Samsung is warning customers about discussing personal information in front of their smart television set.

Samsung is warning customers about discussing 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.
Such TV sets "listen" to some of what is said in front of them
and may share details 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.
Data sharing

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.


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: "If your spoken
words include personal or other sensitive information, that
information will be among the data captured and transmitted
to a third party."

Corynne McSherry, an intellectual property lawyer for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which campaigns on
digital rights issues, told the Daily Beast that the third party
was probably the company providing speech-to-text
conversion for Samsung.

She added: "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."
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.

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 "very seriously".

Samsung said: "If 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."
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, which specialises in voice recognition,
Samsung has confirmed to the BBC.

Samsung is not the first maker of a smart, net-connected TV
to run into problems with the data the set collects. In late
2013, a UK IT consultant found his LG TV was gathering
information about his viewing habits.

Publicity about the issue led LG to create a software update
which ensured data collection was turned off for those who
did not want to share information.