Samsung Smart TVs: Uploading Your Private Conversations?

If you have a Samsung smart TV that is connected to the Internet, your private conversations may be converted to text and uploaded to Samsung and other third parties.

No this isn't science fiction or some paranoid email forward from that crazy aunt of yours. It's clearly spelled out in Samsung's new privacy policy:

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

The warning, as reported by The Daily Beast, means that if you decide to use voice command for your TV, you're giving Samsung permission to upload and convert pretty much anything you say within earshot of your TV, including private and sensitive information.

Voice command on the Samsung Smart TV allows you to access programming and TV features by simply barking out commands. It's some pretty cool technology, but is it worth giving up the privacy of your own home?

Samsung responded to The Daily Beast with the following statement:

Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously. In all of our Smart TVs we employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers’ personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use. Voice recognition, which allows the user to control the TV using voice commands, is a Samsung Smart TV feature, which can be activated or deactivated by the user. The TV owner can also disconnect the TV from the Wi-Fi network.

If we're reading that properly, Samsung isn't denying that they can and do listen in on everything you say. They do promise to encrypt your private data, but there's no information on where that data goes or what third parties have access to it.

Does this mean that a private conversation about your rash could be uploaded to a third party advertiser who will then start sending you coupons for their ointment? Or what if you're talking to a friend about your troubled marriage? Will you start getting advertisements for divorce lawyers in your email?

Nothing Samsung says in their statement denies that this is possible or that they're already doing it. The only good advice they seem to give is something that everyone should already know; your TV can be disconnected from the Internet... But then again, how would you watch anything on Netflix?

We want to know what you think. Are we just being paranoid or is this invasion of privacy something that concerns you too? Answer our poll question below: