Why is my unused Vizio TV sending gigabytes of traffic every day? | Hacker News Reader

Why is my unused Vizio TV sending gigabytes of traffic every day?

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44 pointskirkouimet23 comments

Well it's not just you [1]. I don't have any data to support it, but I'm personally guessing either it's a ridiculously massive update, some overzealous ACR, or they may have setup some kind of p2p streaming system for who knows what reason. If you don't want to turn off wi-fi to the TV entirely, maybe try disabling ACR [2] to see if that does anything.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/VizioTV/comments/96gtti/vizio_tv_us...

[2] https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...

I would be upset if my tv sent a single byte of information out. I use an old lcd and if it ever dies, I just don’t even know what we’ll do. Can you even buy TVs anymore that don’t spy on you?

Yes. Sceptre is a good brand for dumb TVs.

Noted

You could just not configure the network on a smart TV if you can’t find a dumb one.

2 years ago with a Samsung tv: no network, no terms and conditions signed, no terms signed, the tv would always forget to use the same input it was using before restart (degraded functionality). I never tried to remove the network after I signed the terms, maybe it woul have still worked.

I only connect my Samsung TVs for firmware updates, seems to work fine pulling the plug after.

Actually, I recall articles which mention certain brands would look for nearby unsecured networks. All of that goes out the window if vendors start provisioning SIMs and use the cellular network.

I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't have some code for looking for undersecured networks capable of being exploited to derive credentials, though at least then you'd have grounds to sue under CFAA.

Embedded SIMs won't be an insurmountable problem as long as the TV can work without network connectivity, but they'll be very inconvenient to deal with.

A destructive approach would involve desoldering the chip or unplugging the antenna. A nondestructive approach would involve Faraday-caging the television: a mesh or aluminum foil taped around where the antenna resides.

The issue can be solved by not buying a TV with a SIM (hopefully still a choice).

This is HN lore. Commented many times, but no one has the proof.

I have an old Vizio and 2 Samsungs. Configured them wired to updated the firmware then blocked the port on the switch. I use an AppleTV for everything as I know what it is sharing.

It doesn't even need that, really. Zigbee and similar long range wireless mesh networks are very realistic (and probably cheaper) for basic usage data.

Bandwidth is much more limited so it probably won't send screenshots of what you're watching like has been reported with some TVs. Screenshots aren't really needed, though, when there's a host of other metadata and on-device processing available.

As someone who runs a Zigbee network at home, this won’t work. The signal strength across my small apartment was marginal at best, there’s no way you could plop down zigbee devices at random and hope that they could find each other, especially between detached houses.

Sorry, I was confusing LoRa and Zigbee.

LoRa claims 2-5 km range in urban areas or 15 km suburban, with even larger variability in rural areas depending on line of sight and landscape features.

Zigbee claims I found vary from 10 to 100 meters.

LoRa is pretty cheap, and there are a lot of gateways around to piggy back off if you don't want to set up your own.

You can see a map of one network of gateways here:

https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/

It also uses less power than Zigbee. The big downside, though, is that you get a lot less bandwidth with LoRa.

Vith Vizio data you get a log whenever user use its remote to (un)pause, go forward, or change channel. I'm not sure LoRa has enough bandwidth to send the usual data. However, it is still possible to send a lightly simpler data (not doing ACR on everything, but identify channels only) But would it worth it right now ? Until a large portion of buyers disable (now or in the next few years) the full data collection, it seems unlikely to me.

That's a lot of data, but I imagine if they operated with bandwidth restrictions, companies might limit themselves more in what they collect.

Though I do think that's within range of even the lowest possible LoRa bandwidth estimates since there's no realtime requirement.

A single remote click is a very small piece of data, even less than the 8-10 bytes that a datetime uses. Contextual data will likely be the larger portion, such as a unique system identifier, currently active application, and any metadata that provides. There are ways to limit that, like sending a context object once and giving it an id, then referencing the id instead of re-sending the same data repeatedly.

But even if that doesn't happen, the lack of realtime requirement means the data can simply be queued up to send over time. If a user generates a few kilobytes of data a second for hours by sitting on their remote control's channel switch button, they won't be that active forever. The device can eventually send out all of the data during the inactive periods.

Or it can prioritize which data to send first, or which to discard, when the queue reaches a certain threshold.

What about a boring, you are looking at the data usage for the wrong device? What's the logging graphic from?

The uploads to downloads look like P2P.

Not sure why it'd be asymmetrical though if you aren't managing it and what would it be storing on at that GB? Is there a hard disk in the TV?

You are using a Ubiquiti device that gathers ip accounting information from a slew of various devices on the network then tries to cram it all together into an overall view. It seems widely accepted that their statistics aren't that reliable. My system reported day that my sleeping macbook sent out 7TB of data. /Narrator: It did not./

Are you totally positive and 100% sure that this is even Internet traffic? Unifi will report all LAN traffic too. Some of those first gen smart TVs will spew untold amounts of multicast and broadcast in an effort to discover DLNA servers and other media devices.

Anything other than speculative theories?

Any .pcap data? Maybe we could see the domains being called?

Interesting question and I agree.

Also, what are you "unusing" it for exactly that requires it to have power?

Just have it powered on for my Apple TV, I never use any of the features of the TV, but I did connect it to the WiFi when I first set it up.

so you do use it to watch your AppleTV?

I don't understand what would possess anyone to hand over their wifi creds to a TV. Sounds like you should change your wifi pass.

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