It has been rumored for years that our smartphones monitor our conversations and it is that, coincidentally, after talking about trips with your friends, for example, you will begin to see a lot of advertising for travel agencies, travel destinations and much more. Well, it seems that this has been extrapolated to the SmartTV and it is that, now, our smart televisions also spy on our conversations. What we are saying may sound like a tall tale or a science fiction plot, but no, it is very real.
In 2015, a Twitter user revealed the small print of the privacy contracts of the Samsung Smart TVs and in this you could read that the devices captured voice commands and that they could record the conversations that were happening around them to transmit it to a third party. This is the clause we are referring to: “Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated text to evaluate and improve speech recognition. Please note that if your spoken words include private or sensitive information, that information may be passed on to third-party companies.”
So, is it true that our Smart TV can violate our privacy? This is one of the most widespread current concerns, especially after the FBI, in a very alarmist way, published that, in the worst case scenario, a hacker could use the camera and microphone of a Smart TV to spy on users. .
How can I prevent my Smart TV from spying on my conversations?
Nevertheless, there is a way to prevent the Smart TV from spying on your conversations and the problem could become bigger, especially considering that we associate our smart televisions with mobile applications in which we have sensitive information.
When it comes to managing the privacy of our television, we must focus on one functionality, the ACR or Automatic Content Recognition. This option is usually activated by default and is responsible for collecting and analyzing images, sounds and data to create a database and display advertising according to the user’s tastes or other preferences, exactly the same as we discussed earlier with smartphones. So the solution would be to turn off the ACR option.
For disconnect the RCA we have two options, although one will be much more functional than the other:
- The most drastic option, and the one we least recommend, is to directly disconnect the internet device from the television. This means that you would lose access to streaming platforms, for example, and you would miss out on all new releases. That is why this is the least recommended option, unless you are not directly subscribed to any platform and do not use the internet on the Smart TV.
- The second option, which is the one we recommend, is to simply go into the TV’s settings and turn off the ACR feature. You may find it as ‘Information View’ in the menu settings. Deactivate it and you will end the root problem.
So if you want to prevent your SmartTV gets into your conversations, you just have to navigate through the settings of your TV and disable the root problem. Of course, if you do, the smart TV will not obtain information about your interests or tastes, so it is very likely that the recommendations will be general and not specific.
And you, did you know that smart TVs spy on user conversations and can freely pass the information to third parties? It is very possible that you did not know it and it is that one of the big mistakes we make is not reading the privacy contracts in full.
