Samsung TVs May Upload Screenshots for Automatic Content Recognition | Hacker News Reader

Samsung TVs May Upload Screenshots for Automatic Content Recognition

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1,246 pointsaritmo688 comments

I'm getting ready to go full Battlestar Galactica in all of my appliances. It's now difficult to find high end washers and ovens without these features.

At least right now we can choose not to connect the devices, but what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether, like with Tesla and other high end modern cars?

I don't think I'm just being a Luddite. This really seems like a bad idea. We need some way to assure security and limit data collection.

>what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether.

Narrowband IoT is the target market for that. T-Mobile has a plan where a certified module costs $5 (There is a min order to get that price, but for a large vendor that's not going to be an issue) then $6 p/year as long as you can keep below 12MB per year. But you can keep bw down by shipping the fingerprinting software with the TV and only sampling a small section of the screen (Other TV Vendors have done done this in the past too) and create the matching fingerprints in your server farm (So no need to send a full screenshot to fingerprint the show.

The question is then would $25 added to the BOM cost per device be worth it to the manufacturer (Cost of the module plus 3 years of NB-IoT coverage). Though you could reduce that by getting a custom deal with the carrier where you only pay for data if you actually activate it, then only activate the module if the TV has been in use for X hours without phoning home using the customers own connection.

From a cost perceptive I think we are pretty much already there.

I think we’re safe from that because enough people put their smartTVs on the network anyway.

We’ll lose some precision in the data because it’s biased against grandma, but good enough to sell the reports.

It may be $25/unit, but if 9/10 put their device on the network anyway, that’s $250/useful outcome.

$25 is hugely expensive. This is an industry that removes $0.02 bypass capacitors by trial and error to save a few pennies.

If you're getting $26 from the ad agencies, then it's $-1 on your BOM. Done deal.

Additional requirement for modern media room:

Faraday Cage

Thankfully it isn't quite that simple for electronics in the US. If it is sold commericially, it has to be registered with the FCC.

In this way, you at least know if it has WiFi, LTE, etc, and can see the module that is installed on it. This makes it much easier to go into the device and physically disable the radios on it.

Heck, maybe that is something like iFixit could do, have a how to to completely remove radio capabilities.

I already did, over a decade ago. I tell friends "No cloud services on this ship!". They've bought into it too, buying more CD's, records and dumb only TV's.

My current setup is an old 1080P Bang & Olufsen setup. Looks and sounds great. Similar with audio - B&O did airplay back in the 80's called master link. So each room in the house can play music from anywhere else.

The only things networked are actual computers and phones. That's more risk than I want to handle, no need to add more. Similarly I've passed over smartwatches for good quality Swiss watches that'll still be worth something in 18 months time. I swear I'm not some character from a William Gibson novel.

I expect at some point old school offline stuff will make a comeback like Vinyl has. Society lags a good 10-20 years behind the frontrunners. Sometimes more.

I was talking to a few people in a slack channel the other day about the potential market for a whole set of "dumb" appliances. At the end of the day, we came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be a able to reach mass market because the mass consumers seem to care more about price than security.

It is frustrating that everything has to be connected. Pretty soon toasters will need updates before toasting. Maybe ads will be burned into the toast?

For a "TV" I think I'll just get the biggest computer monitor I can and do without an actual television tuner. Most times I watch YouTube or Amazon Prime Video, more and more less Netflix and broadcast TV. Even with that setup a Pi Hole is a must.

> At least right now we can choose not to connect the devices, but what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether, like with Tesla and other high end modern cars?

This is the point of “5G” everywhere. If the underlying phys and chips are cheap, low power and licensed appropriately a lot of “dumb” stuff will suddenly become smart whether you like it or not.

What you're looking for is a law. Those strictly dominate technical capabilities, and can set useful baselines that remove the need for a consumer to deeply inspect the policies of every single device or white good they buy.

As Maciej points out, we don't teach people how to perform botulism tests to eat safe food; we regulate it. We desperately need something similar for privacy.

> but what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether

It’s worse then you think. Read dredmorbius’ comment in its entirety.

> Which means that peel-and-stick computing is well within reach, if not a present reality.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21873388

> what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether

Just like what happens when any product you like gets discontinued. You either accept the drawbacks of the alternatives and pick the next best choice or you do without it altogether.

If this really becomes TV with LTE or not TV, you’ll quickly see how little people truly care. Think back to 2008-2010 and the anti-smartphone people. How many of them are still holding out?

I recently went to but a new range/oven. In the price range I was looking at (1-2k) it was impossible to find something that didn’t have a touchscreen with some smart feature (WiFi, Bluetooth, whatever). You had to jump up to the $3-6k range to get a “pro” model that comes completely stripped of (apparent) electronics.

My wife's CPAP machine has LTE and phones home her sleep patterns to her doctor and presumably insurance company. Whole thing makes me really uncomfortable.

> full Battlestar Galactica

This is a truly marvellous turn of phrase.

I have a cpap machine that uses LTE (or some sort of mobile data). I had no idea that it would automatically upload my data until I logged in to their portal one day and saw a bunch of stats before realizing "Hey.. I never gave that thing my wifi information" and looked it up.

Maybe we should just ddos these endpoints, they don't deserve anything better.

>> I don't think I'm just being a Luddite. This really seems like a bad idea. We need some way to assure security and limit data collection.

Don't buy a TV. Buy a "monitor" and plug it into a device over which you have proper control. Use a computer as a media player, a computer with appropriate privacy safeguards. Even samsung would never dare place a LTE connection on a monitor.

How my devices configuration look (all their mac addresses banned on router level, they dont have access to internet):

- tv, not connected to network, using raspberry pi 4 for kodi, connecting outside trough squid proxy limiting domains it can connect to. Was never connected to internet

- roborock vacuum cleaner, rooted, software disabled, replaced by open source version

- android deviced moved to microg lineage, armored with xprivacy lua and netguard, by default on spoofing/blocking everything and disabled on case by case basis. If application demands private informations it doesnt have access to internet

- 100% self hosted, sftp for files, dns server, own mail server, squid proxy with custom scripts, blocking from domains to rewritting requests, customized searx, running on custom build freebsd

- browser on all devices, heavly armored firefox

- only linux and freebsd devices except android in phone (it is going to be replaced by linux/sailfish when released - cosmo communicator)

- each new device bought is evaluated before buy and returned after buying if it cant be rooted/blocked from internet.

- no device is bought with connectivity if not needed, following "no internet of shit principle"

There are lots of details around that, ask if interested.

Survailance capitalism? No thank you.

We absolutely need consumer protection laws for this.

The problem is that capitalism doesn't permit companies to simply succeed by being profitable. They must grow too. So the people who run the business are ultimately forced to squeeze every conceivable revenue stream from their products. The March towards forced online IoT and printer ink cartridge obsolescence models for everything is inevitable.

Appliances used to last forever and you'd get a guy to come fix them. My dad gifted me a 40 year old jigsaw that works better than any new jigsaw I've used.

>what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether.

Tinfoil or an ESD bag over the transmitter or MB should do the trick. It'll be the new version of putting a sticker over the camera on your laptop.

"It's now difficult to find high end washers and ovens without these features."

