South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. has come up with a futuristic TV that can listen and share conversation taking place real time in its surrounding. Watching TV won’t be just a one sided affair now, it’s morphing towards becoming phone, just the camera is missing though. Period.
As per the sources, its voice recognition technology has an ability of capturing and transmitting nearby conversations, while the TV is connected to Internet. The smart TVs eavesdropping on conversation has also been listed in its privacy policy. The point mentions that sensitive information could be among the data that is tapped and sent to a third party via Voice Recognition.
Gathering data for improving TV performance
As soon as the voice command feature is enabled, TV listens for speech that is interpreted by third-party software into text and further encrypted back to the TV as a command, although the name of the software has still not revealed by the company.
Samsung justifies that data is gathered for enhancing TV performance like is the case with any operating system. Of course, users have the authority of disabling the feature as their own will since, the consumer privacy is the most important factor for the company, added the firm.
This is not the first time any smart TV has ignited the privacy concerns. Back in 2013, owner of LG Electronics smart TV surfaced that the TV is transmitting data related to viewing habits to the company without any prior approval. And it was because of the same reason, LG was able to display targeted ads.
Source: ABC News
