Samsung admits its Smart TV will capture your personal conversations and send it to third parties

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Samsung’s Smart TV is a pretty swish product. It comes with on-demand TV, mobile applications and a screen resolution four times higher than average HD.
 
The one setback? You just need to make sure you don’t hold any private conversations in front of the internet-connected TV, as its voice recognition technology will record your words and pass them on to a third party.
 
The technology company’s privacy policy for the product is unusually candid about the depth of data it will collect right from the heart of your living room.
 
The policy states:
 
To provide you the voice recognition feature some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the voice recognition features to you.
 
Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of voice recognition.
 
Samsung does – thankfully – allow users to switch the voice recognition service off if this doesn't sit comfortably with them. Yet as Parker Higgins from privacy advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, the default setting certainly has some unsettling connotations:
 

 
The Smart TV also gathers data from your viewing habits, browser information, cookies and text-based queries. Samsung also advises its customers that video or apps provided by a third party will have their own privacy policies for which Samsung is not responsible.