Don't buy high-end consumer units, buy industrial units instead. They won't have any fancy features like automatic program selection or whatever, but they will wash your clothes and cook your food for decades, and can stand up to uneven loads and abuse, and they can be repaired if they ever break.

I refuse to let any additional "smart" things into my life. I want buttons and manual controls, no internet connections.

I don't even want any program buttons on my microwave oven, I want exactly two knobs, one for power and one for time.

Something I was impressed with recently is LG and their opt in collection policies. I was able to not opt in to most of their advertising and data collection policies and only the features that required that data collection were disabled, everything else worked fine. Samsung isn't like this and I just keep my Samsung "Smart" TVs off the network. I have a Roku (just slightly better) that handles the smart part.

> what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether

Seriously troubling if the only reason preventing TV manufacturers from making their devices send your data via LTE is the cost of moving the data to them. Soon you'll have to put your TV into a faraday cage or remove the LTE antenna or whatever if you appreciate any notion of privacy.

Except for a TV, and I wanted a great plasma, I just do not buy new appliances.

Tons of used ones, many easy to service, parts available online for a song.

Have saved serious money over the years. Have no plans to change.

I hate all the extra, useless features. Just do not need any of this garbage.

For the TV, it never goes online. Whatever it does, stays home.

My whole country has been blanketed in public WiFi access points as they were included in all but the most high end tiers of consumer broadband installations by all ISP's. Any device with WiFi can already get to the Internet regardless of your own network firewall settings using these.

Just wrap all your appliances with tinfoil. Problem solved!

have you looked into commercial variants? you can get dumb display panels geared toward that use, I'm sure the same is true for fridges, dishwashers, ovens. Aesthetics may be an issue.

Just buy a projector. Those have none of the connectivity features TV advertize nowadays and size does matter for displays.

Samsung always seem to be the worst, whether it is recording stuff, to getting on fire. Not too hard to avoid them.

> what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough

Hey, look what I found under your kitchen cabinet...

https://en.battlestarwikiclone.org/wiki/Cylon_transponder

privacy legislation like the GDPR is a good start. In the US at least California seems on their way to come up with stronger privacy legislation and hopefully it'll spill over.

Faraday cage your house somehow. Stick to land-line and ethernet.

When you are no longer in control, you don't own the product. It's a redefinition of ownership and eventually things come to own you.

> high end washers

Consider Speed Queen. Best buy (pun intended) I've made in a while.

Stop with Samsung and LG - all they do is chip things.

They'll find some way to make internet required to use these devices.

> It's now difficult to find high end washers and ovens without these features.

Look for quality antique appliances. They also look better and likely are better for the environment than buying new.

Jammer is an option. Breaking the antenna too.

maybe HOAs can establish community rules and set up some sort of neighborhood firewall that blocks IOT data exfiltration

The old Soviet Russia and Orwell jokes have taken on a whole new meaning in these "modern times"... 6 years ago it was discovered --- through packet inspection --- that LG TVs actually did something similar:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759426

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6778397

Now I bet they're all using TLS and won't let you trust your own certificates, making it even more difficult to MITM it and verify what exact information it's sending.

For those who don't mind a bit of DIY, you can "lobotomize" a smart TV by replacing the main board with a dumb one of the type used in computer monitors --- there are many online sellers of these, just search for "LVDS board" or "scaler board". You will need to know the model of the panel, and the seller should be able to help with that since the board needs to be programmed with the correct parameters for the panel it's driving. Something like this: https://www.aliexpress.com/i/32860791745.html

It’s hard to believe Samsung has any customers outside of their Korean hegemony.

Samsung hasn’t proven themselves as a trustworthy smart electronics vendor in the past, be it smart TV, smart watch, or smart phone:

2015 - https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-changes-smarttv-privacy-po...

2015 - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/new-e...

2015 - https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-lg-smartwatches-yield-pers...

2015 - https://www.techhive.com/article/2881944/samsungs-latest-sma...

2016 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/19/samsung-g...

2018 - https://betanews.com/2018/07/03/samsung-messages-photo-bug/

2018 - https://www.consumerreports.org/televisions/samsung-roku-sma...

That’s not to mention they’ve been found price fixing, astroturfing, embezzling, and bribing.

Vote with your dollar.

> It’s hard to believe Samsung has any customers outside of their Korean hegemony.

You could say the same about Facebook for the same reasons, and yet here we are. I was just at a Christmas party where a cybersecurity professional told me that he didn't care if his TV spied on him. I think that's how most of America thinks.

Are we friends with the same person?

It's quite upsetting to see cybersecurity professionals say they don't care their TV spies on them.

As a Canadian taxpayer, my tax dollars fund Samsung.

A Canadian company, AdGear, won[1] a contract with the Government of Canada to be the official advertising technology provider in 2015. That was all fine and good, until Samsung acquired AdGear in 2016 [2].

Now Samsung is distributing official bulletins for the government, as well as running ad auctions on the national news outlet, CBC. These same ad auctions would presumably use all the data harvested from Samsung TVs and other consumer electronic equipment.

I have been unable to find more details on if/when this contract was renewed, I know the original contract was for a term of three years, with two optional one-year renewal periods.

One thing's for sure: The whole thing stinks.

[1]: https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/the-government-of-cana...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGear#History

I bought a $3000 top-end Samsung TV in 2015. The experience made it the last product from Samsung that I'll ever buy.

Their top of the line 4K HDR-UHD TV (for flat TVs, their highest was curved) was delivered with bright corners that were whitish all the time. Samsung claimed that this was within normal standards for a $3000 TV, and told me they would not repair it (after going around with them for a week or so). Luckily, the local retailer agreed to exchange it. Their denial of responsibility has cost them a lifetime of purchases.

> It’s hard to believe Samsung has any customers outside of their Korean hegemony.

No it's not. Most people have no clue and might no even care [now].

I agree, Samsung doesn't deserve our money. I boycotted Samsung after they destroyed my perfectly good Galaxy s5 with software updates. Sadly, the Pixel I got next wasn't much better.

They dominate certain RAM markets though, and that's kind of unfortunate.

I had an S5 too, and actually still have it in case I ever need a backup (e.g. last week when _my_ Pixel started getting caught in an infinite boot loop!) Though I hadn't noticed the S5 being destroyed by software updates - the only reason I stopped using it is because they stopped updating it and it was locked from custom ROMs, which was a sad conclusion because it had still decent hardware. Could you elaborate on the villainous updates you encountered?

What’s a better company to buy from? Samsung is the only company getting brand recognition in your post.

Vizio is much better about privacy, almost entirely due to https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/02/... .

Eventually the FTC (or a state AG) will get tired enough of Samsung's anti-consumer shenanigans to run with it and see what happens, and/or Samsung will do something that they don't clearly and fully disclose and step into the FTC's world.

How did we go from a country that made it a crime to share video rental records to one where everything you watch is constantly monitored and monetized?

It was the common man who shared video rentals yesterday, while it's businesses who monitor and monetize today.

Just wait until you see how white collar crime is punished compared to street crimes!

OP was talking about rental records. That would be Blockbuster telling a marketer which videos you rented, not you lending a rented video to a friend.

Let me guess. Mostly ignored.

The video rental records were used to compromise a congressman from the ruling party. That's the only reason there is a specific privacy law for them.

If you want a TV privacy law, you'll have compromise a congressman.

