Smart TVs take snapshots of what you watch multiple times per second
melroy@kbin.melroy.org to 
By Jeremy Hsu on September 24, 2024
Popular smart TV models made by Samsung and LG can take multiple snapshots of what you are watching every second – even when they are being used as external displays for your laptop or video game console.
Smart TV manufacturers use these frequent screenshots, as well as audio recordings, in their automatic content recognition systems, which track viewing habits in order to target people with specific advertising. But researchers showed this tracking by some of the world’s most popular smart TV brands – Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG TVs every 10 milliseconds – can occur when people least expect it.
“When a user connects their laptop via HDMI just to browse stuff on their laptop on a bigger screen by using the TV as a ‘dumb’ display, they are unsuspecting of their activity being screenshotted,” says Yash Vekaria at the University of California, Davis. Samsung and LG did not respond to a request for comment.
Vekaria and his colleagues connected smart TVs from Samsung and LG to their own computer server. Their server, which was equipped with software for analysing network traffic, acted as a middleman to see what visual snapshots or audio data the TVs were uploading.
They found the smart TVs did not appear to upload any screenshots or audio data when streaming from Netflix or other third-party apps, mirroring YouTube content streamed on a separate phone or laptop or when sitting idle. But the smart TVs did upload snapshots when showing broadcasts from the TV antenna or content from an HDMI-connected device.
The researchers also discovered country-specific differences when users streamed the free ad-supported TV channel provided by Samsung or LG platforms. Such user activities were uploaded when the TV was operating in the US but not in the UK.
By recording user activity even when it’s coming from connected laptops, smart TVs might capture sensitive data, says Vekaria. For example, it might record if people are browsing for baby products or other personal items.
Customers can opt out of such tracking for Samsung and LG TVs. But the process requires customers to either enable or disable between six and 11 different options in the TV settings.
“This is the sort of privacy-intrusive technology that should require people to opt into sharing their data with clear language explaining exactly what they’re agreeing to, not baked into initial setup agreements that people tend to speed through,” says Thorin Klosowski at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy non-profit based in California.
LOL "if it was opt-in, no one would do it!"
no fucking shit. there is nothing worth watching that i would buy a smart tv for
One issue that has come up recently in discussions on here is that it's hard to get dumb TVs or computer monitors in large format in 2024.
Not impossible, but surprisingly difficult. I went looking for a large computer monitor for some user who wanted a large one. I eventually found an older one on Amazon still for sale, but it's not that easy to get large computer monitors, which I think is part of what drives people to use smart TVs as computer monitors.
You can get projectors, but that's not what everyone's after.
A smart tv without an internet connection is usually close enough to a dumb TV. It's not like your TV needs regular security updates so leaving it off your home network is fine.
I do not know how true it is, but I've heard that some of them will create a mesh network if your neighbor has the same brand and it's connected to the internet.
I've always meant to look into it but I have big dumb TVs that work for now.
Open the tv and rip out the antenna. Y'all already forgot the classic secret agent trope of checking the hotel room for bugs? Now we all get to play that game!
Nowadays the antenna is often embedded into the pcb, so no way to rip it out other than scraping off the traces
Google part numbers (if they aren't scratched off/lasered off/ epoxied). Once you've found the ethernet controller, you can short out the pins, or yeet it off the board.
"mechanical malfunction, please contact support" as a big red warning that you cannot dismiss
Would love to know how true this is as I wouldn't put it past manufacturers
There's another reply further down that goes into specifics. I ain't the one because I didn't come with receipts and I'm just a drunk.
It's called wardriving, a practise Samsung TVs are infamous for.
I never put that together with wardriving but that's exactly what it is. Thank you for that.
Unrelated story: ~20 years ago I was in the military and broke as hell. I went wardriving in my neighborhood looking for open wifi and found a business not too far away that had it. So I built an antenna out of a coffee can, mounted it up just outside my window, and got free wifi for months.
I will not give them the satisfaction.
Smart TVs are only smart when they are connected to the internet.
As mentioned by others, they sometimes network with nearby devices such as your neigbor's TV or an unsecured wifi.
Which should be telling them that not only does no one want it, but maybe just maybe we already paid for your fucking TV. Either raise the price or stop being so fucking goddamn greedy to the point that you force us to make the government force you to stop.
Of course the bought and paid for US government won't, but hopefully EU governments will.
If they raise the price, then they only get money once. If they sell your data, now they have an income stream.
These are criminal violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Jail the motherfucking felon CEOs!
But the supreme court ruled to save the conviction for the election.
Worse than that, they
havegave free speech to corporations, and now that includes doing nearly anything involving communication or spending money.I’ll believe corporations are people the moment Texas executes ones.
So LG and Samsung likely have tons of illegal (copyright) content on their servers then? Ownership is 9/10ths of the law so they say. That’s gotta be exabytes
Most likely yes.. And other privacy sensitive information like banking details, passwords and more.
awful ethics aside what a disgusting waste of processing power. software already barely runs
now you know why
Screenshotting every 500ms is insane.
TVs I've come across are such displeasure to use, it's incredible
Would be nice if we could have some technological privacy laws written in this century.
We need all the boomers in Capitol Senior Care Home to vacate first
You have it backwards. You have to EVICT them.
Until then just desolder the antennas good luck sending data with no way to connect to the internet.
