I so want this for my Samsung TV... since they did a firmware update that puts ads into the source selection screen.
And for what? A couple of dollars of side revenue. And whole lot of customer hatred.
And for what? A couple of dollars of side revenue. And whole lot of customer hatred.
1. It uploads voice samples. Don't say anything sensitive in the room. https://imgur.com/Phy1uzX
2.It uploads screenshots regardless of input. See other threads.
3.Front facing camera. Not kidding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x6TOtkFQxY
4. Audio beacons? Old news. https://threatpost.com/ultrasonic-beacons-are-tracking-your-...
5. Targeted ad market, selling you. https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/samsungs-invasive-plans-...
6. If you don't give it wifi, it may decide to find some by itself anyway. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTechnology/comments/odf9qu/can_s...
Of course this is the point of Amazon Sidewalk, so in due time, it probably will.
They can technically do it, and I totally expect them to be doing it already.
Also two other observations. First, there is means: unsecured and public groups like xfinity, sidewalk, fios via some business deal maybe. Also in the means column is a full linux machine, totally possible (not saying it's happening but possible) to run Kismet all day in the background to look for auth. There's all kinds of pocket doodads at Defcon doing this. Second is motive: your data as revenue is the these things are getting so cheap. Why would they leave free cash on the table?
As for battery, they would only need to sample a second every few minutes, to see if there was a beacon afoot, quick DFFT, and they wouldn't need to analyze much.
Not saying it's happening, just that it's easily possible. Look how many apps have location permissions that don't need it.
with no media playing it never shows anything, but bring up some youtube or television and it squawks every so often.
Obviously there's a front facing camera, they're not hiding it. It's even a GOOD webcam, to disable it you push it into the bezel and that physically blocks the camera. Great design.
Beyond that, the criticisms are just "This is a proprietary OS by a company that makes hardware, it's not trustworthy." So why the focus on the camera? It's almost like you're trying to imply that Samsung is integrating hidden cameras just to covertly surveil their customers.
1. Same issues as any voice assistant. It only uploads things when voice recognition is actually active, and puts a big icon on the screen to show this.
2. Not screenshots, it uses fingerprints to recognise content.
3. That TV is an older special model advertised with built-in camera for skype. The linked video raises a minor security issue that web pages you navigate to (on your smart TV, how many people actually do that?) can enable the webcam without you knowing.
Most TVs don't have a hidden front facing camera.
4. Audio beacons are hard-coded into the tv content, your smart TV doesn't add them. It's more of a privacy issue with smart phone apps using them, and the studios who add them.
5. Actually true
6. You link to a thread of someone asking if TVs might do this. Nobody has provided any evidence of TVs actually doing it, it's 100% theoretical.
IMO, the fingerprinting and advertising are bad enough. No need to invent extra FUD about what smart tvs can do.
My dryer broke yesterday. I specifically bought an AEG because it was a dumb dryer, not some smart appliance with an app and all that junk. Don't get me wrong, I love smart stuff. In fact, I plugged my new dryer into a Shelly S plug so my home assistant can send me a notification on my phone when it's finished. But I trust my HA. I can never trust Samsung again.
Pi-hole your network for a week and take a look at the logs to see all the crap it has blocked. You'll be surprised.
What are other people's experiences with other brands of TV?
There are no good high-end “dumb” tv options.
Loewe[0] make really nice, simple, high-end TVs with great picture and sound, which really don't have intrusive 'smart' features. I use mine purely as a 'monitor' for AppleTV (and Nintendo Switch).
The problem is distribution: they're difficult to source even within Europe.
> I had never heard of loewe, but after 10 minutes of searching, I still know nothing more about them - there is no pricing available, no idea where to buy them and no list of models. The one model I could find I also can't find tech specs for because the download link is broken.
Loewe are indeed wonderful TVs totally letdown by their marketing and distribution.
FWIW their website (which I linked to above) does have model and spec information, but it's fair to say that they've fallen off the radar for most consumer-TV review sites, and even their user-base forum[0] is predominantly German-language (although any questions asked in English do receive a response).
I think the problem is that the TV-market is saturated by the major brands, and they achieve market-dominance by stealing and selling their users' data, instead of pricing their TVs realistically. Most people don't care.
The TV is fairly excellent and the hosted apps are fine and not in your face - the TV comes on directly showing its current input (e.g. in my case from a BT smart box) rather than apps or a start screen or similar. I can also immediately cast media to it by a right click from my PC.
I initially had problems with the overall system integration: I have poor wifi coverage in my house and the TV (Loewe) and sound systems (Linn) wouldn't always work reliably together until I had ethernet wired into my house. Also, and this is not a big problem for me, an Alexa can recognise the Loeve as a device but appears unable to use it for sound output. In the bin for you, Alexa.
I didn't go for an extremely high-end display, but I wouldn't have done that anyway. They seem to be out of stock of a lot of their "4K" models, but they are priced at 600-1000€.
Ships from Sweden, so should be possible for a lot of Europe.
If you’re looking for a generic LCD it’s probably fine, but if you’re comparing to an LG OLED you won’t find an ad free option in the commercial market. At least I couldn’t back when I tried.
Giving the TV no network access and using an Apple TV seemed to be the best option.
https://www.lg.com/global/business/commercial-tv/lg-77EU960H...
They don't update the commercial line annually of course, so it's equivalent to a consumer model from a few years ago, but the panels are all the same until the 2021 models anyways.
Scepter brand tv - Walmart -not greatest quality, but at least it’s dumb.
I recently bought a 1080p spectre for my youngest kid, wall mounted it, put an indoor antenna on it and a raspberry Pi running openElec with a wifi dongle.
as far as i can tell, it's a "dumb" tv.
I changed the hotspot password and now the TCL blinks its status light while it's turned on, to chastise me for disabling its internet.