Correction: if you want a regulatory law of any kind, you'll have to compromise a congressman to a greater extent than existing foreign and corporate interests have already compromised said congressman.

Slight correction; it was John Tower, a potential Defense Secretary nominee whose nomination was scuttled when a local paper got hold of his video rental records. He wasn't in congress at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tower

I mean, that's pretty much how the system is _supposed_ to work, right? You want a law passed, you convince one of your duly elected representative to propose the law, get it passed through both houses and signed by the president.

Now maybe actively attacking members of congress isn't the most forthright way of convincing them that a law against that specific attack is a good idea, but assuming you can do it legally (such that the only way any future such attacks could be prosecuted would be if a new law were created to make the attack illegal) it does seem like like a rather effective approach.

Slowly, and then all of a sudden.

Ads, baby. Everything you do online is for sale.

The Internet needs to be better than being almost entirely propped up by the advertising industry.

Surely even they know their day will come.

It will, won't it?

Displaying content on your television isn't something you do online. It's something you're doing at home. Samsung is spying and putting it online.

After I've moved to Firefox and installed lots of ad-blocking plugins, enacted privacy settings and GDPR options everywhere available and uninstalled mobile native apps (ie. FB, Twitter), I felt like I had defused the whole data-collection-to-advertising lifecycle. By not seeing ads, no matter what Samsung collects, I would be safe or at least disruptively useless for them... until Samsung showed me a small, targeted ad through their TV UI. Resistance is futile.

Too many people saying, “I have nothing to hide.”

Also, people like “free” stuff.

It's not even a free problem, it's general pricing. Companies constantly seek ways to increase profits, while customers constantly seek bargain basement pricing.Electronic privacy is not a problem people have dealt with at large, I think. People also often view the competency of corporations much higher than the HN crowd typically does.

I think this is the same for any category of information though. Informed people will heavily advise against things that the public just has no idea on. Health is a big one.

My question is what can we do aside from running around in panic? It feels hopeless.

Nothing to hide mentality ignores why America has a Bill of Rights. Becuase the moment you give a government too much control you have no rights. We are slowly working towards this. Little by little our rights are taken away.

> Also, people like “free” stuff.

I pay for a ton of products and services that still siphon my private data and serve me ads. The problem is that companies will try to squeeze as much value as they can out of their customers, whether they pay or not.

It’s really hard for people realize the effects of something that could potential harm them in the future. Future self Vs present self, present always wins.

Nothing is free. People don’t realize that google being free is because, let’s say, Samsung pays Google for ads. And Samsung passes it on to customers. Lo and behold, your phone purchase pays for Google. (This is simplistic but I’m using it as an example of hidden costs. Advertisers could potential still spend the money elsewhere or keep it as profits)

Convenience. Even always using the private mode when browsing the web is a hassle.

Except these are expensive TVs and not "free".

In a word: lobbying.

Corruption.

FTFY.

In a word: convenience.

Tasks versus goals, same as always. It's exactly the same as the question of why it was once recommended to carry a rifle for safety when traveling from St. Louis to Portland, and now it's recommended you leave it at home.

The goal was always to make corporations money. The task necessary to accomplish this goal just happened to flip.

Wait who would recommend making that journey unarmed today?

It was the natural outcome absent privacy legislation like GDPR. Why not create a two-sided market out of everything?

indeed. This turn of events continues to blow my mind.

Few reasons why I prefer dumb TVs, just a flat LED panel:

1. You have control over bullshit like this

2. You can make them smart by attaching the external box

3. You don't have to throw the TV because your Software is now old, just change the box.

4. There's new format which requires hardware support (av1 is coming), change the box.

5. Want to add new hardware? Upgrade the box.

Wait until 5G rolls out into mass adoption where an IoT modem is built into every TV for “diagnostics”

I have a ham radio license. If/when this happens, I eagerly look forward to using what I’ve picked up to figure out how to kill this with fire. In all likelihood, a piece of thin metal plate taped to the case in the right place will probably be all that’s needed.

This is the only thing that mildly concerns me. Now I can just not connect. In the future, it may simply not be an option.

I've literally never had a TV break or stop working. Ever. Especially with the new mass produced panels, what sort of Diagnostics or remote analysis could they POSSIBLY be doing?

What makes 5G so much different than an LTE modem for this type of application? If they were going to do this why wouldn’t it already be happening with LTE.

What's to prevent you from doing the same with a SmartTV in the future? Just disconnect it from the network and keep a box plugged into HDMI1.

I believe the suggestion is that in a 5G world the TV would have its own prepaid 5G connection home that you can’t turn off or audit.

6. Want to turn down the volume? You can do so instantly, instead of waiting 20 seconds for your TV's operating system to finish booting.

Some functions of "smart" TVs are impossible to turn off, unfortunately. I personally don't like the FPS smoothing most modern TVs do, and for many there is no option to turn it off completely.

Smart TVs are already cheaper. If you don’t connect it you are basically getting the rebate you should get because your information is sold, but without uploading your information. If this becomes common manufacturers will need to ensure this hole is closed. I suspect TVs will soon be sold with big rebates that can only be redeemed ON the tv itself once it’s been internet connected for some time.

> Just disconnect it from the network

On this note, I would suggest never connecting it to your network (it could secretly remember your wifi password). Maybe it's just a bug, but once in a while the my Samsung TV's usb connection is listed as the last used source. I've never connected anything to the usb connection and it's wall mounted above my desk (where my kids and wife would not be able to reach it so I know it's not them using it either). It could be a coincidence, but I have also not seen it do this since I changed the wifi password in the access point.

Needless to say, when I bought a new TV recently I never connected it to the network at all.

> Just disconnect it from the network and keep a box plugged into HDMI1.

One would assume it'd be as simple as that, but apparently it ain't because many SmartTV's will jump trough quite a few loops to get online, like using nearby open Wifi.

At least there's been a bunch of stories like this in past HN discussions around SmartTV's.

Which dumb 4K TV(s) should I buy?

"Which dumb 4K TV(s) should I buy?"

That's a really good question, as it is qualified by the '4k' requirement ...

It's very easy and relatively inexpensive to buy a 1920x10280 commercial display unit, such as the NEC p461, which you have probably seen 10k times in airports.

However, there is not much demand for 4k panels for videowalls since ... the videowall grows to larger than 4k resolution anyway just by virtue of being a wall of panels.

So, at this time, in 2019, it is difficult and very expensive to buy a commercial display panel (that is what you would search for) that is 4k.

If I had to find one I think I would probably get that Dell 43 Ultra HD 4K Multi Client Monitor (P4317Q) with the caveat that it is "only" 43 inches in size.

I’ll go for this one when my plasma dies:

https://ironcast.tv/

Shouldn't your question be 'which 4K TVs are still dumb'? I cannot find a single TV at Best Buy that isn't a Smart TV.

Buy any 4K that fits your budget. Just don't connect it to your WiFi.

Someone here mentioned recently that there are many dumb TVs sold as business/commercial displays. Haven't got one, but maybe that's something you can look into.

Don’t. Good panels and quick onboard logic correlates strongly to being a “smart TV”. It’s better to buy a smart one and just not connect it.

https://ironcast.tv maybe? I want to buy a new TV in the next few weeks and I'm really tempted, but worried about this being a Kickstarter project and the display quality not being up to par.

