You sit down to relax, put on your favorite show, and settle in for a night of binge-watching. But while you’re watching your TV… your TV is watching you.
Smart TVs take constant snapshots of everything you watch. Sometimes hundreds of snapshots a second.
Welcome to the future of “entertainment.”
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At this point I’m just going to assume George Orwell was a time traveler. He’s been right about everything so far.
No it’s not.
Still got an old Panasonic plasma from 2010 and it’s going strong.
But I am aware of the “wonders” of post-purchase monetization, which is how they’re printing out so many of these cutting edge OLED big screens for surprisingly low initial purchase prices
Just create a black hole network at your house and connect all ‘smart’ appliances to that. Block all traffic at the router level. This prevents them trying to connect to open mesh networks and also provides the benefit of cataloging all the traffic
Mine ain’t, I’m using an ancient dumb TV.
I’m not, but I’ve disconnected the Internet from it. It can try all it wants to send the data to the mother ship.
Soon they may come with cellular capacity. Cars and e-bikes already do.
You gotta Faraday cage it!
even better we dont use tv anymore, just a PC.
Still gonna need a large screen somehow unless you watch all your stuff at the desk or through a laptop.
99% of what we watch is from streaming (Netflix, YouTube, etc). A dumb tv with a Chromecast probably isn’t any better.
I watch TV through my computer using Jellyfin. Am I at danger?
Nope
Other than your PC or Mac spying on you, you are in no danger.
Sometimes hundreds of snapshots a second.
That’s a pretty neat FPS for a tv.
The article states that’s what the privacy policy sais samsung can sample every 500ms and LG every 10ms. It doesn’t really mean they are, but it’s definitely possible. A very basic way of detecting content is to take a 1000 pixels evenly spaced out over the screen and store the color values. That gives you something you can match against a database. You don’t need to process a 4K screenshot for this.
Yeah I’m calling bullshit on that quote, I’d like to see proof of any smart TV having beefy enough hardware to record anything at 100fps+, and even then what would be the point? Nothing played back on the screen will even have a frame rate and 60fps… I’m sure this is a lazy article mistake
EDIT: I take it back, I talked it out with Gemini and understand the logic and realistic implementation now, it’s a dedicated part of the SoC design. Still hate the fact that this is a thing, we just need to spread the word about not connecting your actual TV to the internet at all ever.
No, it’s not. It has not connected to the internet.
Some TVs will sneakily connect to open APs to try and phone home. It is nasty but it does happen. You can only be worry free if you yank out the radio module. Some TVs make it easier than others (My LG TV made it as easy as opening the back of the TV and disconnecting, YMMV)
My TV isn’t a “smart” tv.
Well, so, about that.
A lot of TV’s will form mesh nets with same brand-or even across brands³-, until they find one that is connected. I’ve even heard reports of one with a sim card¹.
¹in a 'smoke filled room’² ²okay it was a van. A smoke filled van. And she was on some other stuff too.
³OS based i think? So instead of Sony’s seeking Sony’s or samsungs seeking samsungs, its android tvs or roku’s or whatever forming meshes. Don’t quote me on that though
Where can I read about these mesh networks?
It’s the same thing apple’s Find My runs on. Devices bounce off each other like the fires of gondor
Think there was an article in… I think wired a couple years back.
My thoughts exactly. My Xbox is spying on me instead.
I think you meant - Me Xbox is spying on my instead.
Yup same, running a shield
I guess I’ll stick with my 2012 Toshiba 55" dumb TV.
We probably have the same model - the one with the big oval stand. Every once in a while I wish it was OLED and/or higher resolution, but it’s not worth the expensive or all the modern “features” such as these.
I just don’t own a tv. Getting rid of my entertainment and gaming systems and most of social media was my answer to internal peace. I don’t have streaming either.
The built-in OS on smart TVs almost always sucks. The built-in OS on our LG is slower, has less apps, and has less support for HDR and higher resolutions than our Fire stick.
Just don’t use it and instead plug in a Fire stick, turn off its tracking, then sideload apps like BeeTV and HDO Box.