Don't mind baby products and dildos or whatever.
They could see bank activity and even login credentials when someone is temporarily displaying their own passwords.
This basically ignores all security measures regarding everything. Sensitive communication, company secrets and so on.
That's fucking seriously huge. What the fuck?!
Right? But we've been convinced the Chinese government spying on us through Huawei is a problem.
Every major tech major brands and business, even cars like BMW and now also TVs like Samsung or LG are all spying on their customers. And why isn't this forbidden by lawn already?
even if it was forbidden by lawn, most people with smart TVs keep them inside the house.
Money & Corruption, the movie.
They are. They just aren't the only one.
They're both problems.
Because that’s a chinese corporation making money.
It’s fine when a US one does it
I know right!?? I connected my htpc to my Samsung tv. Omg!
I'm so tired
Moi aussi. I am le tired.
Well, have a nap
THEN FIRE ZE SAMSUNG & LG CEOS!
Bout that time eh chaps?
... right-o.
Zen have a nap
Actual paper here.
https://arxiv.org/html/2409.06203v1
It is not sending full screenshots as anybody technical would already have guessed. It's a few KB over an hour, so it's content recognition hashes.
Opt out anyway. Their study shows the opt out option does indeed opt you out of it.
This shouldn't be opt-out. This is the digital equivalent of some fucking pervert showing up at your window and taking pictures of your TV and then letting a bunch of other perverts pay to find out what you were watching so they can use that info to manipulate you, multiplied by however many millions of TVs they've sold. Even if the punishment for that crime was just a single week in jail, the people responsible should be facing several
hundredthousand years behind bars when you add it all up.It shouldn't be opt in or out tbh. This shit should just be illegal.
The whole adverspying industry needs to be reined the fuck in and slowly turned to mulch.
The first step to that is letting us see what the advertiser has in our hidden "profiles" and let us modify and/or wipe them out.
So the data is still captured every 500ms. But it batches the data together and indeed only send data of around 8kb every minute back to the centralized server. But 8kb can not be full screenshots of MBs of course, so this is some kind of meta / fingerprint data. The original author (Jeremy Hsu) is misleading here with the term "screenshot every 500ms".
Yeah, it'll grab a few frame, crunch them up, post back something like "ac8c986ffcb770d460151b20c1cfe628612247ac2d284c780761af3b544bfea7" to the servers and from there it likely gets binned as "not recognised" but might match a segment from Star Wars 4K77.
It sounds like the sort of thing that should be off by default (and it probably is, I haven't bought a new one for years), but what we've learnt since GDPR is that if a big box comes up over what you're trying to do and it has an "Accept" button, people will generally click it and read nothing just to get back to another riveting episode of America's Deadliest Home Shootouts or something.
Does that come on before or after "Ow! My Balls!"?
Right after "People Falling Down And Suffering Serious Injuries: Oops! All slide Whistles Edition!"
But before Merica's Deadliest School Shootings
Go away. Baitin!!
Is that from the Idiocracy movie? 😀
"meta tags every 500ms" might be more accurate, but the end result is the same. The device is monitoring what you consume in order to aggregate data on your household.
How can I turn this input into an intrusion vector and exfiltrate all their IP to public social media and then corrupt all their servers and backups and make their IT Dept autodefenestrate ?
This kinda stuff should be opt-IN, not opt-OUT. Just think of how many people don't even know this is happening, or that there even is an opt-out.
You hear that? It's a whisper.... It's a multinational multibillion dollar class action lawsuit coming after Samsung and LG. WTF!
Okay. So how do we turn it off!? I’ve read nothing in my Samsung manuals about this “feature” and here no instructions for turning it off.
Just don't hook it up to your wifi. Don't use any of its included apps. If you must stream get a separate device to do it.
This is the correct answer. I actually disabled LG's version of it when I first heard about it. A few months later it had been reactivated in an update, so I just factory reset it and connected an old laptop.
You can't trust anyone — corporation or government — to protect or respect your privacy. Ever. If it's not open source and E2EE, assume that a criminal is going to view and process it for profit.
No it is not the correct answer! The correct answer is to put the CEOs who perpetrate this criminal shit in prison for millions of counts of hacking and stalking!
Merely shrugging and implementing a technological workaround is not an appropriate response to someone perpetrating a felony against you!
I have a Samsung smart TV that is not connected to any networks, and every few days it will display a 'detecting device' loading screen when switching to my input that fails after 30 seconds or until I cancel it (canceling does not seem to impact its functioning)
I have no evidence but I strongly suspect this to be related to attempting to record and send device data to a remote server.
I have noticed this too, I have to press the 'back' button on the remote to get the computer output.
Question, what separate device is best and most privacy focused? I just imagine getting a firestick, google Chromecast, etc would also give away data?
There are some open-source systems for media PCs.
Kodi seems to me to be popular, though I don't use a media PC myself.
You'll need to have the technical knowledge to install it yourself.
No Internet for the device
They have been known to connect automatically to nearby compatible devices or unsecured wifi.
Use Pi-hole and block their domains
They're getting smart to that and are starting to hard code server IPs, circumventing any DNS you have in place.
Joke's on them. Their telemetry server is in another
castleVLAN.Do you know where I can source the domains?
https://blocklistproject.github.io/Lists/ the Smart TV list under their beta lists.