There needs to be some regulation on this - because a boycott will never work, people don't think about boycotts or this sort of thing when they "need a TV today"; they either are shopping for a specific feature or going on price per square inch of screen or cheapest overall. These TVs blowing through 100MB/hr of internet data even while 'off' has to potential to lock people out of their internet connections, or get a large bill for overages. I only have 15GB of hotspot data, and i "need" that for the console, my fixed wireless home internet only has 150GB of data included in the plan, and even if i 'cheat' and use pdanet or something to use my cellphone without the hotspot data in the plan i only have 75GB of data there, as well.
So, in summary, smart TVs need to be regulated. And I really need to sniff that traffic while it's off because what could it possibly be doing? how much storage is on these things?
I swore off buying Samsung stuff after the Galaxy S3. I eventually gave them another chance and bought one of their TVs since the reviews were great. Huge mistake. I hated that thing so much, and recently replaced it with an LG which has been fantastic.
So no phones, appliances, laptops, TVs, memory sticks, SD cards, and whatever else they make. Even if they magically got a better reputation for customer service, the shenanigans with the smart TVs is enough to keep the boycott up.
It's sad that this is necessary to keep enjoying a device of $2,000+ that you own, but it has worked beautifully for my Samsung Frame TV.
I’ll put them on my list of devices to never buy then. Jeez.
There was a discussion on HN some time ago, many/all major tv manufacturers suck in your viewing data via HDMI fingerprinting (IIRC) in order to serve up unblockable ads and sell your viewing profile to ad networks. Many tv makers send data to Chinese based servers too, from memory. It’s nuts.
[1]https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/resources/tv-...
Edit, more reading:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-wat...
A good Samsung tv is an offline Samsung tv. A better Samsung tv is one you don’t own.
Wait a second, what if I use my TV as a monitor for my PC?
!!!
Sending a screenshot would use too much bandwidth/data on Samsung's side, but a couple dozen bytes every few minutes would not.
I keep hoping this is gonna be the case, but the years roll on, I'm still clicking some stupid consent-popup on every single website I ever visit, and in the meantime TV manufacturers continuously spy on their users, sell their user-data, and push unwanted ads into their interface and even in programs being watched, and apparently no-one (apart from a few of us on HN) seems to care.
Soon it will violate the warranty not to plug it into the network. Probably for “security” or to protect the children.
So I would assume that this is mostly an issue in non-GDPR regions (or they're doing some really ugly legal shenanigans to ignore the denied consent?).
https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimat...
> Legitimate interests is most appropriate as a lawful basis where companies use personal data in a way that individuals can reasonably expect. If it impacts individuals, it can still apply if the controller company can justify there is a compelling reason for the impact the processing will have.
> Companies can rely on legitimate interests for marketing purposes if they can prove that the data usage is proportionate and fair to the user. It must have a minimal impact on the user in privacy terms and be for a reason that people would not be surprised at.
Sadly I would reasonably expect Samsung to sell the data and I would not be surprised by it.
https://noyb.eu/en/our-detailed-concept
>noyb uses best practices from consumer rights groups, privacy activists, hackers, and legal tech initiatives and merges them into a stable European enforcement platform. Together with the many enforcement possibilities under the European data protection regulation (GDPR), noyb is able to submit privacy cases in a much more effective way than before. Additionally, noyb follows the idea of targeted and strategic litigation in order to strengthen your right to privacy. We will also make use of PR and media initiatives to emphasize and ensure your right to privacy without having to go before court. Ultimately, noyb is designed to join forces with existing organizations, resources and structures to maximize the impact of GDPR, while avoiding parallel structures.
Naturally this is a process most people do not feel like going through, and as such most companies continue flying under the radar :)
Most people don't use their TV to look at that kind of thing anyways.
>They are just feeding image through an alogrithm [sic]
You don't know that.
>Saving it would incur legal problems like copyright
That's not how copyright works.
>and have storage costs
Negligible.
>Most people don't use their TV to look at that kind of thing anyways.
Irrelevant.
> Data ceases to be personal when it is made anonymous, and an individual is no longer identifiable. But for data to be truly anonymized, the anonymization must be irreversible.
Examples of PII:
A cookie ID. Internet Protocol (IP) address Location data (for example, the location data from a mobile phone). The advertising identifier of your phone.
A tvid is personally identifiable.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
> (30) Natural persons may be associated with *online identifiers provided by their devices*, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them.
Device Identifiers explicitly covered as a definition of GDPR. Further, IPs are also shared if you are behind an ipv4 gateway and these are also covered.
I'd only cut the antennas in a last case scenario. It's more likely they'd have a connector or I'd try to de-solder them first.
Don't forget that the HN crowd is not your average consumer. Most people don't care, or don't seem to have issues with the ads. They just want the best TV they can afford in terms of size and picture quality.
With companies this big, who have been in the consumer electronics market for decades, you can be sure that every decision (like putting ads in a menu) is tested over and over. Obviously Samsung knows that they will loose a tiny percentage of the enthusiast market by placing ads. But the margin on the sale of a TV is pretty slim anyways, and multiple years of ad income for every sold unit is probably worth losing a small fraction of your audience.
People notice, but you have to re-condition them. I know adless hulu and netflix did their part in that fight.
There's a difference between enjoying the current state and accepting the current state. A few years ago, while helping my grandmother find something online, I asked if she would want an adblocker installed. After explaining what it was, and what the effect was, she was over the moon for it.
Ads are noticed by everyone, and are pretty universally despised. The difference is that you and I know that there are options, while less techy relatives assume that nothing can be changed.
Is there ever a point where these advertisers stop and think "no, this is too obnoxious"?
Don't know if it could be applied to current models at all. Not following that stuff, since not using TVs since 1996.