Is a Smart TV really worth having if you have to worry about it telling everyone else your secrets? On Monday, Forbes reported that Samsung’s Smart TV shouldn’t be in the room if you’re trying to talk personal details. The TV, which is always on and uses voice recognition to carry out your commands, has the ability to hear your personal information , record it and send it right along to third parties.
Why would a TV do such a thing? For company research. The Daily Beast reports that Samsung’s privacy policy indicates that voice commands will be documented to better improve the service provided by the TV. Users aren’t stuck with an eavesdropper at all times though. The voice recognition feature can be turned off in the TV’s settings, but third party data collection will continue. If you go one step further and turn off the data collection, you can’t actually use the voice recognition service, which just leaves you with a very expensive TV.
So who is Samsung sending all your very important conversations to? Forbes indicates that it isn’t advertisers, but people who just want to make the service better. This is great news for the privacy of your information but that still raises the question of exactly who these third parties are and whether or not they’re being safe and secure when handling our data.
Due to certain contractual obligations, the company that is likely being used—Nuance—doesn’t usually allow clients to say if they are using the company’s service or not. In this case, Samsung is almost definitely using the voice recognition company for their Smart TV, as noted by multiple tech news websites . If it makes you feel better knowing when your information is going, you’re being a little mislead. Nuance also sends information off to third parties, so you’ll never really know where the end of the line is for your info.
Even if your voice command recordings aren’t important, if the voice data is not encrypted, hackers have the ability to hack into the TV and listen to every little thing that’s being said. Now that’s something to worry about.
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