I use nextdns on my network and there’s a filter there for smart tvs. Samsung seems to want to call home the most.
Pihole will log DNS requests. The requests come.from the TV. So when it pops up, Block it.
Disable internet.
You'll have to insulate your home from any outside unsecured wifi and compatible devices to stop some of them from networking.
Since it can also connect to untrusted wifi access point (eg. without password). You need to live in a Faraday cage ..
You know that part of the manual that tells you to connect the TV to the Internet?
Don't do that.
That sadly doesn't work well enough. They will connect to things on their own.
I got an LG because despite how it looks, you can just refuse to agree to a bunch of their privacy agreements and be fine. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than it would be otherwise, and miles ahead of Samsung's lack of options.
I have come to realize this and have declined all the T&Cs except for like 3 that you just have to accept to make it function.
Yep, same. Works fine for me, I never wanted the features that disables.
If there are open wifi networks near your TV that you can't lockdown, you'll want to confirm it your make/model is known to automatically connect to those, and then take whatever mitigation steps are justified for your own use case.
For example, if you have multiple TVs, maybe you can swap models around based on their capabilities and location, or look up the schematic for the TV and see if it's easy to block it's internal antennas.
Or maybe that seems like too much of a hassle and you just say fuck it, and don't worry about it. Which is always an option, because given how much data already gets sucked up by surveillance capitalism, my evening TV viewing habits have to be some of the lowest value data points, as I already block ads and avoid all ad supported services.
I love my Samsung because I never gave it the wifi credentials.
Dumb TV is better. My PS5 can do everything I want and I already give all my metrics to them just playing it
Hello 8th person I've had to explain this to: they still connect to stuff. Even if you disable WiFi on the Samsung TV they can mesh network with other TVs in your neighborhood or with your phone (Samsung is particularly pushy about wanting you to install and connect your phone).
Ok I'll look into this. I have not witnessed any evidence of this behavior. What frequency would this be meshed on? Any 2.4GHz and 5Ghz I would have already seen.
Its real tricky to get into and overwrite some of the SoC processors and ARM chipsets, but pretty earlyon the hacker crowd was turning Samsungs Smart TVs dumb.
They've acrually got some great resistance to screen burn.
Yeah. My Samsung claws my firewall like a squirrel trapped in a box. It intensifies on certain hours of the day. I'm quite sure it also tries to send what devices are connected and filenames are in attached memory sticks. Maybe also some media file checksums.
Do your firewall rules allow you to block your tv's telemetry, while allowing you to still use the internet on it? If so, would you mind sharing how you did it?
You should look into PiHole, if you're half-savvy with computers. They should be able to block all the destinations smart TVs are trying to connect to
Sinkholes can be negated by manufacturers using static, hardcoded dns addresses. Be careful and check traffic regularly.
And those can be blocked and even redirected at the router level. Though not as simple as spinning up a pihole.
Actually simpler, if you have an Asus router. Just remember to disable its telemetry stuff...
... Sending telemetry to Asus about the TV sending telemetry to LG? Wtf is this timeline?
We are on the "let's see how back corporate greed can get" simulation server.
And they do. My Philips TV didn't even ask for DNS until hardcoded IPs for Netflix et al. timed out. And when it did, it asked Google, not my router.
This is why you need to do DNS hijacking to handle hardcoded DNS requests.
Very easy to circumvent
THIS is piracy. Along with all the other personal data selling.
This is why our "smart" TV is not allowed to be connected to the internet.
But can you really be sure that it doesn't connect to another network? i have to check again but if i recall correctly there are TVs that try to connect to other open networks or even look for other TVs from the same manufacturer and connect through those to the internet. I have to double check this again, so take this with a grain of salt
If that's true - lan for your own content with network isolation and ripping out the WiFi antenna, I guess?? I hate this
There is such a thing called HDMI Ethernet. If you connect some sort of Android box to your TV it might establish an Ethernet connection with it and thus connect to the internet.
If you use an Android TV system you don't get to complain about your video output device tracking.
I have searched for alternatives. There are none that I am aware of. I just want a streaming box that can run jellyfin with a simple remote. I really don't want to use a keyboard in bed.
If anyone knows a simple setup that boots straight into jellyfin with a remote, I would love to hear about it.
Android has closed source Google spy framework, don't use that.
Agreed. It's not solving anything when you move to Android TV.
A smart TV is not allowed on my property.
I am a bit puzzled about the "even when your laptop is connected" part.
I have a small android box connected to it and am not using apps on the TV so it should have no chance of sending screenshot out even if it takes them.
The TV itself is not connected
what kind of Android box do you have? anything you recommend? (looking to have some sort of streaming client)
Nvidia Shield. The bigger one.
Yes, it's a couple of years old at this point, but it's still the best device of its kind.
Not to mention the remote is FANTASTIC.
It's a Chinese one that I used at first for retro gaming with emuelec. Now it is dual boot and I have kodi and newpipe on it too.
the google tv with chromecast dongle is quite decent, good price/performance ratio
Sorry for being paranoid but can the TV piggyback the connection used by the the streaming device/android box to send data back to the TV OEM?
yep, never allow them to connect to the internet
I don’t think my TV has ever been connected to the internet. As a safe guard to ensure that it never is I banned its wired and wireless MAC address from my network. So even if someone did plug it in…nothing.
