If you’re feeling like ’80s one-hit-wonder Rockwell these days and think that someone’s always watching you, you might be right. Especially if you own a Samsung Smart TV.
The Smart TV, which can be controlled with voice recognition, can also record your conversations. Apparently, it’s such a concern, that the company had to address it in its 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 through your use of Voice Recognition.”
Of course, Samsung says you can disable the voice recognition feature in settings, but this “may prevent you” from using the voice-activated features, which is kind of the point of having a voice-activated TV, right?
So, where are your conversations about Pitch Perfect for the 50th time going?
Intellectual property director Corynne McSherry of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the Daily Beast: “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.”
According to BBC Tech, An EEF activist took to Twitter, comparing the Samsung Smart TVs to the telescreens that listen in on conversations in George Orwell’s 1984.
Left: Samsung SmartTV privacy policy, warning users not to discuss personal info in front of their TV
Right: 1984 pic.twitter.com/osywjYKV3W— Parker Higgins (@xor) February 8, 2015
Samsung has released a statement saying that the privacy policy was meant to be transparent with consumers and that it takes privacy “very seriously,” according to the BBC.
And while yes, you probably shouldn’t discuss anything illegal or disparaging in front of your Smart TV, we imagine most recorded conversations probably sound like this: