Gadgetory

get used to gadgets eavesdropping on your conversations I'm Bridget Carey and this is your CNET update there's quite a bit of buzz about the voice recognition feature in Samsung Smart TVs in particular how TVs listen to your conversation in order to pick up on your voice commands and that data can be sent to third parties The Daily Beast was the first to stir up commotion with a report about the privacy policy wording so should you be worried about televisions spying on your living room conversations a little yes and a little no here's some perspective on Samsung the outside party Samsung is sending your speech to is nuanced it's a voice recognition software provider that turns speech into text nuance also works with a bunch of other tech companies like LG Panasonic and ZTE it also works with automakers like BMW Ford Honda and Subaru so cars will also be listening to your conversations so it could detect when you say that magic voice command key word you know what else also listens to you the Amazon echo smart speaker and the Xbox Kinect which also has voice commands for the most part companies like Microsoft Apple and Google keep that data on their servers the bottom line is that sharing to a third party like nuance shouldn't really worry you but what we need to all be cautious about is how companies are keeping that data secure when in transit samsung says it encrypts voice data for security protections and it does not retain the data or sell it but don't forget if you have a samsung smart TV you could just turn the listening feature off in other TV news dishes sling TV service launched nationwide in the US on Monday the internet streaming television service gives people 12 channels for $20 a month and coming soon to that bundle is AMC so fans of The Walking Dead madman or better call Saul can get their fix moving on to sketchy cybersecurity stories the software maker Intuit is once again leading people files state income tax returns with TurboTax the option was turned off after a fraud scare and worries about suspicious filings but the company says there was no breach of data and filings have resumed fraudulent tax are a growing issue especially when health insurance provider anthem just lost the personal info and Social Security numbers of 80 million people that data could be purchased off a hacker to file a bogus tax claim and if you have anthem for health insurance be careful not to fall for phishing emails that claim to be from anthem trying to trick you in to clicking bad links or share personal data cyber security reporter Brian Krebs has an example of such a phishing email on his blog but anthem has sent no calls or emails to customers the real notifications will be coming to people through the Postal Service you know good old-fashioned paper mail that your tech news update and there's more details than cnet.com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey