Technology giant Samsung has warned customers against discussing personal or sensitive information in front of its voice-activated televisions.
The privacy policy for the company's Smart TV sets advises users of the voice recognition feature that their spoken words will be "among the data captured and transmitted to a third party".
Privacy campaigners have branded the policy "outrageous" and made comparisons to George Orwell's description of telescreens, which spied on citizens in his novel 1984.
According to reports, Samsung's 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.
"While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it."
Emma Carr, director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said the company needed to understand that not everyone wanted to be spied on by their TV.
"It is outrageous that the company has even stated in its own privacy policy that if the TV's owner does decide not to share their private information, then the company may still take the information anyway.
"This leaves users with no knowledge or control over where your information goes or who has access to it and that is simply unacceptable."
Samsung has insisted it takes customer privacy "very seriously" and any gathering of users' information is carried out with the "utmost transparency".
"Voice recognition, which allows the user to control the TV using voice commands, is a Samsung Smart TV feature, which can be activated or deactivated by the user," a spokeswoman said.
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