Samsung has warned its customers not to discuss personal information in front of their TV set, it has been revealed.

It said that its modern televisions are recording the conversations of its users and could transmit the messages to “third parties”.

Many of the latest sets have microphones so viewers can change channel, turn on a DVD or browse the internet by speaking at the screen or remote.

But in its privacy policy, written in small print, these so-called Smart TVs contain warnings that general conversations are also being recorded.

The warning came to light via a story in online news magazine the Daily Beast which published an excerpt of a section of Samsung’s privacy policy for its net-connected Smart TV sets.

Commenting on the developments, Emma Carr, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: “Not everyone wants to be spied on by their TV.

“Few people would expect a TV to intrude on our privacy, yet this is increasingly becoming the case. As this sort of technology is being made to gather increasing amounts of data about us, it is vitally important that people should have to choose to make use of these additional services.”

Within the policy, Samsung explains that the TV set will be listening to people in the same room to try to spot when commands or queries are issued via the remote.

It stated: “If your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.

“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.”

The technology works by converting words into text commands. If these are simple, such as for changing a channel, they do not need to be sent over the internet. But for more complex requests, such as finding the details of a film on Google, the information is transmitted online to a separate company.

The Samsung privacy policy stated: “If you do not enable Voice Recognition… while Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it.”

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