I know Amazon has a bad rep from a privacy standpoint but the Fire stick is super cheap compared to its competition and lets you turn off the tracking in one page of the settings menu.
The article says the TVs still capture input and do recognition from external sources so using an external device is not helping.
Edit: Unless your tv is not connected to the internet.
The TV can still connect via weave, Amazon sidewalk, or other mesh networks through your neighbors doorbell or thermostat or whatever… Even if you never connect it, it could still report. Have to open it up and destroy the antennas.
It’s almost like we should have strong data privacy laws so companies can’t spy on everything we do…
European liberals are trying to weaken gdpr
Jokes on them: I watch videos on my tablet. There’s no way that’s spying on me, right? Right?
Not if your tablet runs an open source operating system without tracking. Like GrapheneOS or LineageOS, which both can be set up entirely without Google services, or sandboxing apps.
I’ve never allowed my TV to have an active route to the internet since I bought it in 2019, it’s exclusively fed over HDMI by gaming consoles and an Apple TV.
The thing is, HDMI 1.4 added HEC, so what’s to prevent media players from serving as an Ethernet switch and providing an internet connection to TVs.
HEC feature enables IP-based applications over HDMI and provides a bidirectional Ethernet communication at 100 Mbit/s
I think the bandwidth is too slow for HD/4K Streams.
I am sure the 100 Mbit/s must also be theoretical maximum, i would be impressed if practical cables supports even half the orignal specs
for streaming, yeah, for tracking its plenty
100Mbit/s is plenty for streaming even 8k
for streaming, yeah, for tracking its plenty
Apple TV is watching you 😁
So does your isp, and uses that for targeted ads. My pihole is constantly blocking a domain ran by xfinity that collects data for their targeted ad service
What domain do I can make sure it’s blocked?
This
Thanks, looks like it’s on the Stevenblack list.
Id also like to know what lists hes using
It’s on https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts
I also have additional lists from firebog.net, and I use jacklul/pihole-updatelists to maintain it.
I’m using like 30 block lists with over 1,900,000 blocked domains. There is a site that had a bunch of blocklists and I just grabbed most of them
I’ve really gotta look into pihole.
It’s really been great
Me too
Can I get some more info. Do you know what device on your network is asking for said address?
Roku: has its own problems, but I dont use the smart tv features and turn them all off especially the wifi. It doesnt talk to my isp and ive never got requests from it.
I think it’s my LG TV. But it has its own service that I also block.
Here is the service from xfinity that I’m talking about. It’s relatively new to my network and has increased my blocked percentage by a lot. Mind you, I have 1,900,000+ domains on my blocklist
Are you using isp provided hardware?
My experience with said items has been poor. Literal open doors to your network.
I’m using my xfinity router/modem in bridge mode to my router.
Do whatever you can to remove this from your network as soon as you can. OpenWRT as a suggestion.
What 4K TV can I buy that doesn’t do this guys help? Or should I stick to monitors???
I mean… Just don’t hook the TV up to the internet. Don’t join your WiFi network on the TV.
Kind of a simple solution.
Doesn’t work anymore. They do dark mesh networks.
No it’s not! I had a goddamn Sony tv and it wouldn’t let me change certain settings unless I connected it to the internet! They try to force your hand!
Do you remember the model number? I would like to research this.
What about connecting to a mobile/theter and change password after you adjusted your settings? 🤷♂️
Until the cost of a sim card w/service is less than the revenue they generate from it. Which I fear is scarily close.
You can’t activate the warranty without it. Then once it knows it can go online it will constantly harass you.
“You can’t activate the warranty without it” That’s illegal in most of the world
Who said
Calm down, it’s a TV.
We’ll see how calm you are when your TV goes live on sky net and kills you in your sleep
Sceptre still makes TVs that are just that, no underlying smart OS
TY!
I got xiaomi, opened it up and disconnected the Bluetooth / wifi card. Connect it to a linux device and now it is a shitter version of a dumb tv. It’s crazy how smart tvs really really suck at being dumb. But it does work once you get used to some annoying quirks.
Tip: connect a cheap air mouse/keyboard to it as a remote
You can buy any TV. Just turn off the tracking in the settings and plug in a streaming stick.
