Samsung warns TVs eavesdrop
Policy reveals smart technology captures, transmits conversations.
SEOUL, South Korea — The owners of Samsung smart TVs will want to watch what they say in the living room. A microphone in the TV’s remote control may be listening. And sharing.
Voice-recognition technology in the South Korean company’s Internet-connected TVs captures and transmits nearby conversations.
The potential for TVs to eavesdrop is revealed in Samsung’s smart TV privacy policy available on its website.
“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,” the policy said.
For the voice command feature to work, the TV listens for speech, which is translated by third-party software provider Nuance Communications Inc. into text and sent back to the TV as a command. The TV also transmits other information, including its unique identifier.
Samsung said data collection is aimed at improving TV performance, but users can disable it.
In a statement, the company said it takes consumer privacy “very seriously.”
“We employ industrystandard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers’ personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use.”
Later Tuesday, in an apparent response to stories about the voice-recognition option, Samsung said in an official blog post that the system works in two ways:
“The first is through an
embedded microphone inside the TV set that responds to simple predetermined TV commands such as changing the channel and increasing the volume. Voice data is neither stored nor transmitted in using these predetermined commands.
“The second microphone, which is inside the remote control, requires interaction with a server because it is used for searching content. A user, for example, can speak into the remote control requesting the search of particular TV programs (ex: “Recommend a good Sci-Fi movie”). This interaction works like most any other voice recognition service available on other products including smartphones and tablets.”
It is not the first time that smart TVs sparked privacy concerns. In 2013, the owner of an LG Electronics smart TV revealed it was sending information about his viewing habits back to the company without consent and without encrypting data.
LG has also experimented with displaying targeted ads on its smart TVs, which requires collecting and utilizing user data, such as location, age and gender.
The data collection practices on Samsung’s TVs are contained in the user agreements, the so-called click-to-agree screen found during the setup of most modern technology. Google Inc., LinkedIn Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have been sued by customers over how they collect data, and Apple Inc. last year updated privacy policies to reassure users that their data are safe.
“If you’re watching TV, TV should not be watching you back,” Julia Horwitz, a consumer protection counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Bloomberg Television. “Consumers, like the company, don’t know what will happen after the data is collected.”
Samsung released a challenger to Google’s Android software for big-screen TVs last month as the South Korean company tries to capitalize on the burgeoning interest in smart-home technology. All of its smart TVs this year will use its Tizen operating system as the company pushes to have more of its appliances connected to the Web.