Are You Sure About Your TV?

Good evening, friends! Modern household gadgets are constantly surprising us—not just with a wealth of new features, but also with the double-edged nature of how these features can be used. Recently, it became known that Samsung TVs are actually listening in on you. This applies to smart TVs that are always connected to the Internet. They have a voice control feature that helps you find the remote, but for this to work, the TV has to be constantly listening to everything you say. All your words are saved, processed, and transmitted over the network.

We’ve already gotten used to computers and smartphones doing this. Microphones and cameras are, by default, always active. On the iPhone, the Siri voice recognition system is supposed to listen only when you press a special button, but in reality, it’s always on. The same goes for Android and “OK Google,” as well as Amazon’s Echo system. Facebook can activate your smartphone’s microphone when you use their app.

Gmail listens to everything you type and shows ads based on that. Facebook does the same.

What About Smart TVs?

Samsung sends your data to what the contract calls a “third party.” Researchers have found that this third party is a company called Nuance, whose job is to convert voice to text. Samsung claims that the data is deleted afterward, but it’s hard to believe that completely.

The most dangerous part is that this data is a goldmine for criminals. The only sentence in Samsung’s privacy policy that addresses this—one that almost no one reads—says: “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