Don't talk in front of your Smart TV, it might be listening.

Samsung is warning its customers not to talk
about personal information in front of their smart
TV, as the device may be “listening” to the
conversation.
Samsung’s privacy statement dealing with the
voice recognition functions of its TVs states that
voice commands may be transmitted to a third
party service that converts and captures the
speech.
“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,” said Samsung.
The warning about the TVs’ ability to capture data
through voice commands is being compared to the
discription of telescreens in George Orwell’s
dystopian novel 1984, where all citizens’ actions
are monitored through the device.
Online news magazine the Daily Beast reported
that intellectual property lawyer for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation Corynne McSherry said the
“third party” was probably a company providing
speech-to-text conversion for Samsung.
“If I were the customer, I might like to know who
that third party was, and I’d definitely like to know
whether my words were being transmitted in a
secure form,” she said.
Samsung responded to the criticism, and
according to BBC News said the privacy statement
was its attempt to be transparent with TV owners.
“If a consumer consents and uses the voice
recognition feature, voice data is provided to a
third party during a requested voice command
search. At that time, the voice data is sent to a
server, which searches for the requested content
then returns the desired content to the TV.”
Samsung said it did not retain voice data or sell
the audio being captured, and did not name the
third party involved.