Electronics giant Samsung is vigorously striking back at reports that the voice-recognition capabilities on its smart TVs are being used to monitor conversations in people’s living rooms.

Reports began to surface recently that the Samsung smart TV privacy policy stipulated that spoken words that contained person or other sensitive information “will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party,” a clause that alarmed privacy advocates, according to a PC Magazine report.

The company claims that in reality, the third parties do things like convert speech to text and any data collection would be used to help improve services. Moreover, the feature can be shut off in the settings menu, although it may mean the voice-recognition software won’t have all the available features.

Clearly sensing it had a potential invasion-of-privacy firestorm headed its way, Samsung issued a blog post titled “Samsung Smart TVs Do Not Monitor Living Room Conversations,” explaining that the mic embedded in the TV responds to some predetermined commands, and this particular data isn’t stored or transmitted. A second microphone, however, is placed in the remote and is used to interact with a server to search for and serve up content, according to the PC Magazine report.

Samsung tweaked its privacy policy to clarify that some voice commands may be transmitted, along with information about your device, to a third-party service provider, which converts the commands to text in order to “provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features,” according to the clarification.

Samsung’s smart TVs first debuted at CES 2012, and the company since then has sought to develop its voice interaction service, allowing customers to simply ask the TV for things like the score for a sports game and get an immediate answer.