I give it five years before TVs with built-in 5G are mainstream. In addition, some TVs automatically connect to open WiFi.

Yeah, people keep saying 5G is important for the internet of things. This is surely what they mean.

The internet of things with ads

IoTwA?

I'm fine with that. If its using 5G then it's not on my LAN and the concern in the featured article is no longer a problem.

Furthermore, if its using 5G then its not tied to the IP address that my other traffic comes from and so they can't use the TV to target me with ads online either. (Provided I don't use any of the same accounts on both the TV and my other devices.)

I think you are ignoring the use of location-based tracking and other correlation techniques. A bunch of different 5G appliances can all figure out their positions quite accurately from 5G signals and decide they belong to the same household.

And, that's before you consider that they can also scan local wifi and bluetooth spectra to glean even more information about their local environments. With participation of vendor applications on phones, they could also use ultrasonics or crazier things like modulated LED lighting.

Finally, if one of those devices is compromised, it can then be used to launch local attacks via wifi and bluetooth, or even potentially those other covert channels if they can exploit sloppy code in those other dark apps...

You are right, I didn't think about those things.

Taking those things into account as well as the things paulmd pointed out in a sibling comment, I am no longer fine with the idea of 5G in my TV.

TVs can emit ultrasonic tracking tones which your phone can pick up and link your TV identity to your phone identity (facebook, google, whatever apps have microphone access to listen).

https://www.pindrop.com/blog/silently-tracking-users-with-ul...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/your-...

https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/ultrasonic-tracking-signal...

Also, virtually any device with cell connectivity includes a GPS on the same chipset so it's pretty trivial to connect that with google location data. So if it has 5G it has your location it has your identity.

It might not even be that hard. The TV could just broadcast a Bluetooth beacon and your phone will automatically send the details to Google/Apple where your locations can be tied.

> I'm fine with that. If its using 5G then it's not on my LAN and the concern in the featured article is no longer a problem.

Not on your LAN but still harvesting your usage data (a feature!), and still hackable (smile for the camera!).

> and still hackable (smile for the camera!)

I don't know of any TVs that come with a camera built into them, and if there are any I certainly wouldn't buy one of those.

I will wrap the entire bezel in Faraday tape. Will probably look pretty cool.

My TCL TV blinked an annoying light when I didn't connect it to wifi

That was because it was setup in connected mode and was trying to tell you of a connection loss. If you factory reset the TV and choose not to connect it, you won't have the blink.

Many of them connect to 3G automatically.

Edit: I guess I was mistaken. They were not caught doing that yet.

I haven't seen that anywhere, do you have a link or source?

What? Can you provide any evidence of this?

Source please.