> It's a speaker system. It plays sound. Why could it possibly have AI, tracking, or ad delivery?
To recognize what you listen to, build a profile, feed it back to Samsung, which will use it in deciding what crap to display on your Samsung TV (and any other devices) associated to the same profile. For all we know it's even listening to your conversation in the room, I mean, it's Samsung - they literally do this:
How much benefit could that bring versus burning reputation and losing it all? These companies are so big and powerful but time and time again they keep on forgetting that they can't exist without the users and when users start leaving it's hard to reverse that trend.
It's so out in the open if you know, or more likely, worked in media advertising.
Their competitor, Vizio, owns iSpot[1] which is, in my opinion, the best in the space.
Samba TV[2] is it's nearest competitor and they have their hooks into 24 Smart TV brands globally[3]. These brands are listed on their website as Philips, Sony, Toshiba, beko, Magnavox, TCL, Grundig, Sanyo, AOC, Seiki, Element, Sharp, Westinghouse, Vestel, Panasonic, Hitachi, Finlux, Telefunken, Digihome, JVC, Luxor, Techwood, and Regal.
There is no reputation to burn, they're well known to do this kind of stuff by anyone bothering to look it up, and nearly nobody looks it up anyway.
It's a pity because I liked some of their hardware in the past (an NX camera I still have, hard disks back in the IDE stone age, 3 LCD screens back from when they were a novelty - they only had a VGA connector) but I just stay away from them now. But 0.01% of their customers staying away is completely insignificant when they consider the profit opportunity of violating our privacy.
Come on, did you read more than just the headlines?
> 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."
So it is not like it was listening without your knowledge. Only when you use the voice features is the data being sent over. Like with every other online service. As much as I don't like samsung, this is a bullshit reason to hate them.
And why provide two links basically saying the same about the same story?
To recognize what you listen to, build a profile, feed it back to Samsung, which will use it in deciding what crap to display on your Samsung TV (and any other devices) associated to the same profile. For all we know it's even listening to your conversation in the room, I mean, it's Samsung - they literally do this:
https://entertainment.ie/trending/yes-your-samsung-smart-tv-...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/samsungs-warning-our-smart...