Your Fancy New Curved Samsung Smart TV Is Eavesdropping on All Conversations, Whatever Room It's In

It's best to be discreet in front of your tv from here on in.

Samsung sells an awesomely powerful and nice looking smart tv with a curved screen for better viewing from anywhere in the room.

It has another cool feature as well: it can hear you, so when you want to change the channel or turn it off or complain about your sister-in-law or rant about your boss, it hears that, too. Oooops! You mean you didnt want it to record the family argument about who should go to the kitchen and fetch the next round of beer and pretzels? Well, you should have opted out. But then you probably didnt bother reading the instructions - just like 90 percent of the rest of the consuming public.

Dont feel badly. Even if you wanted to opt out, the device still records lots of good stuff: and all in the interest of perfecting the service and its delivery! How neat: it's all about you! Those naysayers and negativos just dont understand. If some additional data helps Samsung and its partners deliver services that their analysis of your data - to say nothing of your voice traffic - suggests you want, well, what's the problem?

You will probably want to be a bit more careful in front of your thermostat, refrigerator, electric wine opener and pacemaker, while you're at it. And don't forget your smartphone. Machines are just so sensitive these days. JL

Katherine Rushton reports in the Daily Mail:

‘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.’
If you settle down to watch television this evening, you might want to think twice about what you say out loud.

Samsung has warned owners of its internet-connected ‘smart TV’ that anything they discuss while sitting near the device may be overheard.

The popular televisions are voice activated, so users can switch channels or ask for suggestions of what to watch simply by giving a verbal command. 

The Voice Recognition feature has to be enabled by the user, and they agree to let it track their conversations when they accept the TV's terms and conditions. Samsung said it sends voice commands, 'along with information about [the] device, including device identifiers' to a third-party service

However, the technology which allows this to happen has a worrying side effect: it records everything else that goes on near the television.

A clause in the Korean firm’s privacy policy warns: ‘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.’

That means it could, for example, record a family argument going on in the living room. Companies that use the televisions in boardrooms risk sharing confidential information such as employees’ salaries or business strategies.

Privacy campaigners drew comparisons between the TVs and ‘Big Brother’ – the authoritarian state which watches people’s every move in 1984, the dystopian novel by George Orwell.

Renate Samson, of Big Brother Watch, a campaign group named after this very notion, said: ‘This thing is going to be in your house, listening in on you.

‘Samsung say they are providing you with a service, but really the only service you need from a television is to watch programmes.’

More than half of smart TVs sold in Britain are made by Samsung.

The company says its televisions constantly listen out for simple commands to switch on or change channel, which are interpreted by the machine itself. 

However, it can only process more complicated requests by recording users’ speech and sending it to a third-party company called Nuance, in the US. 

That firm then sends the data to a computer server, which translates it into text and sends a response.

To give these complex commands, viewers must press a button on the remote control as they speak, and during that time, anything within ‘earshot’ will be collected.

 The data is encrypted, but can be listened to by authorised Nuance staff. 

Last year, IT consultant Jason Huntley realised his LG smart TV was tracking his family’s viewing habits and even knew his children’s names because he had watched a family video on his set. An LG set is pictured

Samsung introduce their curved TV screen (2014)

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY

SMART TVs are television sets that link to the internet, allowing viewers to browse the web or watch programmes on demand, for example on BBC iPlayer

Most are voice activated, so users can change channels without the remote control

The TVs do this by constantly listening to the discussions around them, ‘filtering’ for simple key words, such as ‘turn on’

When they hear these predefined commands, they carry out the instructions

To give a more complex command – such as a request to recommend a good programme – users must hold down a button as they speak

Most smart TVs then record the user’s speech, and send it via the internet to a powerful computer, which processes it and sends a response back to the TV set

This has to be done remotely because it takes far more computing power than there is in an affordable home TV

141 million smart TVs will be sold worldwide this year, and more than half of TVs sold are now ‘smart’ models

The technology giant remained tight-lipped about whether it then keeps users’ data, only saying that it does not sell information on, and that it operates within privacy laws, which vary by country.

Professor Peter Sommer, a digital forensics expert who has lectured at the London School of Economics, said there was ‘no reason’ Samsung would not be storing up data. 

‘The fear is they could be building up a pattern of your preferences, or learning your voice,’ he said.

Users can stop Samsung from recording their conversations by turning voice recognition off.

However, even then, the firm collects certain information. 

Its privacy policy says that, if the feature is turned off: ‘While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it.’

Renate Samson slammed Samsung for forcing people to ‘opt out’ of recordings, rather than giving them the option to opt in. 

‘It is the wrong way to go about it, and even if you do opt out, you can’t guarantee [your privacy],’ she said.