Those of you who have read the George Orwell 1984 book better not buy a Samsung TV. There has been a raging debate online about the loss of personal privacy because of technology. In the late 1990’s when I lived just outside of Monaco, while working for a Monaco-based company, I thought about the loss of privacy each time I walked down to the office. In Monaco, there were so many cameras on the streets that I wondered how anyone could commit a crime and are not caught within seconds.
As a matter of fact, I once noticed two women approach a man and within minutes, two police officers came out of nowhere and questioned them about their residency papers. Apparently, they were soliciting the man and a camera caught the transaction before a deal could be made.
Well, according to a recent Samsung Global Privacy Policy released a few days ago, that SmartTV you want to install in your living room could eavesdrop on your conversations. According to the privacy statement, if you enable voice recognition on your television any conversation the television set picks up “is transmitted to a third-party service that converts speech to text.”
In other words, the conversation you are having in front of the television set it transmitted to a Samsung vendor who then parses it and converts it into text. Although Samsung promises not to share the private moments that television set picks up – you all are aware of the many instances where such promises seem to evaporate when convenient.
Keep this in mind the next time you want to have a private moment with a loved one in front of the television set. That private moment many well end up on the Internet for all to see.
