Samsung: Don’t have discussions in front of our voice-activated TVs — information collected will be sold to third parties

Following an online report by the Daily Beast, in which the web-based news magazine published an excerpt of a section of Samsung’s privacy policy for its net-connected Smart TV sets, the South Korea-based electronics provider has issued a formal warning to its customers that they should not have discussions that include personal information in front of the actual, physical televisions, as any details the device picks up will be recorded and sold to third parties.

The policy that the Daily Beast published explains that these TVs are constantly listening to people in the same room so as to spot when commands are issued. The legal language reads: “If your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.” 

Corynne McSherry, an intellectual property lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works on digital rights issues, told the Daily Beast that the third party in reference is, in all likelihood, the company providing speech-to-text conversion for Samsung.

She added: “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.”

The Daily Beast story went viral and in order to combat the widespread sharing of its policy statement, Samsun issued a clarification of how its voice activation technology works, and explained that the privacy policy was its way of being transparent with owners in order to help them make informed choices about whether to use some features on its SmartTVs.
“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 explained. “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.”

The company added that it didn’t retain voice data or sell the audio being captured, and that SmartTV owners should be mindful of when voice activation was turned on because a microphone icon is visible on the screen. 

For those curious, the third-party handling the translation from speech to text still has yet to be named.

Via BBC