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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Most people I know have either a Roku or an Amazon Fire connected to their TV. I assume Vizio's spying capability is nil if it's set up this way, with the TV wifi off.

I wonder how common that sort of set up is.

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I've seen SmartTVs pop up with "Watch your stream on Service X" after ID'ing the content (presumably from fingerprinting the image or sound) coming in from HDMI. A smart TV I had kept offline for a few years to prevent this that someone "helpfully" attached to WiFi.

That setup does eliminate Vizio’s spying ability, but my understanding is that Amazon and Roku do essentially the same thing. On Roku at least, you can turn on settings like “limit ad tracking” to mitigate this somewhat.

Or setup something like a pihole. My pihole has blocked my Roku from calling home over 20,000 times in the past 24 hours.

Don't believe that using an external device helps -- the TV can detect what content is being played by sampling the video stream and creating a fingerprint. They can compare to live tv streams to detect channels, and static video files to detect movies/tv shows -- even the menus and cutscenes in video games can be detected.

Also note that disabling WiFi isn't always helpful - some devices expose ethernet over HDMI which the TV will use to phone home.

time for hdmi condoms, I guess.

When Shazam was popular, I believe they embedded digital fingerprints in the non-audible ranges of the audio stream. That allowed phone apps to quickly label content.

I suspect a similar thing happens with video content.

> some devices expose ethernet over HDMI

wait, is this really a thing? I've heard about hdmi over ethernet, but ethernet over hdmi? also it seems it would be a lot trouble to bridge the wifi connection and dhcp to this ethernet over hdmi interface, why should they do it?

Yes.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HDMI_Ethernet_and_Audio_R...

TIL! doesn't seem it really gained any popularity though to be really a security concern

Using Ethernet to communicate between the connected devices doesn't mean that either device is acting as a router to send packets beyond that direct link.

Source? I couldn't find information on any mainstream TV brands using ethernet over HDMI. Not configuring wifi and using an external device seems like it would do the trick.

I've never plugged any TV into a network, except as absolutely necessary for application development (my company used to do those). I fear this might no longer be enough in some possible future - if enough people don't connect their TVs, I could imagine manufacturers equipping the TVs with always-on LTE/5G modems. (You don't need airplane mode if you can't realistically use it on an airplane anyway.)

Then Roku and Amazon are the ones doing the data collection. There's no escaping it.

Well you can get an Apple TV. They make a profit on the hardware, on the TV App Store, and on their services, so they have less incentive to spy when you're not using their TV app.

This. If you have Roku device, you must use something like PiHole. It is the noisiest device on my network, constantly phoning home, down to each interaction with the physical remote.

Amazon Firestick is the same, although there's potential for more control since it's running Android.

Amazon's Ad business is one of its fastest growing segments.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/29/amazons-ads-business-nears-7...

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