I guess their clean design philosophy bleeds into their website by making it devoid of useful information.

Exactly the same list of reasons why manufacturers now only want to sell you smart TVs, and dumb panels are so hard to find.

I just need to go to the local Media Markt store to find a couple of dumb ones.

Philips Momentum monitors...

Then they add some kind of display connectivity DRM like HDCP and suddenly all older dumb monitors are unable to connect to a newer device until someone figure out a way to break it.

DRM were never about protecting the content, it's all about control.

I can't agree more, but the choice in dumb TVs is limited. In the end the best option seems to be a video projector, but I really dislike the image quality v.s. a panel.

Any recommendations?

Don't try to buy a "TV", buy a "monitor". The ones sold for digital signage may be your best bet depending on the size you're looking for.

You can try looking into commercial TVs (aka digital signage). These are displays with usually few smarts in them, and also designed to be on 24/7. You'll likely pay more than a regular consumer TV.

I might be in the market for a large screen soon. Any recommendations for good dumb panels? I assumed they'd be difficult to find.

CDW still sells non smart TV versions of the latest and greatest from the manufacturers for environments that don’t want Samsung coming on the network.

https://cdw.com/content/cdw/en/products/monitors-projectors/...

You don’t need an agreement or anything to buy from them.

Walmart Online is selling a Spectre dumb panel (with good specs!) for $219 for 55” and $279 for 65”. Otherwise I love my LG OLED, which acts as a dumb panel until you accept the overbearing privacy policy (you can still play local DLNA/USB sources without accepting, but can’t run any apps including web browsers so no captive portals)

I like this initiative anyways:

https://ironcast.tv/

I’m not affiliated in any way, I just like what they’re doing.

I'm looking for a new TV and I started with looking for a dumb TV but I came to the conclusion that 4k HDR isn't supported by Nvidia Shield for Youtube and Netflix.

Only option to get that is to use the built in smart features of the TV. So even using external boxes you don't get all the latest hardware support for video codecs.

Yes it is?

Why Apple hasn't made a TV set is beyond me.

As much as we want a Dump TV on HN, in terms of general market I would doubt even 5% of people are willing trade cheaper pricing, integrated Software experience for privacy.

Didn't you just answer your own question? The market for $5k+ televisions is pretty small, especially when they're unlikely to be better on paper than what you'd get for half the price from another brand.

My TV software gets updated. Have gotten noticeable improvements.

I've had a 55" Samsung smart TV for 6 years now - zero software updates after year 3.

Quite annoying, as I had hoped that codec support would improve over time.

And where can we find these dumb TVs?

That sure is one hell of a privacy policy:

Information we may collect automatically includes information about:

access code , advertising IDs , apps and features you use , app usage information , clickstream data , connections to certain Services , connections to other devices , current software version , device model , device settings , Google Ad ID , hardware model , IMEI number , IP address , log information , MAC address , MNC , mobile network operator , non-persistent device identifiers , Personalized Service ID , referrer pages , sales code , search terms , serial number , subscription information , use of third-party websites , web browser characteristics , web pages you visit

Practically, a Smart TV is an oversize mobile phone that you use in landscape mode.

In that respect, all ad-supported revenue for a phone is extended to the smart TVs.

Unfortunately all vendors do it. Here is how to disable it, for most brands: https://www.flatpanelshd.com/focus.php?subaction=showfull&id...

I bought 2 smart TVs recently and was able to turn all this BS off by simply not accepting the privacy policies during setup. Of course this means you can't use the built-in netflix apps or check for software updates or whatever but that's fine by me. I left both on my network for a period of time as well to check (via DPI) and indeed neither one was actually doing anything on the network other than pinging a software-update server every few days.

Here is how to disable it for all brands: Don't connect your TV to the internet.

Exactly. I wouldn't trust any TV where it's even an option.

If only that were a future-proof strategy. :-(

Some of the newer TVs need to be configured with internet access to even work.

Thanks for sharing this! I had to go disable this "feature" on the "Smart TV" my family has. Turned off "Viewing Information Services" and "Interest Based Advertising". It was on by default!?

On my recent LG WebOS-TV Netflix and Amazon Prime wont start anymore after that.

Great link, I still don't connect mine to the internet.

I was hoping it mentioned consoles. Does anyone know if PS4 does this and if there is a way to turn it off?

If you don't want to read the whole thing, the content recognition part is this:

> Viewing Information Services This privacy notice should be read in conjunction with the Samsung Privacy Policy, which also applies to your receipt of customized Smart TV experiences and can be found at https://www.samsung.com/us/account/privacy-policy/. In order to provide you with customized Smart TV experiences, some of our feature and services will rely on your TV viewing history and Smart TV usage information. Your TV viewing history includes information about the networks, channels, websites visited and programs viewed on your Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them. We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture this information. Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched.

To those in this thread denouncing these dystopian times my question to you is, how do we as technologists create a meaningful and successful career changing this?

I’ve been against this for a very long time and can’t see any easy way to contribute (and also provide $ for my family) short of being in government policy making or law making which would require substantial career changes and further education and then some luck.

> To those in this thread denouncing these dystopian times my question to you is, how do we as technologists create a meaningful and successful career changing this?

Disclaimer: I don't mean to criticize you, just to critique the mode of thought expressed in your comment.

Why are we as technologists so rarely willing to entertain the idea that meaningful change (in this and other socio-political domains) and "career success" might be mutually exclusive? At best they tend to be orthogonal, I think. Very rarely are they tightly coupled. More often one arrives at work that leads to "success" as conventionally defined (i.e., high pay, job security, nice benefits, social status) by embracing preexisting ways of thinking and living: that is, by embracing convention.

Convention is precisely what needs to be challenged, if one wants to effectively resist social inertia in contexts like this.

Unfortunately I don’t think there is a legitimate opportunity to work on this problem, and also have a stable high paying job. At the moment I think the best thing to do is educate people. Eventually, awareness will build and the market will emerge.

With all the media coverage and growing concern of recent years I was hoping that time had come.. that’s a shame

Support organisations that are trying to create and preserve software freedom (FSF, Conservancy, CCC etc) using your existing job.

Join communities where people reverse engineer the devices they own, work out how to modify the firmware and write Free Software replacements. Then buy devices second-hand, replace the firmware with free equivalents, resell the devices and use the profits to enable more reverse engineering work.

Bruce Schneier has been advocating for "public interest technologists" in order to address this very question: https://public-interest-tech.com/

He even recently had a job posting (on his blog) for someone to work in this area.

This is a great resource thank you! Although it’s slanted to the USA and I’m not American it still looks very useful.

You could pipe a piece of your paycheck to the EFF, a lot of companies have donation matching.

Yes I’ve considered that (and will probably do so) thanks. I’m looking for contributing though through my career if/when that is possible.

The answer to connected TVs is commercial display. These are "dumb TVs" that you've seen 10K times at airports manufactured by the usual suspects such as Sony, NEC, LG, and yes - even Samsung. They are offered in 4K, have plenty of ports, and are price competitive to smart TVs

https://www.necdisplay.com/category?category=displays#1 https://pro.sony/en_GB/products/small-displays

I tried this. At least for larger sizes, the price premium is often 2x or more. Also, finding HDR - let alone HDR, HDMI-CEC ("Turn on the TV when the source comes on"), and ARC ("Generate decent audio without two cables") - is hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664952

It's hard to find a consumer TV that doesn't have HDR, CEC, and ARC in 2019. Commercial displays may have other missing features I don't know to look for.

