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Comment by nesk_ | Hacker News Reader

I just allowed my Samsung TV to connect to the wifi (to access the local network, because the Steam Link client is better on it than it is on the Apple TV) and then, on my router, I blocked all Internet access coming from the mac address of the Samsung TV.

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At some point, these devices will be smarter than you about this. They will recognize a WiFi connection that cannot access the internet, and prefer an open network instead.

They will simply come with a cellular modem built in and you won't be able to block it. These things are so cheap now, and with virtual sims I think this is pretty much inevitable.

At some point everything will be internet connected just because the tech will cost pennies. We're not there yet, but for a big ticket item such as a TV or a car it's either already there or about to happen.

> They will come with a cellular modem built in, and you won't be able to block it.

Haha, joke's one them. I live in a nice apartment in the middle of a major US city, and in my last 3 apartments, cell signal reception was ranging between 1 bar and no signal reception at all. Good luck with a built-in cell modem here.

Thankfully, wifi calling is a thing working by default. So having almost no cell reception at home has exactly zero effect on my phone usage.

The worry I have is TVs also embedding an Amazon Sidewalk chip. Seems like it would be easy for them to egress your data through your neighbor's spy device with something like that.

Is that really a specific chip or just their Alexa devices creating a shared WiFi network?

I assume it is the latter, because that's what Alexa Sidewalk is. But that's a speculation, because neither of those currently exist in TVs, and I don't see LG or Samsung go along with it.

EDIT: I stand corrected, Sidewalk isn't a wifi network, it is it's own LoRa network that's limited to barely 1Kbps (which, imo, only strengthens my original point). Thanks for pointing out that technical detail in the replies.

What's to go along with? Samsung and/or LG are not required to participate in Sidewalk. They just need to be given the ability to scan for open WiFi networks and join when found. They really don't even need to know the SSID, but of course they'll track that info as well.

Sidewalk is not wifi, it's their own networking based using LoRa, which has its own wireless spectrum and its own limits. For example bandwidth is limited to single digit kilobyte/s in best case. Of course real world usage is going to be worse.

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