Samsung SmartTVs snoop on viewers using voice-recognition feature

Samsung’s Internet-connected SmartTV may be listening to more than just your voice commands.

Buried in the privacy policy for the Samsung device, which lets viewers verbally change channels without picking up a remote, is a paragraph warning users that the TV’s voice recognition software might also pick up private conversations and send them to an unspecified “third party,” as first reported by The Daily Beast.

“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,” the policy says.

The privacy policy does not name the third party with whom the voice data is shared, and Samsung did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Parker Higgins, an activist from the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, took to Twitter to compare the policy side-by-side with a passage from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”

Higgins quoted Orwell’s description from the novel, published in 1949, of the ubiquitous “telescreens” like the one in the main character’s living room: “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.”

In response to concerns raised over the policy, Samsung has said that users can disable the TV’s voice recognition feature.

“If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search. 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,” a Samsung spokesman told the Guardian newspaper.

The company also told the Guardian that it takes consumer privacy seriously. “In all of our SmartTVs any data gathering or their use is carried out with utmost transparency and we provide meaningful options for consumers to freely choose or to opt out of a service,” it said. “We employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers’ personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use.”

Voice control features have been integrated into other devices including phones, such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s “Ok Google” and Microsoft’s Cortana.