Samsung was grilled by different privacy advocates recently after releasing its privacy policy claiming that the voice-recognition feature present on some of its smartTV may record customer data and share it to third-party companies.
To counter these claims, the South Korean tech giant released an edited version of its privacy policy in order to avoid putting scare to its users.
The new privacy policy said that the Samsung's smartTVs "do not monitor living room conversations." The new version also cleared rumors about privacy invasion saying that the users have the ability to enable and disable the feature so as to avoid data capture, according to Tech Crunch.
Samsung also reiterated the fact that the voice recognition feature allows the user to interact with their smartTV using only their voice. It added that user's voice commands are sent into a third-party company that converts voice commands into texts up to the point necessary to provide the voice recognition feature. The third-party was confirmed to be Nuance Communications which also works with LG and Panasonic, according to CNet.
However, despite Samsung's effort not to sound too creepy in its privacy policy many analysts are still skeptical about the vagueness of it. Some of them said that Samsung can still provide the appropriate voice recognition feature with resorting to third-party services which means transferring sensitive customer information.
Another intriguing side of the story is Nuance Communications' own privacy policy which clearly states that the company is free to do whatever it like to the data gathered from Samsung customers. One possibility is selling this sensitive information to advertisers and marketers.