Unplug your TV RIGHT NOW!
kidding 😛
It seems that Samsung’s latest privacy policy for their smart TVs has made a bit of noise online. The company’s voice-recognition feature note in question stated:
Samsung may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. 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.
I LOVE YOU MOTHER IN LAW!
The wording used in the policy was put into question by the Daily Beast who spotted the text first, and the reference to personal and sensitive information being transmitted to third parties has left a lot of people online disturbed. Now of course this doesn’t mean that Samsung is spying on you, although the language suggests it, but it’s more likely saying that the company will use the data it captures while the user is giving commands to improve the voice recognition experience itself.
Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously. In all of our Smart TVs we employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers’ personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use. Should consumers enable the voice recognition capability, the voice data consists of TV commands, or search sentences, only. Users can easily recognize if the voice recognition feature is activated because a microphone icon appears on the screen, a Samsung spokeswoman told CNET.
So, who are the third parties?
(crickets chirping)
