Your Smart TV Knows What You’re Watching
These TVs can capture and identify 7,200 images per hour, or approximately two every second. The data is then used for content recommendations and ad targeting, which is a huge business; advertisers spent an estimated $18.6 billion on smart TV ads in 2022, according to market research firm eMarketer.
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/12/12/your-smart-tv-knows-what-youre-watchingOpen linkView original on kbin.social262
Comments103
Obviously
Honestly the least I'd expect of a smart TV.
... but it isn't able to tell anyone, as it is not connected to the Internet. Poor smart TV.
If there are any unsecured networks in your vicinity it might be telling on you without you knowing.
Pull one of your old routers from the back of closet, and use it to make a completely new network just for your TV. If you don’t connect the router to the rest of the internet, your TV is happy to connect to something, and you get to keep your privacy a little bit longer.
Not everyone has an old router. I do, but not everyone.
Why do I keep an old router?
If you have a nice enough router you could connect your TV to it and block its Mac address maybe.
Or maybe configure the firewall to block/allow only very specific things. It’s a bit more technical than just plugging in an Ethernet cable though…
Cause it still works, doesn't take up much space, and doesn't really eat a whole lot just siting there.
Also, 2 is one, 1 is none. Good to have a fall back in case hardware dies
This is the way.
I'm a little surprised we haven't heard about one of these smart TV brands using something like Amazon Sidewalk yet to communicate the analyzed data:
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/
A popular brand could totally set up their own network like this and with apartments there would probably be sufficient density to ensure that there's always at least one connected device nearby to act as a bridge.
Well that's pretty terrifying.
Need to figure out how to block that now. Sigh
Faraday cage.
Open it up and desolder the wifi module/antenna
if you're this paranoid, just buy one of those mcdonalds menu screen tvs or just rip out all of the wifi electronics. i can imagine it being one of those standard modules like in laptops.
Until it doesn’t work at all since the wifi chip is integral to boot up.
Just make your own TV
What’s the funny-to-serious timeline for this comment, fifteen years?
Any evidence of that or are you just speculating?
Pure speculation.
I don't think so. The first step when connecting to WiFi is to agree to the terms of service that allow the manufacturer to legallly spy on you. Without agreeing to that, they'd be breaking the law.
I'm too skeptical to default to the whole "corporations will abide by the law" thing anymore. I'm willing to accept that I might be wrong though. There have just been too many times where I've pessimistically remarked on a situation like this as a sort of half joke only to find out that I was right and it was actually worse than I initially assumed.
"Oh boy, my master gonna be so proud of me when I can finally show him everything I collected over the years... cant be too long until I finally be able to ping the severs... any day now..."
Read this in Dug's voice
I am nearsighted and wanted a ~75” tv for the bedroom so I don’t have to lay sideways on my glasses while watching and cuddling.
I could not find a single non-smart tv in that size. Nobody is interested in selling dumb TVs because there is money to be made :/
The price of TVs is heavily subsidized by the "smart" features. Same way that PCs are subsidized by having Windows pre-installed.
The trouble is you can't find decent sized monitor panels at reasonable prices. Frankly your most practical bet is to buy a TV with minimal smart functions and never connect it, then use that for your media PC. Also maybe hack the TV, that should be far more common IMO.
I mean yeah I agree the HTPC doesn't care, my point was mainly that you can't get a big ass 50" monitor that easily - TV's are cheaper and easier to find for large panels. However I'd also prefer to have a dumb monitor, for control reasons.
My bigger issue though is that I have a growing temptation to drop a grand on 4x 18TB hard drives... https://diskprices.com/
Nice setup. You could try Radarr and Lidarr, and Plex. Plex would probably work with your tv card and bring all your media together.
I'm pretty sure my Android TV powered by Google™ knows more than what I'm watching. It could probably give me therapy if I threw a LLM on there.
Good to know I'm not paranoid enough tho.
Yep.
I got a Fire Stick early on, ditched it after a year.
Have a Samsung smart TV now, working to stop using the smart part and run more self hosted, and isolate apps like Netflix and Amazon.
Worst part about this is I have an OLED, if I use a different device for features I risk burn. Netflix on the tv will show a screensaver and go black after 2 minutes. Pressing pause on Netflix on the ps5 or appletv means you get a static screen until you return.
I wish we could get what we pay for and not be products ourselves.
