Must be crap. Right!
Amazon says Echo’s always listening feature is handled locally until the wake up phrase is recognized. That seems a reasonable privacy compromise.
Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud, where we leverage the power of Amazon Web Services to recognize and respond to your request.
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While Privacy is very important, and I wish we had the option to do all speed recognition locally rather than through a web service, that is how The Ubi, Google Now, Amazon Echo, and Samsung do it.
Quote like this are scare tactics when not put into a helpful context.
This is an education problem that Samsung should have handled much better BEFORE putting it in the Terms of Use (before activating the feature).
The policy states: “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.”
Frankly, I doubt many SmartThings customers read or fully understand SmartThings “Terms of Use” and “Privacy Policy” either, though it’s language seems a little more on the readable English side than typical.
…CP / Terry.
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Personally I don’t care as the only conversation around the TV which goes on is between the missus and her friends!!! 
I do have to say it is a little… concerning… that with the idea of voice recognition on many devices. We assume that all that we say is private, and for the most part I feel relatively confident it is. But I can imagine that it’s entirely possible something like this “third party” provider could get hacked and that data could get out there.
For most of us, for most things, this just won’t be that big of a deal. No one is going to care that I ordered a pizza or that I had an argument with my wife of whether or not I remember to put the toilet seat down. But there’s always the possibility that it happens to pick up my wife telling me her password to a site when I’m trying to trouble shoot something for her, or maybe one of us reading out credit card number over the phone.
It’s always possible that it might pick up a conversation about the mother-in-law and what she did this time. If a conversation like this became public it could be personally embarrassing. The counter to this is that who would ever take the time to track down who made the conversation, who it was about, and then track down who that person is and proceed to provide them with a copy of the conversation… and you’d probably be correct to say this is highly unlikely.
What might be at issue is celebrity gossip. Just like the “Fappaning” probably snared many personal pics, the masses only cared about the celebrity ones. In the same way no one is going to really care what my wife and I talk about, but I’m sure the masses would love to listen on supposedly private conversations of stars.
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