Anyway, expect a 200%+ premium for a product that in nearly all respects is inferior for this task.

As someone who installs commercial displays, I wouldn't quite call them "price competitive" in many cases, the commercial displays cost considerably more than a domestic set with a somewhat equivalent feature set.

Surely the answer is just not connecting your set to the internet in the first place, and if you absolutely must have Apps or internet connected features, then something like an AppleTV (Apple being at least vaguely privacy focused), would be ideal ?

Stuff like this is the reason I don’t connect smart TVs to the internet. If I need web content on the TV, I can connect my laptop with HDMI. The TV should be no more than a display and speakers with a tuner.

Can't confirm this myself, but in previous threads about similar topics, people noted that some of those "smart" devices probe every open WiFi they find and use that without your explicit consent. So it's not always possible to disconnect them.

people noted that some of those "smart" devices probe every open WiFi they find

Given that this would potentially expose them to criminal liability under unauthorised access laws in various places, I have always been sceptical of this claim, and I have yet to see any convincing evidence that it actually happens. Does anyone know definitively that it does?

Solder the antenna to ground on the wifi module. It's what I'll be doing on my next TV.

Correct thing is to "connect" them to the internet but blackhole them so they cant actually talk to anything. It's what I've done and so far it's blocked a lot.

With the exception of coffee shops and big box retailers, there aren't many unsecured networks left in even dense residential areas, so I'm unsure of how much impact this has.

I've also found smart TV systems, especially Samsung's (this was quite a few years ago now), to be quite terrible. I would constantly have connectivity issues and app crashing issues. Now I have so many external devices (Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast, PS4) with all of the streaming apps that I will never buy a smart TV again.

Not only are the built ins awful. Their lifespan is very short. I had my Samsung for about a year before it would let me know that “XYZ service was ending in one month”.

Disconnected that thing from WiFi and have never hooked it back up. Xbox/PS are just far superior smart devices.

Soon enough, failure to connect your TV to the internet within, say, one month will void your warranty (and the TV will refuse to work in two months after that).

Given that the above would potentially be illegal on both counts in many places, that seems like hyperbole.

To each their own - 100% of the content I consume is Netflix or YouTube. For me a non-smart tv is useless unless I hook up something smart to it.

The thing is, the smart thing you hook up to it is under your control. It could be a laptop or Raspberry Pi.

But you could plug in a Roku or a Fire TV, right? The TV can't proxy through those. It's maybe cringeworthy to say, but I probably trust those companies more than I do Samsung.

Netflix is watching you. Youtube, on the other hand, in a private window over a VPN is as far as you can go privacy-wise.

"The content I consume". When the fuck did people start actually talking about themselves like this, it sounds like it's straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel from the 80s.

I discovered this "feature" when I set up a PiHole on my home network. After a few days I noticed that my TV was phoning home on an almost minute-by-minute basis. After digging into the URL (which had the acr in it), I read a few posts about their data collection and immediately lobotomized my TV (reset to factory) and disconnected it from the network. There is no universe where the manufacturer of my television needs to know what I'm watching on it.

The solution most of us fall back to is to never connect a smart tv to the internet.

But that is not a long term solution. It is only a matter of time before devices start shipping with their own sim card that you can not turn off.

I don't know what else to do but to focus on manufacturers that don't do this in the first place. If there are any.

Remote comms with no user intervention or control is already happening in medical devices. Almost certainly coming to consumer devices soon.

Also the FBI recommends you have a separate network segment for your TV/IoT devices [0].

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-recommends-that-you-keep-y...

People like subsidized stuff. People who subsidize things like to do it only when they are paid more than the subsidies they give and they are paid based on who they subsidize because the people who are paying the subsidizers must go to the subsidized people and take their money for the subsidies.

It's a rock-solid business model with a requirement to know your customers, it's not going away unless a better alternative is invented.

But consumers are not being informed that they’ve bought a subsidized tv. For example, Several salespeople have told me in the past few weeks that none of their TVs serve ads. Looking deeper into the TVs the salesperson was clearly wrong. Few consumers even know to ask the question. Even fewer know that the sales guy is wrong.

Remove ads pop-up at the first set-up? AFAIK the games that offer this option make a very little portion of their games from ad-removal IAP.

Most people simply don't care enough. For those who care, there will be a niche premium market.

Businesses don't leave money on the table. "Smart" features don't subsidize the purchase price, they just add to the margin. If companies tacitly collude to keep dumb TVs off the market, surveillance is a tide that will lift all of their boats.

This is specifically about privacy, which relates to targeting and tracking, not all ads. Most user data is completely useless to advertisers, but there is a mania for it right now. Perhaps it will end when ML people from CS backgrounds learn Bonferroni.

How I see it is an optimization problem about paying a downpayment to get your device and after that paying instalments through purchases of unrelated goods and services down the line.

The advertisement agencies are the creditors and the debt collectors and they try to optimize for accuracy of targeting. The more accurate they are the ticker is their margins.

Saying it subsidizes price is not entirely true. Even the stupid expensive brand new 8k panels do this same thing.

It's a simple fact of corporate greed and lack of regulation.

Moreover, on the other end of the scale, there are <= $200 LED TVs (1920x1080 x 40") that don't have the networking to upload anything.

I think I read that Roku does this as well, and it does cause a lot of strange traffic on our network, which is why I want to get rid of our Roku. I'm considering replacing it with an Apple TV when a new version hits the streets.

At least Roku can only capture screenshots of content it's serving from itself. Not that I'm defending this practice in any way, but it's significantly less disturbing than my TV doing the same thing.

What if I'm using my TV to watch [homemade] porn, or browsing sensitive personal data on a PC connected to the TV, or something like that? Sounds like Samsung will get screenshots of all my content, regardless of what it is or which input it's coming through.

See, that seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen for Samsung.

If it's my content and they're taking a copy and you're living in a place where clickthrough EULAs are illegal, they're violating copyright.

I run pi-hole and have a Samsung smart TV. How do I know that the Samsung DNS servers are being blocked? What prevents Samsung from registering new meaningless-sounding DNS names and continually pushing out TV software updates peddling “Security and bugfix” release notes?

This is the exact reason I didn't buy a Samsung smart TV 2 weeks ago. My wife reminded me about ads, so I looked into using Pihole. It wasn't guaranteed to work, so I went with a brand that won't run ads on a TV I paid for. That is a big pet peeve of mine. I hate ads, and refuse to watch them if I pay. I don't pay for the privilege of viewing ads.

I made the mistake of buying a Samsung TV a few years ago. I created this guide[0] which gained some traction.

Also, I'm pretty sure they do upload something recognisable because one time (2-3 years ago) I accidentally pressed the 'social' button on the remote while I was watching premier league football on Sky Sports (via a separate satellite box) and the TV started showing me relevant tweets about the match.

I'm definitely not buying a 'Smart TV' next time.

[0] https://gist.github.com/peteryates/b44b70d19ccd52f62d66cdd4b...

>How do I know that the Samsung DNS servers are being blocked?

