Hacker News Reader

Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I’d tend to assume that any data collected would be uploaded opportunistically whenever an internet connection was available.

View on HN

Most likely. I worked at a political company (eww) that used this data up to two years after it was generated. The historical data is more useful for political markets for advertising issues than near real time since campaign targeting usually needs to be performed or at least planned a few weeks in advance. Near real time is great for message tweaking but knowing whether there's a receptive demographic is historical.

I think you'd have to write a DNS server where you choose what to return NXDOMAIN for. So updates.samsung.com, sure, let it connect, but spying.samsung.com, block. (Obviously, do not allow connections to any IP addresses you haven't yet approved, which you approve by manually retrieving the DNS entries.) This can be defeated with DoH, or by different business units inside the company cooperating to use the same domain for different purposes, or by doing the TLS negotiation with good.samsung.com but setting the Host header to evil.samsung.com, etc. The first is too scary to ship (you have to keep the DoH's IP address and certificate safe forever; I wouldn't sign off on that), and the second made me chuckle as I was typing it.

I'll add that "back in my day" a screen could display the video signal on its inputs without ever needing a software update. But I suppose automatic time zone changes are a reasonable reason that code needs to be pushed post-manufacture. Then again, who needs a clock on their TV?

I have an unfortunately smart TV, which of I’ve never connected to the network. In general

* it is effectively dumb to me, so I don’t care about feature updates

* it isn’t connected to the network, so I don’t care about security updates

It hadn't occurred to me that there could be TVs out there that are so “smart” that they can’t even take an input without a network connection. Such a device would be returned as defective by me, but of course I can see somebody deciding that packing it all up into the car is too much of a pain.

A squid proxy is a much easier solution, whitelist only.

Video codec upgrades and software processing are nice things to have and often worth the update.

What data could a smart tv collect on you if you're treating it like a dumb tv? Assuming it lives its life disconnected from the internet with an Apple TV/Roku/Chromecast connected to it. Would it have any data on you other than, maybe, when the tv has been turned on?

I mean, Forbes, so take it with a grain of salt, but

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/02/08/shocking...

> Once every second, software in the Vizio TVs would read pixel data from a segment of the screen. This was sent home and compared against a database of film, television and advertising content to determine what was being watched.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com