A lot of shit makes a new, random MAC address for every new connection to an access point now
I’ve jokingly said this before, but just wait until manufacturers start adding 4G/5G to TVs explicitly for ads and telemetry…
Just like modern cars... I wish there was some kind legislation that would limit phone-home telemetry to emergency service telecommunication frequencies, and be opt-in only. That way any OEM operating under commercial cellular frequencies would thus be unlicensed, and subject to FCC violations and import bans. Like what OnStar was originally pitched as; only auto dialing to 911, and 911 only, if you were unresponsive after airbags deployed. OEM couldn't use the telecommunication frequencies for anything other than networking with emergency service endpoints on the same VLAN.
Anything recorded by the vehicle would be required to stay on the vehicle due privacy regulations, like the black box recorder for warranted forensic investigations. OTA updates could also be distributed offline for users to download and flash via USB, like any motherboard bios, so transactions would be write only.
No matter how much they ask
Something doesn't add up. How can a TV take 100 Screenshots of 4k content per second? No wifi has that bandwidth. No embedded processor has that capacity.
It doesn't need a 4K screenshot. It needs enough data/metrics from any given single frame to run it through analytics and an algorithm to tailor ads. Backend surveillance like this isn't interested in fidelity to the human viewing experience. It needs identifying data. That can be had through a combination of low quality data scrapes done numerous times.
"Screenshot" is more like a metaphor here. Sort of like how your Apple or Google photos are "private," but the data and analytics taken from them you've given away. It's like if you told me I could look at all the photos on your phone and take as many notes and subject them to as much analysis as I wanted, but I promised not to actually physically keep your phone/photos. Probably makes you feel like your photos are securely still in your possession, but I got what I wanted. Your data is technically private, but my data about your data is mine.
Totally agree. It sounds like something was lost in translation here by the final edit of potentially some run though a llm for proof reading to dumb it down enough to either just make it more consumable, more clickbait or realistic both.
My guess is the actual research reported that it was 100s of packets per second (not screenshots) which is still a lot more than you would expect even for spyware. Either way it’s been well known that smart tvs are spyware ridden, I don’t need a paywalled service to tell me that.
it doesn't necessarily take full resolution images
just because it can capture images a few hundred milliseconds apart doesn't mean it's continuously capturing images. It could be several in short bursts with a delay between groups of images.
You know when people say "I've only talked about this once, never searched for it, and then I got ads a few days later"?
What if it hasn't been phones that were listening (despite Siri/Google Assistant/Alexa mis-identifying something as a wake-word being the most sensible explanation), but TVs?
I'm pretty familiar with how one particular brand of TV works, and you're right, it's absolutely not screenshots. It's a handful of single pixels across the screen. By matching these pixels against known content it's possible to identify what was being watched. Not too different than how Shazam can identify a song.
That's not to say all TV manufacturers work that way.
I'm with you, I think it's probably BS. But I suppose it could be taking highly compressed low resolution snapshots.
Plenty of embedded processors have that capacity, but I generally agree about the bandwidth.
360p is probably enough. And that's "up to" per second, average is probably far far far less.
Probably a data snapshot, not an actual screenshot.
It may be snapping multiple in a small period of time, everyonce in a while. Compressing them in the background then trickling them back out.
It doesn't say the screenshot must be full resolution and it doesn't say the screenshot is immediately uploaded. A couple seconds to downscale and compress would work the same as far as content identification is concerned
Yea I don't believe it, that's some processor intensive streaming. My security camera feeds can't even do that. 100fps is crazy for streaming. Are we sure these "screenshots" aren't just anonymous metric gatherings like video codecs and resolution?
Not mentioning taking 100 screenshots each second with what - 25 frames per second? - is kinda overkill...
Imagine the amount of bandwidth and energy saved, if they didn’t do any of this bullshit.
They are essentially using someone else’s money to get themselves more money. Fuck these people!
LG by now will have several weeks of footage of me scrolling through streaming services and failing to find anything to watch.
Diagnosis: ADHD. Display ads for stimulants.
Probably won’t happen as I’m not in the US, however if it does start to show ads it will be very quickly disconnected from the internet and relegated to being solely a display for the PS5. It’s not far off that anyway.
prediction if this becomes widespread: soon they will have their own wireless internet connection just so they wont have to rely on your network to spy on you lel😎
You joke but that's literally what they did with the cars. I remember when that was an upsell, now you getting that modem you asked for it or not and it will ping the merchant when it detects that you are fucking your mistress in the back seat.
Welcome to to today's America peasants
Not sure how ads for medications are legal anywhere.
Friendly reminder that gaming console monitors, computer monitors, projectors, dumb TVs, and commercial displays exist.
Yes, I could hack a smart TV to disable its networking capabilities. (Merely withholding my wifi password is not reliable.) But that would still be showing the manufacturers that I find spyware TVs acceptable, and supporting the production of those models.
Also, this would be a good time to pressure our legislators into criminalizing this nonsense.
Only one company makes Dumb TVs anymore, Sceptre, and the quality is very hit or miss due to the way they acquire their screens.
It's also harder to find them in larger sizes any more, even for the few for which sell them at all, so if you want a larger one, you may not have much by way of options.
https://assetbasedlife.com/dumb-tvs-are-a-dying-breed/
This lists Insignia, which is a Best Buy store brand.
