Let's go to the other room so the TV won't hear us! With Samsung smart TVs you have to be careful what you say, especially when they're on.
Some who have bothered to read the fine print in Samsung's manual have discovered several paragraphs that contradict its privacy policy. The paragraphs concern the voice recognition feature and start off somewhat innocuously:
“To provide you with voice recognition capabilities, certain voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, such as your device ID) to a third-party service that converts speech to text to the extent necessary to provide your voice recognition capabilities.”
The next paragraph comes with the assumption:
“In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and related text so that we can provide you with voice recognition capabilities, evaluate, and improve features.”
As you can see from the above, Samsung can track people if they have their MAC addresses. Samsung records what you say along with your device's MAC address, and your ISP can track you!
The situation even gets worse in the last paragraph:
“You should be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information is among the data collected and transmitted to third parties through the use of the voice recognition feature.”
So, don't even think about using Internet Banking with Samsung open and whispering your password, because the Korean company will record your password and send it to third-party services.
Even worse, as Samsung states:
“If you do not enable the voice recognition feature, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features to control your TV using certain preset voice commands. If disabled, Samsung will not collect your spoken words, but may collect text and other usage data so that we can evaluate device performance and improve it.”
“You can disable voice recognition data collection at any time by visiting the Settings menu. However, this may prevent you from using all voice recognition features.”
Samsung of course states in its privacy policy that all data it collects is encrypted and cannot be used by unauthorized persons.
But the hacks of Anthem, Target, Sony, and many other companies are real. Of course, all of the aforementioned companies had made similar commitments and extolled the effectiveness of their security.
