Your Samsung smart TV is capturing your conversations.
Samsung’s privacy policy for an internet connected smart tv with voice commands reads, “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.”
This could be an attempt to train your smart tv to use voice commands. “It looks like they are using a third-party service to convert speech to text, so that’s most of what is being disclosed here,” said Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
But, said McSherry, “If I were the customer, I might like to know who that third party was, and I’d definitely like to know whether my words were being transmitted in a secure form.” If the transmission is not encrypted, a SmartHacker could conceivably turn your TV into an eavesdropping device.
Don’t forget the government has a backdoor into all this technology, so maybe Samsung doesn’t care but I’ll bet Uncle Sam would flip a switch if they thought you were one of those dangerous tea party types.