Samsung TVs can report dog barks and baby cries to Samsung
TVs can detect mics in soundbars and other devices
It’s not as sinister as it’s being painted online
Privacy has always been a hot-button topic online, and since the furore over LG TVs’ data collection people have been paying particular attention to televisions and associated accessories. So the latest news about Samsung TVs seems rather scary: according to a thread on Reddit , it has "on-device AI listening for your dog and baby, watching what you watch, and borrowing your soundbar’s mic if the TV doesn’t have one." That sounds appalling, but when you look into the detail the picture becomes considerably less sinister. Some of the supposed spying Samsung is doing isn’t secret: in some cases it’s for features Samsung happily advertised as reasons to buy its TVs. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Samsung is doing everything with complete transparency, or that there might be more data collection and retention than you’re aware of. But it does mean perhaps putting down the EVERYBODY PANIC! signs and looking at what the TVs are actually doing. What are the claims about Samsung TVs? According to an X user called log4j , they started digging into their Samsung TV’s data use when the on-screen ads were getting very specifically targeted. And in the latest batch of data they’ve published, they found markers for dog-barking and baby-crying events, data on camera streaming duration, and a feature that can detect microphones in nearby devices. Scary, right? But the AI baby crying detection was a feature Samsung advertised under the name Family Care as a key selling point: the idea was that if your TV detected a child’s cries, it would send alerts to your connected mobile devices. And Samsung’s already said that it is discontinuing the feature — 18 months after it launched — due to low usage and persistent false positives, for example because it was detecting on-screen crying as if it happening for real. What about the dog barking?…