You could always turn the screen off
My two smart TV’s are the most blocked devices by my network’s pihole. It’s not even close.
The first two are my two TVs, (one is a Samsung, the other is a Roku,) and the third is my phone that I’ve been doomscrolling on all day. The “better” TV has almost 3x as many blocked requests as my phone, even though I only used my TV for about an hour today.
yeah lol, no real need to obfuscate those ip fyi
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/campfire.png
I tried using free tier NextDNS on a network with 2 Samsung TVs hooked up and hit the threshold of 300k requests within a week. It's mad how much data Samsung is collecting from their smart devices. Even when not using any features, the TV may stay with a screensaver and still send lots of data.
I have my old (stupid) tv from like 2013, works perfectly fine. No apps, no firmware, no ads, no tracking. Never felt the need to buy a smart tv, but I'm afraid it'd be near impossible to find a new one that isn't nowadays I'd mine broke down.
This is the only reason I have a smart TV. I didn't want one, in fact it prompted me to make an SSID and VLAN just for it, then applied a bunch of DNS blocks. Unfortunately my old 2012 TV wasn't worth shipping across the country and the image was getting pretty dim and it had started developing dead pixels.
If you want anything above 1080p that's a dumb TV you have to go commercial like the hospitality market and they charge you way more for it. And they won't even sell it to you without a corporate account in most places.
The only way to get 4K and HDR without the smarts as a consumer is to buy a giant gaming monitor... and those too ask for quite a premium, because gamers.
Have you tried just not connecting it to the internet, and using a streaming box?
I opted to connect it because it's the only device in the house Netflix is willing to give more than 720p. I hate DRM.
That’s just some epic bullshit. Netflix’s tiering is just asinine.
☠️
They come with the crap built in these days.
I know. Don’t connect it to the internet, and don’t use the crap
Yeah, I'm waiting for the death of my current TV. A LG that's plain old LCD, but HDR and 4k, no smart shit. Luckily I know hardware and can physically disable things. I break and remove things so hardware is physically incapable of connecting.
"Are you watching the TV, or is the TV watching you?"
Good. Have fun uploading any information about me without wifi or an ethernet cable. Smart TVs were a mistake, even the most expensive ones are slow and trash.
Yeah, I needed some 70" for work displays had to spend like hell to go top of the line to get half assed quad cores.
Couldn't you use a raspberry pi or something? My point was that a $50 android tv box beats the absolute top TVs both in terms of speed and compatibility with apps.
I dont need them for the smart, I need their menus to be consistently fast for automation. Response time for input changes, menus disappearing timely after boot.
When we buy $300 50" 'specials' and I start pumping IR at them for timed remote automation they always get hung up and start missing steps.
laughs in crtv and dvd player
So... Can someone explain how this is legal if you're watching DRM content? Capturing and uploading copyrighted, protected content doesn't seem very kosher.
Jesus. Spend a fraction of that developing good products that people will actually want to buy so you can end this unethical, scumbag way of making a buck.
It'll never tell anyone because it'll never be hooked up to the internet.
I really likr the last few firmware updates that my TV received. But apart from checking for updates every few months, I agree that keeping it blocked in my router settings is ideal.
Doesn't that kind of beat the purpose? The device can just store telemetric data and send them in batches whenever you connect it.
My Sony runs AndroidTV and uses NextDNS to block telemetry and the like. The features that I received with the last few updates enabled VRR, improved clarity and Dolby Vision, etc. So it was definitely worth it.
I had read a story once that if I recall correctly, one manufacturer would send the signal back thru the coax cable to the cable box just in case to make sure your data was captured somehow.
surprisedpikachuface.webp
God damn webp, why is support so inconsistent?
My smart TV is blocked from the internet. It doesn't know shit.
oh it knows. it just can't tell anyone!
I am so glad I don't have a TV. It's just the Internet with even more ads, minus the Internet.
It doesn't have to be. I get everything for free, no subscriptions, no ads. I'm pretty happy with the deal.
I leave the TV on all day for the cats, I'm sure they're getting lots of useful data while they sleep in front of MASH reruns
Considering I don't connect it to the internet I'd be surprised if it was doing anything.
It's brute-forcing your neighbors' WiFis
"I'm in"
Joke aside, would that make it basically anonymous? Unless it's actually sending screenshots, it will only tell "somebody around this IP is watching TV/Something from HDMI"
Well, no. I think there is so much information in there, that the IP address is your least concern.
