Business

Samsung doesn’t want you to talk about your personal info in front of its TVs

Samsung warns customers not to discuss personal information in front of smart TVs.

by
Kevin Raposo
February 15, 2016

Samsung warns customers not to discuss personal information in front of smart TVs.

As if privacy couldn’t be more of a hot topic these days, along comes Samsung with a bombshell after confirming that its “smart TVs” are peeping into every customers’ conversations. The most fucked part of it all is the company’s response. This is more or less what they’re saying: “don’t speak about personal information while near the TV sets.”

This is like a refrigerator company saying “don’t eat the food that you store in here.”

https://twitter.com/xor/status/564356757007261696/photo/1

So, the proof is in Samsung’s own words:

“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.”

They confirm that the voice activation feature on its Smart TVs are capable of capturing nearby conversations. From there, the TV’s share all of that information, including the sensitive stuff, to Samsung as well as third-party services.

After this news was released, Samsung issued a statement clearing up the air on how its voice activation feature works:

“If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search,” Samsung said in a statement. “At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV.”

It’s also noted in that particular statement that Samsung does not retain or sell the voice data, but at the same time they failed to name the third party that translates users’ speech.

So what’s the moral of the story here? We’re all fucking doomed, that’s it.