1) "Some Samsung TVs already try and connect to open WiFi networks if you don't connect them yourself."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629155
2) there is ethernet over hdmi - I would image this is another source of inadvertent connection.
3) samsung tvs require an ethernet cable to "update firmware" so HDMI works.
4) ACR - which will look at ALL the inputs.
and wait for the next few iterations
- smart devices talk to each other and exfiltrate data
- smart device manufacturers collaborate with ISPs who have put wifi gateways in your house and your neighbor's house.
I despise Samsung and their junk.
I also have a buggy 1.5 year old Samsung stove that has to be reset when I lean a pot lid against the back It causes the touch panel to trigger a random button and lock up.
I suppose, but it's still misleading to be calling it "LED" in the first place when that's just the backlight.
But it keeps trying to come back for just a moment every couple of days. I had to ban its mac address since there was no way to get it to stop in the settings or after factory resets.
It is maddening how incompatible with Democracy the commercial surveillance system has become.
I’m sure this will be beaten though.
I just wish there was a manual captive portal check button built into browsers that forces a standard port 53 check because if I'm behind a captive portal I have to reset my dns settings to sign in before then switching it back to get my VPN to connect.
This claim doesn't seem to be well sourced. It's essentially going on the word of an anonymous redditor.
(I don't think that's very likely in this case, but I bet there are actual examples out there of conspiracy theories being deliberately seeded as a way to discredit potential real criticisms.)
Why would notoriously low margin products like a TV ever pay for such a lavish addition when most people voluntary connect it to wifi or ethernet anyway?
just make an agreement with one company, done.
And if you think it stops here, I've got bad news. This is only going to get worse without strict regulation.
Also, software. Half the software on our computers stopped working despite not being internet related.
It was incredibly frustrating and really soured me on the direction tech is headed.
in any case, i'd get any claim that the tv works without internet in writing. then it becomes a warranty issue if the tv stops working
i. e. the ads on smart devices can be blocked
I was curious because I have a Vizio that I deliberately keep disconnected from the internet, and rely on an Apple TV. Seems like that's not an attack vector in this case, though #1 is (and #3) seem worth looking into.
What's ACR in point #4?
[0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/325215/appletv-eth...
But I think that a more helpful way of thinking about it is that (1) people are great at rationalizing, especially when it makes their lives easier. And (2) the open source alternative isn't good enough or easy enough.
For a long time, pirating music was the easiest way to listen to music that you wanted. Then things like iTunes and the iPod came along.
Until there's an easy, open alternative, even smart people will continue paying money to put surveillance devices in their living rooms and bedrooms.
I get that they can build a profile of me based on what kind of content I’m watching, but it doesn’t seem different from what Netflix or YouTube is doing anyway. Probably they’re going to use the data to show attribution for engagements on ads for media. Good for them I guess. It‘s not in my top 1000 reasons to riot personally.
That a faceless, remote corporation can reach into your home and arbitrarily control a product you've purchased feels very invasive.
Companies like Samsung and LG have previously had cameras and microphones silently streaming unencrypted feeds. They've also been caught running network probes to search out, catalogue and report private media.
All that feels very creepy to some people such as myself.
You want to say no, don't do that ...but you can't.
Imagine you are working from home or your kids are schooling from home, and you use the TV for meetings. Are they recording your presentation? Are pictures of your kids' classmates being fingerprinted and archived somewhere for correlation with all the other classmates?
There are levels of outrageousness here:
- Spying on TV through a purpose-built device: mildly annoying that every show and ad now has a tracking watermark that can be used surreptitiously, but voluntary Nielsen participation is just fine.
- Spying on an app you own: YouTube collecting aggregated watch times for videos is useful to creators to avoid reaching people who don't want to watch them. Netflix collecting in-house analytics is only mildly annoying because I don't know how individualized the data is, but aggregate stats are fine. Behavioral analysis of individuals is still creepy.
-Spying on all apps running on your software: Roku or a smart TV reporting what you watch in all apps is starting to approach unacceptable. Presumably appmakers know about this when they are making the apps, but a third party doesn't have the same checks and balances to make sure they aren't alienating users with creepy behavior. There is not a functioning market here because appmakers don't get a choice of how to reach users, because platform rentiers are claiming all of the users.
- Spying on arbitrary video files you watch through DLNA: not okay. My work-in-progress video productions and self-ripped discs are simply none of the TV makers' business.
-Spying on HDMI inputs: serious WTF. Like I can't even... WTF??? Who do they think they are?
This is a problem. I don't want advertisements to be optimized for engagement. Anything that makes advertisements more effective is something I'm against.
It might not do that today, but perhaps a future firmware update that you would need or want, will do that; Visio TVs started ACRing and uploading that data after an update (they were sued for it and lost; it was called “smart data” or some other innocuous name.
Smart phones
Smart TVs
Smart speakers
Smart doorbell/security cameras
Smart home systems
If there's one thing these all have in common it's:
'Known privacy issues regarding tracking and data collection by large tech companies.'
When a product is marketed as smart...I assume it's smart as in it's watching and learning from me and giving the data to someone.
since it's not necessarily "paid for" via the advertising
Would 'heavily subsidized by' work as well?
With TVs, the sticker price pays for the hardware. The ads pay for the extra house the manufacturer's CEO feels he's entitled to have.
Your data is subsidizing the low hardware costs.
You mentioned commercial displays costing a lot more but those are a different market entirely, and the extra price is only slightly motivated by the lack of advertising.
Now with complex video and audio codecs, video post-processing and shoddily coded software there's been a very severe downgrade in that department. I don't have a TV at home but every time I'm in a hotel or my parent's place I notice how laggy it is when I'm just browsing through the channels (which is what I do 90% of the time when I'm using one, since there's hardly anything worth watching anyway).
For those of you who are too young to know what I'm talking about, have a look at this: https://youtu.be/v83WEzw8tfw?t=44
My recollection from the 80's was you switch the channel (physically) and it's... switched!
So was there some magical latency there that I just couldn't perceive, or are the "near instant" reports talking about some other type of TV? Or something else?
With this I basically never see the UI on my LG and Samsung TVs, and I certainly don't interact with it unless I need to get into settings.
But if there's just no open wifi points around then you can still be pretty certain of this.
As Samsung is essentially hostile beyond belief, and has thrown away all pretense of 'helping', I'd say yes.
Rather than constantly monitoring and investigating what your TV is doing it's far simpler to just avoid Samsung, LG, Panasonic or Sony products.
Even if your current smart TV doesn't do this, it's exactly the sort of dark pattern that certain manufacturers could add with an update and there's nothing you can do about it because you don't control the product.
Best to just avoid brands you don't trust.
And then once one or two companies have made that acceptable, they all will go that way.
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/idiocracy....
Maybe not so easy in the future. TVs might eventually have 5G internet connections built-in and paid for by the manufacturer. It could be worth it to them if they get enough revenue from their software platform through user tracking and advertising.
5G is looking to reduce the cost of them further as LPWA is a key part of the standard.
If not, you could use a Raspi? I had non-techie (but still young) friends who came up with and implemented this idea by themselves.
No good. The TVs are starting to nag the user if left unconnected.