New York, NY, February 14, 2015 -(TerraUS, mhUSA)-
In a bizarre turn of events, Samsung ' s new line of smart TV ' s are quite smarter then the manufacturer have set them out to be; they can listen to your conversations and collect as much voice data as it wants to turn it over to third parties, as Samsumg has told media outlets already.

The new practice has irated customers, since the so called smart TV ' s will indiscriminately collect every single word you speak in front of them it will then store it and send it to third parties to be analized!, talk about spying on people.

Samsumg is now telling customers not to discuss personal information in front of their smart television set. The warning applies to TV viewers who control their Samsung Smart TV using its voice activation feature.

When the feature is active, such TV sets ʻʻlistenʼʼ to what is said and may share what they hear with Samsung or third parties, it said. Privacy campaigners said the technology smacked of the telescreens, in George Orwell ' s 1984, which spied on citizens.

The warning came to light via a story in online news magazine the Daily Beast which published an excerpt of a section of Samsung ' s privacy policy for its net-connected Smart TV sets. These record what is said when a button on a remote control is pressed.

The policy explains that the TV set will be listening to people in the same room to try to spot when commands or queries are issued via the remote. It goes on to say: ʻʻIf your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.ʼʼ

Soon after, an activist for the EFF circulated the policy statement on Twitter comparing it to George Orwell ' s description of the telescreens in his novel 1984 that listen to what people say in their homes.

In response to the widespread sharing of its policy statement, Samsung has issued a statement to clarify how voice activation works. It emphasised that the voice recognition feature is activated using the TV ' s remote control.

ʻʻThe new practice has irated customers, since the so called smart TV ' s will indiscriminately collect every single word you speak in front of them it will then store it and send it to third parties to be analized!, talk about spying on people. ʼʼ

It said the privacy policy was an attempt to be transparent with owners in order to help them make informed choices about whether to use some features on its Smart TV sets, adding that it took consumer privacy ʻʻvery seriouslyʼʼ.

Samsung said: ʻʻIf a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search. 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.ʼʼ

It added that it did not retain voice data or sell the audio being captured. Smart-TV owners would always know if voice activation was turned on because a microphone icon would be visible on the screen, it said. The third party handling the translation from speech to text is a firm called Nuance,




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