That's why I bought myself a dumb TV, and added smart features using a Raspberry Pi connected to it by HDMI. The TV has no internet connection available.
Why would you need voice search in a TV though... I can't understand ... I don't understand which everyone is going nuts for IOT either!? Why do I want a web browser on my fridge really
But Samsung said that it only happens when you issue a vocal command, not that the TV is always listening. I have a Samsung smart TV and you have to press a button to use a voice command so it may not always listen to you as is stated in the article. And they share the information to a third part not to sell it but for the voice recognition task.
Looks like there is a small difference as voice search and voice activation.<p>I own smart tv (Sony) that has microphone on the remote which you can only use at Youtube search bar (then light lit on the remote when microphone is active), and I believe it's quite nifty as typing via remote is PITA.<p>On the other hand I don't know voice activation features on smart TVs. Do you tell your TV to "turn on" or "change channel", which is not practical IMHO.<p>It makes sense that personal assistants (amazon echo, apple siri, google whatever) listen all the time as you use trigger words to activate them but it's so useless for TVs.
Looks like Vizio got fined for doing something similar recently. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/06/these-smart-tvs-were-apparently-spying-on-their-owners/?utm_term=.240cc62be8b2" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/06...</a>
This is really old news, and actually, the text in the link was pretty much inspired by the one from Huffington Post from 2015 - <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/09/your-samsung-tv-is-spying-on-you_n_6647762.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/09/your-samsung-tv-is-...</a>
i don't mind cameras, you can just stick tape over them (until they will be build behind the display which will take few more years), microphones are worse, is there some easy way how to disable or mute them without disassembling TV and voiding warranty?