If you own a Samsung smart television, be careful of what you say in your living room because your TV could be eavesdropping on you and sharing your private conversations with third parties.
The company’s privacy policy indicates that Samsung TVs have the potential to listen to personal information and send that to third parties through a voice-command feature.
The policy is available on Samsung’s website. The South Korean tech giant told C/Net that they do not collect private information or sell it to third parties. They respect their consumer’ privacy. The data is collected to improve the performance of TV.
The voice-recognition software, which is activated when a microphone symbol comes up, enables Samsung Smart TV users to interact with their television by talking to it. There is no need to use a conventional remote control.
If users want to view another channel, all they need to do is to say a few words and their TV will change the channel.
Jon Healey, a reporter at Los Angeles Times, says that the microphone, which is built into the remote control, listens to the sounds only when a user presses the “voice” button on the remote. Hitting that button causes a microphone symbol to appear on the screen of television. This alerts users that their Smart TV is ready to follow their instructions.
He further added that the remote will not collect information unless the user activates “voice interaction” that uses voice-recognition technology. In other words, pressing the voice button will activate a non-Internet-connected technology that pays attention to a limited number of keywords.
If users want to switch off the voice recognition feature, they can do so in the following way.
1. Go to the Setting menu and choose Smart Features.
2. Scroll down to Voice Recognition feature and turn it off.
Easy! – but remember to do it if you don’t want your words to go elsewhere.
