- Terms consist of 16 pages
- Text readability: reasonable
- Unclear on what exactly is monitored
- Lots of translation and grammar errors
- Tries to reveal that personal data is collected, while according to law they collect data that is considered personal
- Consists of 8 pages
- Text readability: reasonable
- The company is unclear what data it collects and for what purpose
- Panasonic requests a fee to get access to the data they collect about the user. Costs are unclear
- Forgot to replace placeholder text < Panasonic customers service > with actual contact possibilities
- Privacy terms are 13 pages long
- Text readability: good
- Privacy terms can’t be accessed from the TV, only a summary that misses important information on collection of personal data
- Philips is clear what data is collected and for which purpose
- The company also mentions that data can be shared with third parties but is unclear with exactly what third parties
Samsung
- Privacy terms are written on 57 pages and about 5000 words
- Text readability: good
- Samsung isn't clear for what purpose it collects data. Terms also aren't focused on Smart TVs and a large residual category "other information" is vague
- Terms are cluttered and links are not clickable
Sony
- Terms consist of 6 pages
- Text readability: good
- Sony is the most obvious on what data it collects and for what purpose
- The manufacturer doesn't properly state who collects and processes the data, doesn't properly state consumer rights (the right to inspect, change and remove data) and provides no information on retention periods and security measures. The last two are not mandatory by law, but desirable.
Besides the privacy terms, also the behavior of the Smart TVs was monitored by the researchers. They found that when you reject the privacy terms, the TV will continue to work as a regular TV, however if you want to use the Smart TV functionality ,the privacy terms will pop up again and will need to be accepted.
The researchers also monitored the internet traffic of the TVs for several minutes and found that the inspected TVs send several MBs per minute to the manufacturers. Some of the data was encrypted but some parts weren't. The analysis of the network traffic of TVs didn't give a consistent result however Sony appears to be most aggressive in collecting data. The monitored Sony Smart TV sent data to Sony's servers every time a channel was changed. Other TVs didn't show this behavior.
All TVs, except for the Samsung TV, contacted the servers of the TV channels. It didn't do so to collect data but to retrieve relevant information that can be accessed with the "red button" of the remote control.
The researchers conclude that most consumers have no idea of all internet traffic the TV generates, especially how often the TV sends personal information to TV manufacturers.
The tested Smart TVs were the Philips 32PFK5509, LG 32LB650Vn, LG 32LB570V, Panasonic TX-32AS500, Samsung UE32H4500 and the Sony KDL-32W705B.