Samsung’s smart TV privacy policy has drawn ire of internet users as it allows Samsung as well as its partners to listen in on everything their customers users.
The policy reads: “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.”
For the voice command feature to work, third party software translates speech into text and sends the command back to the TV.
Users can turn off this feature, but that means they will not be able to use the voice recognition feature of Samsung’s smart TVs. Despite restricting voice data capture and transmission, Samsung will still be able to collect data about how people use the TV. Users can tell when the voice recognition feature is activated because a microphone appears on screen.
“While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it,” the policy states.
Samsung said in a statement that the data it captures is encrypted to keep it safe, and that smart TV owners can always disconnect their TVs from Wi-Fi if they want to keep their data safe.
Many saw the policy as a warning about the “internet of things” which some say could allow companies to collect more data on its users than ever before.
