Franken issues warning over TVs that spy on your conversations

Samsung and LG are under new fire from Capitol Hill over TVs that can listen in on people’s personal conversations from their living room walls.

The companies found themselves in hot water in recent days after the discovery that new voice-activated “smart” televisions are not only sending information about their users to outside companies, but that that information may include private conversations.

{mosads}For instance, Samsung’s SmartTV privacy policy warns customers: “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.”

LG includes a similar warning to users of its Smart TVs.   

The news, which prompted fears that people’s television sets could be monitoring their most intimate moments, has now attracted the attention of Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.),  

“This relatively new technology has major implications for people’s privacy and I am concerned about the extent to which Samsung may be collecting and sharing SmartTV users’ voice data,” he wrote in a letter to Samsung’s North American CEO, Gregory Lee, on Wednesday. 

“I am concerned that Samsung currently does not provide consumers with the information needed to understand how their voice data may be used by third parties.”

The senator fired off a similar letter to LG USA’s president, William Cho.

Samsung has denied that there is anything Orwellian about the new technology.

In a blog post on Tuesday, the company said that it used “industry-standard” protections to encrypt people’s data and only transmits information when people ask a specific command, such as “Recommend a good Sci-Fi movie.”

The company is in the process of changing its privacy policy, it noted, to clarify that the TVs collect information only when “Voice Recognition” is turned on and “only when you make a specific search request” by clicking an activation button and speaking into a microphone on the remote control.

Franken has been a noted privacy hawk and has routinely criticized companies whose names pop up in the news for questionable uses of data about people. He recently put the screws to Uber and Lyft, for instance, for their practice of allowing staffers to monitor people’s rides.