This has a couple, at least as of last year:
https://www.tomsguide.com/features/dumb-tvs-heres-why-you-cant-find-them-anymore
It's also possible to buy a used TV, but obviously, as with getting used cars to avoid monitoring stuff in newer cars, the pool of those will only be around for so long, and you can't take advantage of any technological advances subsequent to them.
Plenty of companies make display TVs that only display commercial content. You see them all the time displaying menus in fast food restaurants.
These can also have all smart tech turned off because some companies also use them as digital whiteboards to display proprietary or confidential information.
Why is withholding the WiFi password not enough? Could they somehow piggyback off a different device or something?
I've heard that some of them will connect to any wifi available. So if your neighbor does not have a password on their network. The tv will connect and upload the data.
Yes. It could talk to another smart device and ask it to send its packages. You could be careful and connect none of the smart crap in your house to your network, but the smart fridge in your upstairs neighbor's kitchen could still be helping with smuggling your data out. Or your devices could be connected to some unsecured network around.
In any case, the only surefire way to stop your data from getting smuggled out is to physically kill all the wireless connectivity capabilities of the device. Disconnect antennae, desolder chips, scrape out pcb traces. Otherwise you're just hoping the firmware is not doing anything funny. Fortunately I think these are all hypotheticals that have not (yet) been observed in real smart home products.
I can understand that if you have a Samsung TV and a Samsung fridge, they can talk with each other. But will it work if you have a fridge from a different OEM? (I'm assuming the OEMs haven't formed a cartel for illegal data smuggling)
Not putting your WiFi password in would absolutely be reliable. I’d love to hear your ideas on how they’d remotely break into your WiFi Network
Remember how Comcast routers made that ghost mesh network?
And Amazon sidewalk.
Any link to news? This is my first time heard of this.
I don't have a link but Comcast offered a get WiFi anywhere option for their customers where they could use anyone's combination modem/router from Comcast to get online with their company credentials. This was (is?) impossible to disable.
No, it would not.
They wouldn't, of course, nor did I say they would.
(But since you brought it up, we have already seen internet providers quietly using their CPE to create special-purpose wireless networks surrounding customers' homes. These could obviously be made available to any company that paid the ISP for access, just as cellular networks have been made available to companies like OnStar. So a TV could do this with a business deal rather than breaking in to your normal WiFi.)
However, your network is not the only network in the world, and WiFi is not the only kind of link. Neighbors exist. Open guest networks exist. Drive-by and fly-by networks exist. Mesh networks exist (and are already created by devices like Amazon Echo). Power line networking exists. Bluetooth, LoRa, cellular, etc. etc. etc. Maybe you live on an isolated mountain top where these things are unlikely to reach you (at least until satellite links become a little smaller and cheaper) but even that is not absolute, and most of us don't.
Unless you disassemble your TV and examine all the components within, and know what they do, it could have any number of these capabilities.
Also, partly due to how prevalent multi-network support is becoming in electronics integration, it is not unusual for related functionality to be dormant at first yet possible to activate later.
I'd love for you not to be adversarial, and to learn more about a topic before making bold claims about it in absolute terms.
To add to this, often, even if you turn off Bluetooth, your devices can still communicate via Bluetooth Low Energy, something that's separate from classic Bluetooth and typically (to my knowledge) cannot be turned off. As an example, I've heard that Google uses it to send ad targeting info between devices.
If you have a samsung phone in the house, it can connect to the TV and give it a hotspot of sorts. This is a hypothetical, not real (yet!)
Do not connect your Smart TVs to network people, seriously. Just a bad idea. Use a media center PC or some other device that allows you to stream content, and make sure the TV itself is just a big monitor, nothing more.
I hear but have not verified that they will connect to an open network without letting you know.
I have definitely had to forget networks, then have them connect to that network weeks later at random, then having to forget the network again. Don't know how that's legal.
Forgetting a network is only when your wifi is password protected. If the TV can find an open wifi access point, it could just automatically connect to the internet. "Forgetting" a network doesn't help here..! Since there is nothing to forget (there are wifi points without password). But it should be forbidden IMO to automatically connect to these kind of access points. But even your mobile phone might do the same thing.
Yep, it was my personal, password-protected network. Either someone reconnected it (unlikely, I live with my gf who doesn't use the TV) or it just cached the password until it decided to spy on my again 🙃
At least you should be able to block its mac address
Btw, is there a firmware hacking/flashing scene for smart TVs?
Unfortunately no.
The best option if you want a new tv without this stuff is buying a business display, such as here:
https://www.sharpnecdisplays.us/products/displays/m651-2
This one even comes with a Raspberry Pi compute module.
You have to specifically search display and not TV.
The problem is that usually picture quality is not the same.
Yes there is, believe it or not. It just depends on the kind of TV you have.
I setup my LG to be “jailbroken” so I could have it inject a python script into a PS4 to mod that.
https://youtu.be/zYoesrUsIj8?feature=shared
Interesting stuff.
The other option is to setup a PiHole and find the telemetry they are using to send the info off and blocking that.
I would love to able to able to put a different OS that does nothing but what I actually tell it to so on my smart TV...
