Your New Samsung SmartTV Will Record Your Conversations and Share Them

File this under "Holy bat$#!t crazy".

Tons of things in our world now do voice recognition. My Android phone does. Your Xbox 360/One does. And now, Samsung TV's will as well.

But Samsung straight up just scared the stuffing out of A LOT of people in the tech world.

The site TheDailyBeast.com spotted the updated user agreement on Samsung's website, and promptly freaked out. Which caused everyone else to freak out, including CNET.com, which is one of my most trusted tech websites. If they're going bonkers, I tend to take notice.

The wording for this comes right from the Samsung SmartTV website. I'm pulling the direct wording from them.

"If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. 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."

In case you're curious, lots of serviced collect your data and sell it. It's how they make suggestions as to what content to suggest to you, and it's how they make a butt ton of money. Google, as an example, claims they make great pains to make sure your identity is not included in their content delivery algorithm.

Samsung is telling you, up front, that if you say something personal IN YOUR LIVING ROOM they will collect that audio, interpret it, and share it with a third party.

Commence complete and absolute freak out. Like ANYTHING on the web and it's content collectors is safe anymore. For God's sake, BANKS have their databases compromised, with all of your personal information. These are THINGS YOU SAY OUT LOUD!

"Do you know where you put the pot?"

"Nice crack!"

I'm not trying to be flippant here, but those are things I've said to my 2 year old, when he hides the pots and pans in the living room, and when he's running around with his pants hanging low.

This response from Samsung is on the CNET.com article mentioned above:

"A Samsung spokeswoman told me: "Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously. In all of our Smart TVs we employ industry-standard security safeguards and practices, including data encryption, to secure consumers' personal information and prevent unauthorized collection or use."

But what might be authorized and by whom?

Samsung's spokeswoman continued: " Should consumers enable the voice recognition capability, the voice data consists of TV commands, or search sentences, only. Users can easily recognize if the voice recognition feature is activated because a microphone icon appears on the screen."

I honestly can't even imagine how this can turn out well, and I think it's safe to say Samsung has completely lost my business.