched on and in operation when a microphone logo is visible on the television screen.
But privacy activists remain uneasy.
"So it comes with a spooky Orwellian 'feature,' but you don't have to turn it on," Parker Higgins, also of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote on Twitter.
Higgins also offered a side-by-side comparison of the SmartTV' privacy boilerplate with a passage from George Orwell's "1984," that begins, "Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up … "
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