Buy a commercial TV. It's a plain jane TV. I put one in as a SCADA, but it's just a tv with no frills. When I saw what it was, I knew when I'd need to purchase a tv this would be the type I wanted.
So what do we do when smart TVs force us to connect to the Internet, and refuse to work until we do?
This is exhausting. We're speeding towards a horrible, privacy-less future.
We own a few TVs but nobody actually watches them. If we're all out in the living room there's four phones out with four people watching four different things.
Dystopian
The question now is, even if I don’t connect the TV to Internet, what TV brand should I buy? Currently I have LG, but no way I’m supporting that even without Internet connection.
Well thing is, they all track you to some point.
Specs wise, LG still makes some of the best TVs. You want 4k 120Hz, they've got you. But if you feel morally unable to support a company that has opt-out tracking like this, you're a bit more limited. I thought maybe Sony's better, but nope. There's instructions on how to disable ACR on their TVs too. Philips comes with Roku or Google TV, both of which snoop on you, but I don't know if they do the automatic content recognition thing.
Dumb TVs exist, but good luck finding one with a decent resolution AND price.
Many video projectors don't. My Epson doesn't.
that name invokes the old horror that is printers
I can top it - my first desktop PC was an Epson. Come to think of it, my first printer was an Epson dot matrix. Loud as fuck but it was a good little workhorse.
hopfully they dont communicate locally with other lg or partnered devices
now or in the future
Like amazon ring devices? I think it's called Sidewalk .
"They found the smart TVs did not appear to upload any screenshots or audio data when streaming from Netflix or other third-party apps, mirroring YouTube content streamed on a separate phone or laptop or when sitting idle. But the smart TVs did upload snapshots when showing broadcasts from the TV antenna or content from an HDMI-connected device."
The world is owned by a big club, and you're not in it.
The only sensible way to operate these TVs is with no internet connection. We run our entertainment through an AppleTV. If that ever starts showing ads at rest, I’ll replace it with a Mac mini or a NUC. Fuck these companies and their race to the bottom.
Use a pihole people, don't go barebacking the internet
Doesn't help if the device has a baked in DNS address and just ignores your settings tho. Amazon and Google devices seem prone to that. After blocking everything on the common DNS ports except the PiHole, some of my devices have been acting kinda sluggish.
Easy to block that - though not with pihole exclusively.
We use another tool at our network edge to block all 53/853 traffic and redirect all port 53 traffic to our internal DNS resolver (works much like pihole).
Then we also block all DoH.
Only two devices have failed using this strategy: Chromecast - which refuses to work if it can’t access googles DNS. And Philips Hue bridges. Both lie and say “internet offline”. Every other device - even some of the questionable ones on a special VLAN for devices we don’t trust - work just fine and fall back to the router-specified DNS.
That might not help..
A DNS filter is no protection lol
I run a pi hole and it blocks 1000 attempts per minute from a single Samsung TV, then it outright denies requests from the tv. Duck those douches.
DNS sinks can often cause elevated traffic numbers because the client is constantly failing and retrying.
I bet if you enabled it to test the numbers would drop dramatically.
Those are just dns lookups.
It's not just DNS. I have this rule in my firewall:
udp dport 15600 counter drop comment "Block Samsung TV shenanigans"So far, it has blocked 20575 packets (constituting 1304695 bytes) in 6 days and 20 hours.
I also see it with Wireshark on my network using the
udp.port == 15600filter.The amount of effort i had to put into buying a dumb tv the last time it was new tv time is positively infuriating.
Yup. When we went to buy a TV I knew this was happening because the smart TVs with wifi and extra hardware and software were cheaper than the dumb TVs. Nothing is free, I knew they had to be doing this shit.
Cool. I've already got more books than I'll be able to finish before I die. Might as well get back into reading. Fuck those bastards.
I couldn't even find one last time
Theoretically I could display highly illegal stuff and they would distribute it making them complicit?
Can the API be hacked to flood their servers with petabytes of cat pictures?
What is happening with the data? Where are the data savers?
Never connect your tv to the internet.
It automatically connects to unprotected wifi access points.
So I guess they learned nothing from the last class action lawsuit https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/lg-samsung-sony-class-action-alleges-smart-tv-privacy-violations/. Also reminded me of this past gem from LG: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/lg-smart-tv-snooping-extends-to-home-networks-second-blogger-says/.
So they are allowed to pirate content actually? Even if it’s not Netflix or YouTube they take screenshots of potentially copyrighted content
Did you actually read the article? They don’t upload screenshots; they recognise content and upload the identification of that content.
The blurb above says that the TVs uploads screenshots when viewing antenna and hdmi input sources, which is what most people are reacting to here. The actual article is paywalled.
However other articles go into more detail and note that only a few KB of data per hour is actually uploaded, so the TV must be doing image analysis locally and uploading metadata only.
The original author that is indeed behind a paywall doesn't know what he is talking about. I dove into the official study and it seems to be 500ms interval data gathering. But only 1 time per minute batches together 8KB data sent back to Samsung.
Buy a computer monitor, a projector or a commercial display instead, they tend to be dumb.
Alternatively, don't connect your TV to the internet (bear in mind some are wireless). Unplug it from the wall when not in use.
As if Microsoft's Recall wasn't enough...
Until the first use menu gauntlet requires an internet connection to complete setup and enable the device for normal usage.
