Samsung claims that their SmartTVs do not monitor living room conversations

Several days ago, The Daily Beast reported that Samsung SmartTVs were pretty much spying on its customers thanks to language buried in the “privacy policy” that allowed for Samsung’s Internet-connected SmartTV to use its voice command feature to possibly capture words stated by people around it.

“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.” – Samsung Policy

To be fair, The Daily Beast did note that it looked as if Samsung was simply collecting voice commands to improve the TV’s performance. As the EFF stated, “that language could be interpreted pretty broadly.” Such as, who is this third party? Is the data encrypted?

Now, Samsung’s official blog has answered most of the questions asked and announced that they will be changing their privacy policy to correct the confusing language.

In the statement, Samsung claims that they do in fact encrypt data sent to 3rd parties and that the 3rd party in this case was Nuance Communications who converted the customers voice commands to text and to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you.

Basically, Samsung is making it clear that the voice commands and associated texts will only be used to improve voice commands in the future.