Samsung investigates why its TVs put ads in others' apps

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31424596

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Samsung says it is investigating why some of its smart TVs are adding adverts to television programmes and films played via third-party apps.

Owners have complained of a silent ad for Pepsi interrupting playback several times an hour.

A spokeswoman for Samsung said it was only aware of the glitch affecting customers in Australia at this time.

The fault comes days after the company faced controversy over the way its TVs made use of voice recordings.

"We are aware of a situation that has caused some smart TV users in Australia to experience programme interruption in the form of an advertisement," the spokeswoman said.

"This seems to be caused by an error, and we are currently conducting a full and thorough investigation into the cause as our top priority.

"This situation has so far been reported only in Australia. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience experienced by our customers."

Users of at least two smart TV apps have complained about the issue:

News site Ars Technica noted that Samsung and Yahoo had been working together on a way to show pop-up ads on Samsung's smart TVs and suggested that the software involved might be the cause of the fault.

It said some users had been able to stop the ads appearing by rejecting a "Yahoo privacy policy" in the affected TV set's settings.

Voice recognition

Samsung's PR team is also dealing with a backlash prompted by fears that its smart TV sets might be "spying" on their watchers' conversations.

Concern was raised by a privacy policy that stated: "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."

Several commentators compared the policy to the surveillance state depicted in George Orwell's novel 1984.

Samsung has since clarified the situation, saying there are two microphones involved:

The South Korean company said it had now altered its privacy document to read: "Samsung will collect your interactive voice commands only when you make a specific search request to the Smart TV by clicking the activation button either on the remote control or on your screen and speaking into the microphone on the remote control.

"If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands."