Nowadays is hard to buy a non-smart TV and that means consumers (almost) don't have a choice anymore. Once that happens, we're at the mercy of manufacturers and we know how much they respect user privacy.

Companies like Samsung are already pushing hard to monetize their TVs, selling ads and shoving them down users throats. Imagine what a Samsung TV + Mobile combo can do to profile users: age, sexual preferences, political views, etc would be very easy to know by the manufacturer.

Going on a rabbit hole around TV privacy, I've read some TVs could connect to a nearby wifi if it's open access, or use HDMI as others pointed out. They can also capture images and sound and send it home to "improve sevices". I'm not sure how much of the above is real vs paranoid fears, but the prospect of this scenario being standard practice in the future is both possible and scary.

Call me paranoid but to avoid some folk on the other side of the world having a list of what I watch and pictures of my family I use the 'service mode' on my Samsung TV to switch off wifi capabilities and bluetooth. I also factory reset the device every few months. I'm not even sure that protects me 100% but at least I try. Because once your data is on the wild, got knows how secure it is, and what malicious actors can do with it...

> I've read some TVs could connect to a nearby wifi

This is a myth that goes around HN as far as I can tell. Nobody's ever provided a concrete example of a specific TV model which does this. It's like the "TVs soon coming with a 5G sim" one, which people also speculate on.

> Nobody's ever provided a concrete example of a specific TV model which does this.

The only concrete claim I could found is [1] - however, I admit, there is no further proof that this claim is true.

There are interesting discussions about the topic in [2] and [3], however even there are no addition concrete examples besides [1] - so, it might be that [1] is in fact how the rumor started.

> It's like the "TVs soon coming with a 5G sim" one,

Not yet, true, but there are enough signs that make such a development credible: Built-in connectivity over which you have no control is already standard for cars. Projects like Amazon Sidewalk show that vendors are clearly thinking about taking connectivity in their own hands. A large part of the value proposition of 5G is connectivity everywhere and a supercharged internet of things.

So I see this as the most likely trajectory for the future.

See also [4].

[1] https://forum.developer.samsung.com/t/if-you-choose-to-not-c...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275350

[4] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/01/huawei-reportedly-plans-f...

>you can just not connect the TV to the internet in the first place.

Make sure you have no open WiFi around and do not connenct the TV over HDMI, since it can also provide it with the Internet.

The open WiFi thing I have yet to see any evidence of, as discussed elsewhere in this thread, and while HDMI has supported ethernet for years I legitimately have never seen a device claim to actually use it. You'd need both the TV and something it's connected to supporting it for it to become a risk.

The same wires are used for HDMI ARC, so any device supporting ARC (most TVs) inherently can't support ethernet on the same port.

So apparently we need HDMI condoms now.

While I think this is a possible future, consider how many people today have trouble connecting their TV's to their home internet, or say don't know their own wifi password.

I think it may be some time before network connectivity is required on the majority of screens.

I can imagine it happening with scattered brands here and there. The bigger concern for me would be connecting to my neighbors ring or adding one of those low bandwidth lte network cards.

My guess is, we'll just skip the "wifi required" phase and go straight to "lte/5g/ring connectivity built-in". It's already like this with cars.

I can easily image a future where it's not even advertised anymore whether your device has a cloud connection or not - you just find its behaviour has magically changed one day.

I also expect other manufacturers to follow Amazon's example and create their own "ring" networks. So your Samsung TV might connect to the neighbor's Galaxy phone which is logged into their wifi, etc...

Wow I hadn't considered other companies doing what Amazon has done with sharing home wifi. That's a really good point.

In the EU at least tying hardware functionality to account creation would be non-compliant due to GDPR (see e.g. debate around Oculus Quest which is not available for sale in Germany due to this). Not everything can be solved through technology, some problems need to be solved by legislation.

I wonder why they never used that Ethernet-over-hdmi, which is a thing for many years now. There is likely something plugged into TV using hdmi that is connected to network.

Also, I recall reading that TVs from certain manufacturers had/has bugs in them that will prevent TVs from functioning after periods of time without connection or firmware updates.

> I wonder why they never used that Ethernet-over-hdmi, which is a thing for many years now.

The same wires on the HDMI cable are used for HDMI ARC, which is far more useful to most TVs (as it allows smart TV apps to back-feed their audio to a soundbar or receiver "upstream" of the display.

This would require cooperation from whatever HDMI device is at the other end to share its own network connection over HDMI.

Interesting… so it would not simply connect another device using dhcp?

I never needed to use it and I’m not sure what was the motivation to introduce it into hdmi, but requiring cooperation would explain why it wasn’t used widely.

> Interesting… so it would not simply connect another device using dhcp?

Most devices didn't support ethernet over HDMI, and it was not something that could be passively supported.

> I never needed to use it and I’m not sure what was the motivation to introduce it into hdmi

The idea was that you could have your TV or AV Receiver connected to your normal ethernet and any other connected devices would just magically have network connectivity as well.

Turns out that most people who care to wire their home theater don't mind just using a switch to connect everything directly, and most of the world will just use WiFi if given the opportunity.

Also AFAIK it was limited to 100mbit/sec so by the time it became a thing it was already kind of obsolete.

samsung will probably have an arrangement with comcast to connect to any xfinity hotspot for ads and telemetry or something like twilio’s super sim

Quite a few years, yet.