Smart television sets made by Samsung may be capturing personal information spoken by their owners and subsequently transmitting it to a third-party. This warning is based off the research of The Daily Beast, which in reviewing the SmartTV supplement to Samsung’s privacy policy discovered the following sentence:
“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.”
Samsung has not identified the third-party. However, Corynne McSherry, an intellectual property lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), reasons that the company must be providing speech-to-text services for Samsung. “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,” McSherry adds. In a statement made to The Daily Beast, Samsung emphasizes the point that it incorporates “industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption” into all of its products. The company goes on to state that users can disable Voice Recognition and use predefined voice commands to operate their sets, which will prevent the SmartTVs from listening in on their conversations. However, the policy does note that a total opt-out is impossible: “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.” This has left many users outraged, including Parker Higgins, an EFF activist who tweeted Samsung’s privacy policy and compared it to George Orwell’s novel 1984. This is not the first time SmartTVs have fallen under public scrutiny for potential breaches of privacy. In October of 2014, Michael Price published a story on Slate in which he explained how his SmartTV logged his viewing hours and tracked what websites he visited. He also discussed how his SmartTV was able to use Voice Recognition to listen in on people’s conversations, providing a statement of warning that in many respects echoes Samsung’s privacy policy: “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.” Price never named the maker of the television set, so it is unclear whether he was referring to a product made by Samsung.
