New gadgets often make it to the headlines, especially with the rapid evolution of smart devices. For the past week, Samsung Smart TVs seem to have occupied much of that space, and it certainly is not the kind of publicity that Samsung's public relations office would have liked.
While the Samsung website brags that “TV Has Never Been This Smart,” the watchdogs and users are starting to anxiously question if smart gadgets have in fact become too smart . The commotion was brought on when techies who actually read the privacy policy spotted this phrase:
“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.”
It is hard to deny that the wording of this particular phrase is worrisome, and some news outlets, such as The Independent and CNN, showed no reluctance in presenting the story as part of a conspiracy. Headlines suggested that our smart gadgets are spying on us, and some authors even linked this phrase to George Orwell’s 1984 where he writes, “any sound that Winston made, above the level of a low whisper, would be picked up by it” – with the Thought Police on the other end.
Meanwhile, review websites such as CNet and BGR shared more reasonable explanations as to what the situation might be.
Although a few Samsung TV models have some voice functions, most of them require that the user actively presses a button on the remote control before the TV will start listening. The tech reviews also clarify that for the voice recognition feature to be activated, the user has to first agree to both Samsung Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Furthermore, the user has to use cues such as “Hi TV” to start giving the TV spoken commands.
The controversial phrase meant that while the voice recognition feature is active, the TV set will pick up on any personal conversations. Along with the commands, it will be sent to a third party who translates the audio commands to text that the TV set can process.
What does all this mean in layman's terms? Your Samsung television is only listening if you are using the voice recognition feature. So no need to whisper if you are fine with using the remote control.
To reassure users, Samsung changed the phrase to read as follows, and obviously also added instructions as to how to turn the feature off.
Voice Recognition You can control your Smart TV, and use many of its features, with voice commands.
If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some interactive voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service provider (currently, Nuance Communications, Inc.) that converts your interactive voice commands to text and to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Samsung will collect your interactive voice commands only when you make a specific search request to the Smart TV by clicking the activation button either on the remote control or on your screen and speaking into the microphone on the remote control.
If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands.
You may disable Voice Recognition data collection at any time by visiting the “settings” menu. However, this may prevent you from using some of the Voice Recognition features.