Samsung monitors now include all the smart TV crap and need a remote to set them up
The Samsung monitors we get at the office still appear to be just dumb screens. No remote or anything like that. But that's from their business lineup of monitors. Wouldn't surprise me too much if their consumer/gamer lineup would be different.
Don't let your TV connect to the internet. I have mine on my wifi so I can control them using Home Assistant, but they're on an isolated VLAN with no internet access.
Edit: Of course, this only works if you use an external box for streaming, like an Nvidia Shield, Apple TV, Google Chromecast TV or whatever they call it now, etc.
Wait what? Is there a blog or article on how to do this?
Because I can't picture how this works in my head for my setup. It needs internet to go to Hulu/Netflix/etc.
Oh sorry, I completely forgot to mention that. I'm using an Nvidia Shield for all my streaming.
Another approach is to connect the TV to the internet but block all LG/Samsung/whatever stuff, for example by using a firewall on your router.
The TV itself wouldn't be able to reach Hulu/Netflix/etc. they're likely using another device for that. Like a media computer or something else.
Like a apple TV / Roku which then... Reports everything you're watching and or viewing. We truly live in the day and age where nothing you do digitally is private, and it's almost turned into privacy via aggregation imo now since the PBs of raw data isn't really worth it for major corporations.
Obvs if you're the .0001% I'm sure the NSA can tap into it and you're still gonna be fucked that way, but that can be said for pretty much any digital device.
Yes you can build your own HTPC, and connect it to the TV, that is what I've been doing for the past 8 years.
You can also find a cheap laptop with like a 7th gen Intel or newer processor and use that with a wireless keyboard and mouse and an HDMI cable.
Bang for your buck it'll be the best deal for you
I just never gave my TV access to the Internet and use my home theater PC to watch stuff. Never seen a need for more.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, corporations treat you like a product. Whether you buy something from them or not. People are becoming the product that they sell.
I usually don't care very much until it starts to affect pricing for stuff based on some algorithms impression of how desperate you are. That algorithm started with travel (airlines, online booking fees for hotels and stuff) and has expanded.
If I need a new computer because mine isn't working, I don't really care that advertisers come at me with ads for their computer products. I need one, they want me to buy one, it's marketing. No worries.
If I need a new computer and suddenly all the prices for new systems goes up by $100 because it thinks I'm desperate enough to pay that, now I have a problem.
I still don't like them selling my data, and I'll do what I can to avoid it, but marketing is going to do marketing things.
The problem is, you don't get a say in the matter. If the marketing company sells on your data, you don't get to say no.
If Ford wants telemetry on your car (and they do) and they sell it to your insurance company who raises your rates because you don't drive in a manner approved by corporate, you don't get to say no.
If you search for wigs and antinausea meds, and Google sells that to health insurance who guesses you've got cancer and are a financial liability, you don't get to say no, and you don't get to argue that you were planning for a party.
If you're a fifteen year old kid and your browser starts showing gay dating ads to your extremely homophobic parents, you'd better hope they don't put it together because you don't get to stop any of it.
You can control how your data is gathered, but you have ZERO say in how it's distributed and interpreted.
wtf?
The divide between the tech savvy and the tech illiterate grows deeper.
And wider?
As a tech savvy person, it's already a gaping chasm. Making it wider and deeper isn't a huge change.
Sceptre still sells dumb TVs'. If you are in the US, Walmart sells them. I have one and it's pretty good. No frills.
I actually like mine. 4k on clearance for $300 for a 55" 3 uears ago. HD version was more. Menus suck and remote on/off is IR only, but I can make do.
i genuinely do not understand how TVs are so corrupt and greedy. You just display pixels, that's it! The entire purpose is to convert 1s and 0s to pretty color
Imagine if your computer monitor just displayed ads on top of the hdmi signal
I believe that is patented
“Oh right, it’s money!!” — Hbomberguy
That's both disturbing and completely expected. I've generally always preferred monitors over TVs tbh, this is just another reason for it lol
They collect all this data and then still cancel the most watched/best shows.
Morons.
But if you never connected the TV to the internet, it's not able to upload anything right?
Correct
Thing is, it's getting pretty cheap to build radios into devices, and companies are doing that and bridging them to whatever Internet connectivity they can reach, not just your own. You don't necessarily have to personally plug something into an Ethernet socket to make a device Internet-connected.
From back when Amazon Sidewalk was rolling out:
https://www.statuscake.com/blog/what-is-amazon-mesh/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/01/amazon-us-customers-given-one-week-to-opt-out-of-mass-wireless-sharing
When you have companies creating their own radio networks, they can use someone else's Internet connection to move data.
For expensive devices, like cars, it also makes economic sense to have a dedicated cell modem and service phoning data home. But it's not the only route.
Point is, you don't have a monopoly over granting your devices Internet access any more.
Cellular modems with lifetime contracts from a telco are also increasingly common.
SDRs like the Hackrf Portapack are, as well.
Well. That’s it. Get the flamethrowers. Time to burn down the Amazon.
No. Not the one that’s already burning. The other one.
My pi-hole blocks SO MUCH traffic from my Rokus. Never buying another Roku again.
Got a recipe for the rest of us?
I'm sure if you search the internet there are quite a few pie hole block lists that are very easy to add.
