On the back of a report that Samsung TV’s new voice-activated features have the ability to capture, store and send your voice and words to third parties, Phil Staley of ABC Far North Queensland jumped on the phone to say “tell me it isn’t so!”.

The reality is that voice activated tech, which we’re seeing lots of, does do what it claims to do, hear, understand and act on your voice and to do this it records you and if required sends your voice to a third-party to trigger service or information to be sent back to you.

This is not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last.

Samsung was caught out in 2012 when its TV webcams were hacked and viewers could be watched at home without knowing it. This was quickly fixed with a patch, but the spy tech is out there, it is capable of spying on you and if you’re paranoid about it, simple don’t enable the feature.

This is not just a Samsung issue, most tech can be hacked into nowadays. Microsoft Xbox One was tapped not so long ago as were Apple, Google and Amazon and lets not get started on the whole Sony tapping debacle.

It isn’t that there is some Russian or North Korean spy listening into your every word, but rather that there is a potential for it that worries most of us.

Simple solution – don’t say or write anything online that you wouldn’t go down to the local market and shout.

On a more serious note, as we use more gadgets that are voice activated or have access to our whereabouts, or store private stuff about us, we become ever more vulnerable to being spied on, this is just the beginning of these possibilities and personal cyber-security is set to become a big issue over the next year or two.

Listen to the segment now: