Orwell and Samsung - Smart TV's now listen to your every word, and share them

[David Guyatt]

People should get off their lazy backsides and fight this to the death by firstly boycotting all Samsung products. Make them technically remove the ability -not just reverse the corporate decision to collect this information and share it.

I own Samsung TV's and am off to do exactly this now. I'll never buy another one again.

Samsung smart TV policy allows company to listen in on users



Policy has been compared to George Orwell's 1984

ANDREW GRIFFIN

Monday 09 February 2015

The new privacy policy for Samsung's smart TVs allows the company and its partners to listen in on everything their users say.

The policy has drawn the ire of internet users, who compared it with George Orwell's dystopian fiction 1984.
While voice recognition software almost always transmits data on what users are saying so that the job of decoding it can be done by quicker computers elsewhere the combination of sending the data to third-parties and the comparison with Orwell has meant that the Samsung policy has drawn particular attention.
The policy states: "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 Recognition."
It makes clear that the tool can be turned off through settings, though that will stop the voice recognition working entirely and Samsung will still continue to collect data about how people use the TV.
"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," the policy states.