This week’s Smart World Problems roundup features smart meters causing health problems, and a SmartTV listening to your every word.

Are smart meters causing health problems?

Cindy deBac, a resident of Scottsdale, AZ, is leading a global educational crusade to spread the word regarding the health hazards of smart meters being installed in homes. According to reports, prior to the installation of a smart meter into deBac’s home in 2012, she was “healthy and exuberant” but soon became “exhausted and tearfully anxious as she struggled with rashes and a chronically racing heart.” One of her dogs died of cancer six months after the smart meter was installed and her second dog soon developed large tumors.

“I’ve never been so sick in my life,” she says. “Nausea, a crushing migraine headache, and painful heart palpitations laid me low right away.”

The installation of smart meters in the US is part of the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) project which replaces manual meters with digital meters able to record electrical consumption data and send the information wirelessly to energy system managers and can be programmed to read and transmit data monthly or every 15 seconds. The problem many see in smart meters is the use of wireless two-way transmitters that pulse signals to communicate. This signal is what is being blamed for the health hazards as it is a form of radiation. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) is proposing that installation and use of smart meters should be temporarily prohibited until they are deemed safe to be operational in homes.

Forget about Big Brother, your TV listens to every word you speak

Before you panic, not every TV in every home is capable of listening to your conversations, just Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s SmartTVs with voice recognition. According to the said TV’s privacy policy, the SmartTV captures “voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features.” This simply means that spoken commands are being analyzed so the TV can learn your language so it can function much better. The problem is that it’s always listening, even if you are not interacting with the TV.

“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.”

Samsung explains that it takes its customer’s privacy seriously and its SmartTVs only capture “TV commands, or search sentences, only” which is then sent to a third-party company that makes sense of the command which then sends back the desired content or query to the TV and does not save any of the voice data. The Samsung spokeswoman also explained that when voice recognition is activated, a mic icon is displayed on the TV so consumers know when the TV is listening for a command and not listening to every word spoken.

If you don’t want Samsung spying on you, you can turn off the Voice Recognition feature, which also makes all Voice Recognition features unavailable to you.