South Korean tech giant Samsung was recently criticized by privacy advocates due to an alarming feature integrated to its smart TV products. According to Samsung, its smart TV products feature a voice recognition technology that will record voice data from users and transmits data gathered to an unnamed third-party company.
The alarming privacy policy clause reads, "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 policy is a little vague but it creates a notion that Samsung is recording audio information and based on the policy the data will be declared property of the company, according to The Korea Times.
The latter part of the clause states that Samsung will not be responsible as to how the third party company uses the data it captures. However, Samsung also said that the function can be switched off to prevent data to be captured in the first place but users will lose the features functionality altogether, according to Digital Spy.
Samsung's smart TV voice recognition technology allows voice commands in directing TV functions like adjusting volume and changing channels. The new products also make use of Samsung's very own operating system named Tizen.
Many analysts said that the transition to Tizen is Samsung's way of luring users away from using Google's Android operating system. The recent privacy policy however could spark a debate whether Samsung is trying to spy on its customers.
Samsung's Global Privacy Policy can be accessed here.