Would have to know all of the domains that the TV connects through, that they're in one of pihole's blocklists, and the TV actually respects the DNS setting entirely and doesn't have any hard coded IP addresses

>What prevents Samsung from registering new meaningless-sounding DNS names and continually pushing out TV software updates peddling “Security and bugfix” release notes?

Nothing.

The real solution is to not connect any smart devices (especially stuff like TVs) to the internet as most are inherently untrustworthy.

Maybe a whitelisting system on a firewall would be more appropriate than a blacklisting system on something like pihole.

Just block all traffic from the TV at router level or don’t give it the WiFi password in the first place

Forget the Pi-hole, just don’t connect your TV to the internet. I have yet to see a smart-tv which work well enough and fast enough to be of any use anyway.

It is simple. Never ever connect the TV to the internet. Use a third party box (or computer) you trust to handle the streaming connection. Apple has fairly reasonable privacy policies for Apple TV. Other boxes may as well.

Related anecdote. My TV needed an update via internet. I noticed that there was no way to delete a wifi password, meaning once connected it was game over. The only solution was to setup temporary wifi credentials, do the update, then change the router credentials again.

The TV also asks for wifi credentials to show you help pages. So, enable help and game over for connectivity and privacy. Nice.

> My TV needed an update via internet.

How could it possibly know it needed an update? And what could your advantage be letting it update, considering it would otherwise be forever air-gapped?

A note for other boxes, especially the nVidia Shield. It's my top blocked client on my home network with pi-hole.

It tries to connect to api.segment.io every 30 seconds.

FWIW my Sony TV has an option to update via a thumb drive, which is exactly what I did since it’s not connected to the internet. Worked great.

At some point piracy is just better, not only cheaper.

Surprised I haven't read this in thread yet, but isn't this Issue what makes homekit enabled routers appealiNg when they finally release ? As I understand it the router can isolate Internet access on a per device basis.

Yes you can VLAN & firewall your way to the same place, but dealing with it at a consumer router level seems like a really great feature of homekit to me.

And yes, homekit supported devices are relatively rare and often more expensive, and they don't have a $€|$$> doorbell. But If we are talking about BSG Colonial style dishwashers, then this seems like a small price to pay.

So who is going to start the FOSS smart TV firmware alternative that I can use as a replacement for Samsung firmware? Or do DRM requirements for apps like Netflix make that impossible?

I'm not surprised that most mainstream buyers don't know about this, but I'm surprised that this is still news to HN readers. In addition to past HN coverage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657930 and others), in the last year it's been in NYT, WaPo, Consumer Reports, and tons of other places.

That said, if anyone doesn't already at least skim the privacy policies of any networked devices they own… now is a good time.

Even retailers often sell your info. For example, Target "may share your personal information with other companies." Crate & Barrel may share "a record of any transactions you conduct on our Website or offline" with third parties. The defaults are worse than any reasonable person would expect.

(Have a few extra dollars? Consider spending it on a DIY public service campaign. I've been promoting https://twitter.com/simpleoptout/status/1191029269691957249 and other tweets to followers of Samsung's Twitter accounts.)

There are a number of gaming TVs coming out that are essentially big monitors with high refresh rates. They're expensive, but they don't have Ethernet ports, or built in apps or any of that bullshit.

I've never connected a TV to Ethernet/Wifi and I don't understand people who have those fucking Amazon/Google/Apple spy devices (aka digital assistants) in their homes. I disable all that shit on my phone too.

Any good recommendations?

Linus Tech Tips did a review of this one:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/big-format-gam...

..but in a recent review he actually recommend a high refresh rate LG over it due to price. There might be others too.

I've listed all of the Telemetry servers that I could find my set connecting to should any of you wish to block them on your local network. https://factory-reset.com/wiki/Samsung_Telemetry_Servers

If you guys notice any others, let me know and I can update the list.

If only there was good guy ISP service that would maintain blocking list for these and all tracking tools so that even clueless people are safe.

They would be sued to hell as the role of an isp is not to be a regulator of what a company can and can not do.

This sounds like the perfect use case for a Pi-hole in your LAN.

When we were developing Yahoo TV, which ended up being deployed on a bunch of "smart" TVs for a while one of the things we struggled with was "what are people going to do with this?" First thing that came to mind for me was, "look up the show on imdb.com". One huge issue though was that the TV basically didn't know what was on — the connected devices don't transmit that information. So we started thinking about a database of shows & movies so that we could identify what was on (using audio and video) when someone wanted to find out more about it. Amusingly, we were thinking about user convenience and not about advertising at all. I don't think Yahoo ever shipped that but I am not surprised it exists.

Apologies as the thread is long, but has anyone mentioned Vizio's creepy ACR tactics yet and how they got sued into submission?

I got a one for the bedroom about a year ago and although it was priced well for a 4K set, I had already heard about their adventures in getting viewing data on the sly and turned all that crap off as soon as I was able to do so.

Sounds like Samsung may well be trending in that direction.

We just bought a Q80 to go in our renovated basement and I'm starting to think about all of the small tweaks I'll need to make in order to minimize the data it collects.

Hard wired w/ Cat 6, Pi-Hole the ad servers, etc.

Washington Post had an article about this here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-wat... it was also discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21657930

Is this the sections the OP is referring to with their link title?

> Your TV viewing history includes information about the networks, channels, websites visited and programs viewed on your Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them. We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture this information. Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched.

Yes, this is the section.

The Smart TV has many inputs, including PC input (if you connect with your computer), Camera input (to watch the photos you took with your camera), Chromecast streaming from your phone.

The wording in this section syas that any of these are fair play to be sent over to the manufacturer for recognition purposes.

>>>Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., along with our affiliates and subsidiaries, (collectively, “Samsung”) knows how important privacy is to our customers.

Translated:

Samsung spits in the face of customers and will do everything in it's power to monetize users private information without compensating users in any way, shape or form.

I've actually been researching this a little bit more using some of the test sets that I have, and it seems that there might be a way to disable some of these features through the service menu.

If you enable the service mode / service menu of the set: https://factory-reset.com/wiki/Samsung_Service_Menu - then navigate to the "Control" sub menu, disable the following settings:

Voice Recognition OFF, Network Support NONE, BT Support OFF, Samsung Smart Control OFF

With the "Network Support" in particular it seems to disable all internet related settings on the TV.

It seems that in some cases this is in the "extended service menu" for which you will need a special remote to access.

Would this cover using your TV as a monitor only? Theoretically, the monitor could recognize/screenshot your wifi/account setup information (presuming passwords weren’t *-out), do recognition on it, and then log itself into your wifi while pretending to be a dumb monitor.

So why isn't there a market for open source TVs? Wouldn't that make sense?

Or is it a similar story to printers?

My Samsung TVs are not connected to the internet. I have never even run the “setup” on them as it turns out you can name inputs and change video settings without excepting any terms. Also before someone post “they look for open WiFi” again it would be great to have proof of that statement that has been made 100 times. Anyway, I was thinking about the screenshots. I wonder what happens if it could not ID the program? Does a human review? It would be a blast to take some shots of Samsung executives and family members and do some deep fake work on them, maybe including Kim Jong Un and some North Korea propaganda broadcast. Except all the terms, hook up to the internet and play the fakes and the propaganda for a month at a time. Just saying..

