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Comment by peregrine | Hacker News Reader

I purchased a Samsung tv, I connected it to Wifi one time to download any 'updates' then I disabled WIFI and all of the smart features via the menu and went the extra mile to block its MAC Address on the router.

I never once touched any of the smart features and it has been fine so far. This has been my rule for any devices that requires WIFI. I should really setup a special guest network for them and disable WAN access but I haven't gotten that far yet.

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If you don't want it constantly connected ie to use built-in apps, the step with allowing it out once is needless or even potentially harmful.

Of course I don't know your usage of it, but generally there is nothing worth downloading in those firmwares, only potentially new ways to serve ads and be obtrusive if facing issues with that. You don't want your previously-OK TV to start showing you some warnings after updating it.

If I'm not mistaken, smart TVs can still communicate by via inaudible sound signals directly to other devices. Spooky.

Really? That's dystopian, but in a cool way. A little like Amazons own internet sharing network or what it was.

It's terrible though. We really live in a panopticon now.

Any links?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/there...

Be careful which apps you allow to use your phone's microphone.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-th...

Not exactly the TV manufacturer doing it, but there have been reports of advertisers using ultrasonic pitches to do cross-device tracking.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia

Slightly different than what gp was talking about but also deals with using invisible audio for DRM

Audio is usually invisible

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