This week a nonprofit group filed a complaint (PDF) with the Federal Trade Commission asking it to investigate Samsung for violating its customers' privacy with its voice recording feature on its Samsung smart TVs.

“Samsung routinely intercepts and records the private communications of consumers in their homes,” the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) wrote. “Samsung’s attempts to disclaim its intrusive surveillance activities by means of a 'privacy notice' do not diminish the harm to American consumers.”

In an e-mail Samsung told Ars, “The claims made by EPIC are not correct and do not reflect the actual features of our Smart TV. Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously and our products are designed with privacy in mind."

Samsung has been accused of playing fast and loose with consumer privacy ever since some users discovered wording in their SmartTVs' privacy policy warning users not to say sensitive things in front of the TV. “To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you,” the privacy 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.”

The third party that Samsung contracts voice recognition out to is called Nuance, and Samsung has asserted that it sends all of the data it records over to Nuance encrypted. “However, a computer researcher determined that Samsung does not encrypt all the conversations it records and transmits to Nuance,” EPIC's complaint reads. “Samsung later conceded that the company does not encrypt all the voice recordings it transmits. Samsung also admitted it has not deployed the software necessary to encrypt plaintext transmissions.” Security issues on Samsung SmartTVs are not particularly new either—Ars reported in 2012 that Internet-facing TVs from Samsung were easily hackable by some security researchers.

EPIC charges that although Samsung might have a warning in its privacy policy, that's not enough to make consumers aware of what's going on behind the scenes. The group says Samsung is violating the FTC Act, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, The Cable Act, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Samsung's SmartTVs were also embroiled in a bit of tangential controversy last week when some users discovered that the TVs were inserting ads into their locally stored content on playback. While the ad placement may have been a mistake, Samsung has partnered with Yahoo to deliver pop-up ads on its TVs.