My TV has an obnoxious full volume boot sound unless you connect it to the internet :-/

Good thing large computer monitors are still a thing, and seem to do well.

I don't have a single proper TV in my house, because nobody needs them. We can consume whatever video streams we care about via the internet, using computers that I reasonably control.

Not an option for non-IT people, though, alas.

Will Samsung take screenshots even when it runs as a dumb monitor on HDMI or Display Port?

I'm sure they would find value in doing so. To understand what you watch on your set-top boxes (cable TV, Amazon/Google/Roku/AppleTV)

Well, that just justifies my decision to never buy a TV. Yes yes, I own a smartphone already. But I've tried to lock it down as much as possible by deactivating some services, limiting which apps I install. There will always be some tracking if you own a phone by the carrier anyway.

But TV's are becoming a whole other thing. I also just hate free-to-air TV, hate having a black void in the living room begging to be switched on, and I hate the effect it has on kids. A projector that only comes out on special movie nights is more than enough. And a laptop to watch Netflix or something with my wife is better than having a TV.

We are beyond fighting this with technical solutions. This can only be properly fixed via regulations and laws. Unless it can be proven that certain information is required for the product to function, it should not be collected. If it is required, it should only be stored for as long as technically necessary.

I am not familiar with the details of GDPR. Does it help in this particular case?

Roku has been doing that forever, and now all those cheap TCL TVs are doing it too. Keep this in mind, especially if you use one of these in a productivity context.

https://docs.roku.com/published/userprivacypolicy/en/us

https://test.tcl.com/eu/en/privacy-notices-smart-tv-services...

This is why you pay more for a Dumb monitor than a Smart TV. The monitor has no avenues to sell your data so all cost and profit needs to be extracted from the consumer through the sales price.

Is that really the reason though? I highly doubt they would lower prices because they are compensated by selling our privacy down the river. Mining data is extracting more value, why lower your profits?

Before the advent of the smart TV, bumb TV's have always been cheaper than commercial displays or monitors of similar screen spec. The commercial offerings have things like rs232 control, sdi video for long runs, and other features to allow them to be remotely controlled for signage and kiosk use. The dumb TV went away because we're knee deep in cheap SoC's that can both control the TV portion and run hulu and netflix. No boxes, wires or cables. No separate remotes. Digital convenience, aka "faux luxury", is the drug of choice nowadays.

Note that this is also in the UK privacy policy[0]

> We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture this information. Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched.

And in the german one[1], which is just a translation

> Wir können zur Erhebung dieser Daten die automatische Inhaltserkennung (ACR) und andere Technologien verwenden. Ihr Smart TV ermöglicht die Bestimmung der gesehenen Programme durch Übermittlung von Audio- und Video-Ausschnitten bzw. von Informationen vom TV-Tuner.

I doubt that this is defensible under GDPR.

[0] https://www.samsung.com/uk/info/privacy/ [1] https://www.samsung.com/de/info/privacy/

I work on this technology(not for Samsung), they do not upload the screenshots. They upload a cryptographic hash of the image and match it to known content. Also, this is true of nearly every smart TV available for purchase and quickly being integrated into projectors. If you want to turn off the functionality, you will have to go through the feature sets of the devices.

> Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched.

Can this upload screenshots even if you use the TV as a mere monitor?

The wording of the privacy policy does not preclude getting video snippets from the PC input. Unless the wording changes, it can be assummed that it can be affected as well.

I suppose if I film a sex tape and watch it on a Samsung TV, it will upload images from that as well.

Samsung Smart TVs do not take screenshots as far as I know. They do audio and video fingerprinting. It would be way too costly and inificient to upload screenshots for content recognition (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognitio...).

Disclaimer: I work for Samsung, but not directly in the TV software.

So, they do video fingerprinting? To me, that means that they can identify what you are watching, which I think is what the OP was pointing out, regardless of mechanism. Mike (ex-CTO Shazam)

It's right there in the linked text:

"Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched"

It could be great if you can get clarification from your colleagues

My Vizio that I’ve had for years recently popped up an “opt in” that asked me to allow them to track my usage. Except it wasn’t opt in at all. I couldn’t use any of their services if I didn’t agree to let them track me.

So I promptly did a factory reset and now we use the AppleTV exclusively with that TV.

It is not only the last Vizio product I’ll ever own but I’ll go out of my way to find a dumb tv the next time I need one, if such a thing exists by then.

There was a good conversation about this on HN a few months ago [1].

Has anyone successfully blocked unnecessary outbound traffic from their smart TV using a firewall such as pfsense? Whilst maintaining usability. A separate VLAN for IoT devices seems like a good first step.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21002745

If some dystopian scifi author described in a book 30 years ago what is actually happening today regarding the points of consumer data collection they’d likely be laughed at.

The programmatic elimination of any expectation of consumer privacy.

Thank fluky we have heroes doing open source projects. Yet open source hardware alternatives remain quite limited or non existent.

Can anyone suggest meaningful ways to contribute?

> We offer you certain choices in connection with the personal information we obtain about you through the IBA Service. You can opt out of receiving interest-based ads from the IBA Service on your Samsung Smart TV at any time through your Smart TV settings menu, at Menu > Support > Terms & Policy or Menu > Smart Hub > Terms & Policy.

I have my samsung spy device blocked at the router. Always amazed at the level of bullshit consumers have to put up with.

I think I wish there was a fine per customer per data item when a data leak happens. That it was 3x if it is discovered the company didn't report it in a timely manner and that it was high enough that companies would be reluctant to collect the data in the first place.

not sure what unintended consequences there would be.

I initially thought it is anti-piracy measure, but then I slowly recognized that I live in a world where my proclivities are captured, measured, and then sold to whoever thinks they call sell me stuff. I never thought I would say it, I liked previous regime better. At least there was a clear distinction.

So uhhhhh, my Samsung TV got stolen, can I compel them to cough up information leading to its current location?

Where does it say "screenshot"?

"Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched"

Not trying to downplay Samsung's sinister behavior, but could you just not connect it to the internet?

I was recently shopping for TVs and found it impossible to find a model I liked without this kind of stuff baked in.

Then you could plug your Apple TV, Xbox, Chromecast or what-have-you and avoid being tracked — oh wait...

Interesting. So say a couple likes to take nude photos . . . Samsung reserves the right to collect and use those photos if you store them on "your" tv. So you decide that you won't store them there to be "safe", but Samsung can take a screenshot of them anyway?

For my last TV I intentionally tries to find a non-Smart TV, in part because of the privacy stuff, but also it always is in your face about wanting you to use the SmartTV features. Unfortunately Samsung and LG really have no competition on the higher end of the spectrum anymore.

Relevant sections:

> Viewing Information Services

> ...

> You may change your privacy choice at any time by going to the settings menu to disable the particular feature or service at your sole discretion, in which case your TV viewing history will cease to be collected for that particular feature or service.

> Bear in mind that your privacy choice may affect the availability or quality of the specific viewing information based service.

> Interest-Based Advertisement Services

> ...

> In order to make the advertising on your devices more relevant to you, the IBA service will rely on your TV viewing history (including information about the networks, channels, websites visited, and programs viewed on your Samsung Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them), Samsung Smart TV usage information, and other statistical data obtained from trusted third party data sources. We may use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technologies to capture your TV viewing history.

