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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, one of the majors complaints is that many of these devices will actively, without prompting search for and connect to open wifi.

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I’ve heard this mentioned on HN a few times; is there any documented case of this actually happening?

Some stuff a year ago. It was confirmed by others at the time (after testing) though didn’t seem to get picked up by news outlets.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...

Anecdotally I have 6 Samsung TVs hung on my office wall for monitoring, which run the Tizen OS and the nag screens about connecting to a network and accepting the ToS make the units a little annoying to work with. (But it’s not as bad as to say I wouldn’t use the thing). It wouldn’t surprise me if they were scanning for open Wi-Fi. I might test it out, but we’re surrounded by free Wi-Fi which has captive portals, so it’s effectively black holed.

This Reddit post is not proof as no one has been able to replicate this. This internet lore until there is repeatable proof.

Hmm, weird, I use a 50" Samsung 4k TV as my "monitor" (I'm not much of a gamer so a lower refresh rate is fine for coding and watching YouTube), and I never set up my WiFi and I don't think I accepted any Terms of Service, and it doesn't nag me, but granted literally the only video data that's been displayed on the TV has been an HDMI input and the color-correction menu. Maybe different models of Samsung TVs do things differently?

Or firmware versions

Crack open the set and ground the antenna? Idk, I’m tempted to find a nice model and figure out an adapter to go from eDP to the panel’s actual interface.

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