What you’re really agreeing to when you accept your smart TV’s privacy policy

By Hayley Tsukayama

Let's be honest here — most of us don’t read the privacy policies for smart televisions. And even if we try to, it’s often difficult to read them, particularly on a television screen. Some televisions even display the massive policies five lines at a time. Reaction to recent controversies involving Vizio and Samsung televisions, for example, have highlighted that while people understand that their televisions have microphones, cameras and tracking software, they don't fully understand how much of this information they've actually agreed to share with companies.

So we asked a few legal experts who specialize in privacy — Christopher Dore of the Chicago-based law firm Edelson, Danielle Citron of the University of Maryland, William McGeveran of the University of Minnesota and Bradley Shear of Maryland-based Shear Law — to explain what we're really getting into when we hit the “I agree” button.

You can see their commentary on these privacy policies by clicking on the highlighted text. We looked at the privacy policies of leading smart television makers: Samsung, LG and Vizio. You may notice from the excerpts we highlight that the tone and type of language in these policies don't really vary much from company to company, so this should give you an idea of what to look for regardless of your television maker.

Voice recognition data

Many televisions have voice recognition features that let you order your television around without having to fumble through menus or hit multiple buttons. For consumers, that could make your television easier to operate. Companies collect and keep vocal recordings to improve their own software, though they do their best to strip out personal information. The privacy trade-off here, legal experts say, is that there are always ways this information could be taken out of context, and that a snippet of your voice asking for a show could be used against you.

Unexpected data collection

Sometimes these policies cover information you may not expect to see in a policy about your television, an indication of how many services are now tied to your television. For example, Samsung has a section about “Fitness data.” These services tend to be optional, so you only have to share that information if you want to — in Samsung's case, the company also does a good job, the experts said, of explaining how the data will be applied.

Viewing data

Companies collect viewing data — information about what you're watching and when — to feed data into their advertising systems. For consumers, the idea is that you would see more relevant ads on your screen.

Your data could end up where you least expect it

We've already outlined how television makers share information with other companies, such as advertisers and technical partners. But our legal experts highlighted that data collected through your television can also show up in places that are completely unexpected, because companies reserve a broad right to collect data to let you know about any “products and services.” That includes, for example, data brokers — firms that can gather information from several places to build a data profile of you and resell that information to other companies, including insurance companies or credit bureaus.

When the data is out of our hands

Also be aware that the company that makes your television isn't the only one that could be collecting information about you. As with apps on a phone, the applications you put on your television entitle those app-makers to collect their own types of information, which they may need to show you recommendations, for example, or give you accurate directions to somewhere. But those actions aren't covered by your television maker's privacy policy — those are governed by the apps' own policies.

Overwhelmed?

If you're not ready to dive into a full privacy policy, experts said, one good way to limit your data collection is to turn on only features that you'll really use. “Even if you're not going to do the work of hacking your way through a policy, it's generally a good principle not to have features activated on services if you don’t use those features,” McGeveran said. “You can bet that you are reducing the overall amount of data collection by doing that.”

Read full article and learn more about Privacy Policy here.

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