> Based on the information above we create groups of Samsung Smart TV owners who share similar interests and use these groups for the IBA Service. The information above is used to determine the groups to which your Samsung Smart TV is assigned and thus, which advertisements your devices receive.

> You may disable the IBA Service at any time by visiting the Settings menu on your Samsung Smart TV.

> PSID

> Your Smart TV viewing history and usage information collected for the purposes of providing interest based advertisements will be linked to a randomized, non-persistent, and resettable device identifier called the Personalized Service ID or “PSID”.

> You may reset your PSID at any time by visiting the Settings menu on your Smart TV and, once reset, your Smart TV viewing history and Smart TV usage information with respect to interest based advertisements will be de-linked from its previous PSID. Bear in mind that if you reset your PSID, the quality of customized and interest based advertisements may not be fine-tuned.

Is it possible to open the TVs and snip snip the wifi/LTE/5G module/antenna?

I guess the antenna is hard to snip in 5G since it’s probably part of the circuit board.

Are the modules entirely on the cpu chip?

Is it possible to screw up the timing (say replacing the crystals) w/out breaking something else?

This is not new. It’s been embedded in tvs for years. You can thank judges who don’t care about consumer privacy and mandatory arbitration clauses for the spreading of this junk. If consumers could sue these companies none of this would be happening.

I join my smart* devices to my network, then add a policy to block all of their traffic on my eero router.

Not sure if this is good practice or not — I remember something about there being an attack vector for devices not on a network. Started doing this since.

This is one of the big reasons I bought a projector instead of a large tv. Because all the large(r) TVs came with "smart" crapware in them.

I just need a HDMI port. Please. Let there be options for us that's not only a friggin' projector.

The days are coming where STBs and TV's can do Direct Ad Insertion right on top of your existing video stream, either augmenting or outright replacing other advertisers content. Going to be super interesting..

I occasionally use my Samsung tv as a second screen. I can't be sure but I may have had my banking information on screen. Does this mean they are keeping screenshots of that too? Isn't that unlawful?

My girlfriend asked why I carry a gun around the house?

I looked her dead in the eye and said, "the motherfucking Decepticons". She laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed, I shot the toaster, it was a good time.

I use Pihole and block all my appliances and other traffic I deem unusual or unnecessary. Its also very useful forensically if I suspect shenanigans on my network. I recommend it to everyone.

It is possible to post to a Samsung endpoint so we can help them gather data?

This is why I never connect my TV to the internet and made it 'smart' via the HDMI input.

Next step is to rebuild my house as Faraday cage.

Ha, if this disturbs you, wait to see what's going to happen when we perfect under display cameras. Your TV may be watching you, just as much as you're watching it.

Surprisingly, why are we talking about TVs only? It says they can collect photos stored on the device (including phones I guess), isn't that the the prime crime?

I connect my smart tv to my internet connection and then explicitly block it at the router. (Easy to do with eero - yes yes amazon gets my Mac addresses etc though)

Just don't buy a smart tv, don't connect it to internet, cover its camera, and disable its microphone if possible.

These things are cyberdystopic surveillance devices

Lets say you work with private data such as something under HIPAA- does the liability fall to you for buying one of these or could you go after Samsung?

What if all Samsung appliance buyers will buy and then return Samsung appliances back to store because of unacceptable data collection policy?

Hm, I was pinged by a company (samba.tv) earlier in the year which does exactly this for a number of TV models. They claimed it was always opt-in.

If you buy a smart TV, disable these features, disable network connectivity, and then plug in another 3rd party box you should be fine right?

Unlikely, because the third-party box probably uploads screenshots or does something equally noxious as well, if not today, then in the not-too-distant future.

What makes you think the third party box is any better?

I pihole on my local network and samsung is the biggest blocked domain on my list with the default block lists. It's INSANE.

If you just point out that it would ID what types of porn you ware watching, it would make enough buyers opt out.

The simple answer for any new TV, as Samsung is not at all alone here, is to never connect it to the internet.

Just another of many reasons to push back against 5G. Enabling this kind of crap is an end goal of 5G.

Can we stop calling these things smart. What is smart about devices sharing user data with companies?

They're smart enough to be rebellious...

If they are gonna do that Lowe th price significantly, let us choose to get screwed or not

Could something like pi hole fix this problem, without disabling services such as Netflix?

Would love seeing the materials Samsung uses to market this “feature” to their partners.

And because these things will connect to any open WiFi network, you have to open them up and work over the networking components with a Dremel. Only then can you be really sure it doesn't fuck you over.

My Samsung asshole tv started showing banner ads overlayed on hdmi signals, already in... 2017 or so?

Fuck these practices.

What DNS settings do I need to change to block this shit?

Covered under default Pi-hole settings?

Is there a Raspbian + dumb (non-monitoring) monitor that’s smarter?

Spoiler alert most TV's in the US already sell this data..

The solution is simple. Stop watching TV and read lol

Are they uploading screenshots or hashes?

Not sure if it's available to everybody or just Europeans, but there is a checkbox to disable it (I don't remember whether it's checked by default or not).

Settings -> Support -> Terms & Policies -> disable "Viewing Information Services" (there is detailed information about what this checkbox entails, and it includes using ACR on screenshots)

Could be a placebo button of course, but that would be a pretty big violation of GDPR and a risk for a huge fine.

That’s why we use projectors.

Who offers a non-abusive tv?

not if I don't connect the damn thing to my network ... right?

Which TV's?

TLDR: the page says: "Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched."

As soon as 5G is widely available, TV manufacturers will most definitely include a modem in each set. A GDPR style regulation is needed.

privacy is dead!

Truly WTF.

You can disable this feature, but of course you have to trust the manufacturer that it’s actually disabled. And if the manufacturer were trustworthy, they wouldn’t be doing things like this to begin with.

We need something to firewall the Internets from our too-smart house stuff! Something like an inverse firewall. A waterwall.

Fortunately, you can specify your own DNS to point at a black hole proxy like: https://pi-hole.net

It'd be safer to do firewall blocking, since the TV could fall back to a well known public resolver (i.e. 8.8.8.8) or even do DNS over HTTPS to a known Samsung IP.

Though blocking is a little harder if you want to use built-in apps of the TV (i.e. Netflix) while blocking it from sending viewing data to Samsung or its affiliates.

Though if you really want to keep the TV from spying on you, the easiest thing to do is to just not connect it to the internet (which is still an option in these pre-5G days, not sure that will always be the case in the future, the TV may have a built-in 5G modem that it can use to talk back to the manufacturer)

Or you could just not connect your TV to your internet connection.

And what do you do if the screenshots get uploaded to the same domain as the other API endpoints needed for smart TV functionality? At that point your only option would be to disconnect from the internet directly.

My understanding is that newer DNS-over-<thing> like DoH would make this impossible...

This has been a reality for years.

I can't tell you how I know this - but I can tell you it has been a fact for more than five years.

Not sure what the problem is. The user consents to this by saying 'yes' when they are asked if they agree with the Terms and Conditions.

It's hard to argue a click through agreement presented after they already bought the TV represents informed consent.

I know rejecting it on my Samsung TV just reset the wizard

> Not sure what the problem is. The user consents to this by saying 'yes' when they are asked if they agree with the Terms and Conditions.

That right there is the problem!

You forgot the /s sarcarsm mark

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