I'm sure there are dozens of not hundreds of options. But those won't salve the curiosity i have.
It's more interesting to actually learn from people and their experiences
They're eating the dogs. 😊
Mine isn't connected to the internet. Too bad so sad greedy fucks
Watch next year's models have LTE modems...for your convenience of course
That means they're violating HDCP (High definition copy protection)? Do streaming services such as Netflix and Disney, as well as movie studios such as Universal, know this?
Did you go beyond the headline?
So an HDMI connected device that is streaming Netflix is getting screenshot?
I mean, even if it wasn't a streaming service, but let's say, video game content, or a blu ray, that is still a violation, and of course, if I'm playing content I made, then it's violating my copyright.
Does it means that it broadcast my chrome browser if connected through HDMI? If I check for a password in the password manager in chrome, it fucking sends my password to Samsung?
I hope they enjoy my 25 million screenshots of Buffy, Angel, and Stargate.
this is why you get a separate apple tv/android box and not connect your tv to the internet
Connect it to a Linux PC for optimal privacy.
Like those things aren't capable of the same shit?
anythings capable of it, but the companies behind the (premium) boxes have less of an incentive. While theyre all capable, its a matter if you have trust in them. At least for the Shield TV for example, go download a shield tv rom if you really don't trust Nvidia. If you are paranoid that they all can do it, than any smart device can do it because its connected to the internet.
I'd rather pay for pretty much all products up-front with money at purchase time rather than pay with my data.
Not gonna tell other people what to do, but for myself, whether it's my car or television or search engine or whatever, I'd rather just pay the bill rather than having the manufacturer or service provider go data-mining my data to figure out how they can make money from it.
I think that YouTube is a great service. YouTube Premium, though, is ad-free. What I want isn't no-ad stuff, but no-log policies. And there aren't a lot of manufacturers selling privacy. And it's hard to compare services and products based on that.
I'll go one more step. I don't want to go read through privacy policies and figure out what the latest clever loophole is. We had to deal with that kind of legal stuff back prior to standardization around a few open-source licenses, and it sucked.
And I don't want to deal with privacy policies that change and maybe don't do what I want.
What I want to do is look for a privacy certification, and let the certification agency deal with that.
I’m happy to see this, my wife and I were about to buy a smart TV. Now I’ll just get the dumb variant.
These don't really exist on a consumer level anymore. What you're looking for is called a commercial display, which is what's used in businesses and hospitals.
No, they still exist.
So much more goatse and bathtube girl pictures along with porn are now gonna be on my tv
I wish I could go back in time to warn myself not to read this. The memory of receiving those (and other awful shit) is indelibly marked in my brain.
lol yeah! My friend where dicks and would set that to our screen savers or if we left our laptops open would go to meatspin.com and then lock your laptop. You got quite the surprise when you unlocked your computer lol
I never own a smart tv, but can you flash custom firmwares into it?
That would be sweet but I have never come across such a thing unfortunately!
Earlier this month I finally disconnected the wifi for my 7 year old Roku TV. I miss being able to turn it on w/ voice activation but I'll trade that in for my privacy
So how do you all guys watch content on these "dumb TVs"?
If you connect e.g. android box, how is it any different than connecting the TV itself? Do you think producers of android boxes aren't such pricks? This bugs my mind.
best way is a mini pc you can put an open source OS on
then you totally control it. they can be found cheap used and are usually upgradable
they are thrown out by schools and buisnesses all the time. it does not have to be very powerful by pc standards
it can also be your first home server if youre interested
Time should have stopped to 1999.
Do they do that in EU too?
If you have a smart device, someone is doing this with it. Best options to reduce their ability to access your devices: smart TV's - don't connect them to the internet unless you're updating the firmware. Use a streaming stick for streaming services, and then your privacy violations are minimized to the streaming stick that doesn't have a mic, or camera. Some controllers do have a mic, it's only a problem with who is making the tech. Other smart devices like fridge, microwave, oven, washer, etc, just never connect them to the internet, they likely will work fine their entire life without a network connection. Personal smart devices such as smart phones, remove google, and apple. Neither can truly be trusted, however apple does have a track record of keeping their snooping to themselves for what that's worth. For robots, they will likely need a network connection, I recommend supporting home automation projects that will allow us to replace the OS on our robot vacuums, and food delivery devices with one that connects to a home based server that doesn't need an internet connection. But never, ever, trust a smart device that is within hearing, seeing, or is touching you. It is a monitoring device, and it is being used that way by anyone with enough power.
No wonder these things operate slow as shit!
Projectors > *
I had to update my LG recently and it had to get approval for all sorts of weird shit. Oddly enough, it let me continue using just about everything even after I denied all the very invasive checkboxes. I guess even they can't deny use of your own tv if you reject the agreement lol
For future reference, you can update LG TVs via USB so you can avoid connecting it to a network.
mine would be getting only choppy static more than anything. where i live there is only sattelite available and it costs more than cable
/song note emoji/I always feel like/end song note emoji/
Don't buy them, they are excessively expensive and tt's a better idea to separate the smart functionality into an HDMI device of your choice anyway.
Most new tv's are smart tv's by default, yo uave to pay extra for dumbness
If I ever have to get a new one, I will madboi it with a monitor and DTV HDMI decoder.