What personally identification information is there? Sure, they can know everything is from the same user/household, but they can't know it's you by name, email, phone, address... That's what I mean by anonymous instead of private
I guess it is somewhat like paying in cash for your groceries: While anonymous, only you buy at this time of the day your favourite 3 food products, a cup of gluten-free instant ramen and a period product.
I would be concerned about this scenario:
You joke... but isn't that what Amazon Sidewalk was invented for? And isn't it sort of what AirTags do? They don't connect to the internet... they connect to partner devices in ways that are unseen by the owners to co-opt their internet access.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Samsung TVs without internet access are using nearby Samsung phones to connect to the internet. Or maybe they partner with the ISP to use those default guest wifi networks. If news broke tomorrow that this was already a thing, it wouldn't surprise me at all.
just plug a SBC running Kodi/jellyfin/whatever non-proprietary to a regular tv
It’s extremely difficult to find a dumb tv in sizes larger than ~55”. You really don’t have much choice at the moment. I personally host a jellyfin server and play that via apple tv over hdmi, but content recognition still does its thing. Best i could do was deny wifi/ethernet to the tv and have no open networks.
Yes, do exactly this. If you have AppleTV connected to your TV over HDMI or whatever, why does your TV need an internet connection?
NextDNS has a blocklist you can enable to block telemetry for Roku TVs FYI. You can also get a dumb TV or keep your TV offline and have a separate Kodi box for your shows.
Mine connects through pihole with all LG domains blocked. I'm not getting any update request, notifications or anything. Just Netflix.
Obligatory pihole doesn't block anything if they use their own dns. You can probably force all port 53 traffic through pihole if you have a decent router though.
Thanks for the reminder.
Blocking all DNS other than PiHole is a great thing to do.
Just setup mine a week ago. Already up to 28% blocked, and no ads on the smart TV (which makes it a little faster)
You can.
Source; I’ve done it. Don’t forget to redirect/block DNS over HTTPS as well. Usually port 853.
Doubtful, since I don't have one.
Well no shit. It's literally playing my porn.
Doesn't mention what circumstances it's tracking your watching habits. If you're watching an obscure movie on DVD, is it still looking at frames? Does it have to be through a streaming service being run on the TV? Does it recognize content being run on modern game consoles? Not a very informative article.
All of this is in the second paragraph of the article.
Bah! Reading! But that is concerning. Looks like I'll be disabling my wifi credentials on my TV later tonight!
It says in the article there's a privacy request option if you own a samsung tv. I went ahead and sent a request to not sell my data, although not sure if it's effective since I'm not in CA.
on our vizio, from the settings side panel: all settings->admin/privacy->viewing data. turn it off.
Mine doesn't
care to share?
Most likely offline or firewalled to Hades.
fair.
genuine question: is it still considered 'smart' if its fully offline? what can it do that a 'normal' tv cant? can it connect to a local media server or something?
Play media from USB or local Plex yes.
Display IP cameras
Really expensive alarm clock
Is an airplane still an airplane if it never flies?
Mine's a crt with an hdmi converter. I'm untouchable
VLANed off with no internet. Can only see my Plex server. No other access
That’s why i don’t connect mine to the internet and I black hole suspicious traffic
Is that you Santa?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0PTXttx13E/?igshid=N2ViNmM2MDRjNw==
A TV that is not connected to the internet is effectively just a large monitor.
I understand that some TVs lock functionality and coerce you into connecting it to the network, but most of them function well as monitors. I know it's tempting to make use of the "smart" features since it's included, but if you care about privacy, it's better to keep it off the internet.
That's cool. I just use my shield
Did you read the article? It captures screenshots, doesn't matter if you use a Shield, console or whatever.
Yes.I read it. And no I dont hook my TV to the Internet . It's even blocked at the router level
Who cares? Ad targeting has been around for years, ads on TV aren't any different than what's on YouTube anymore, they're often literally the same ad. I don't need drugs, I don't need cars and I don't need insurance so whatever
You do know what community you’re posting in right?
This type of snooping covers anything you play on the screen including but not limited to Blu-Rays, Plex, Home Movies, Live TV, YouTube, and Netflix. It’s incredibly invasive and harmful to the end user, especially when the raw data is inevitably leaked to the world at large.