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What does my smart tv that has never been connected to wifi do?

Ethernet was added to the HDMI standard since version 1.4 and most cables today support that. If your TV is connected to an already networked box via a HDMI cable, chances are that it won't need a WiFi connection to go online.

Also, it could connect to an open WiFi without telling the user since it wouldn't need any input to enter credentials. It is becoming a lot harder to remain offline, at least with TVs.

> If your TV is connected to an already networked box via a HDMI cable, chances are that it won't need a WiFi connection to go online.

I’m skeptical of this. Why would my Apple TV cheerfully proxy my TV’s request to send packets to the Internet?

Why wouldn't it? Apple has a whole network of devices that relay data from other devices. Its not like you can even check the software running on their products.

Because it's an extra expense to support it with basically no value. The reason to give a TV a network connection would be to use the applications built into the TV... ones that you don't need if you're using an Apple TV.

And hell, I can't even find any evidence that there's TVs that support HEC.

The value comes from the value of selling ads and knowing everything about the product. In this case the viewer. Value prop for building the ability to still have insight into your product is there. It captures all the people who think they are clever by not connecting through WiFi and not understanding that it can be done over HDMI.

There's no value _to Apple_ (in this scenario) to building ethernet-over-HDMI to let your TV sell you ads, because Apple isn't seeing a cent of that.

Rumor has it that some devices will connect to other networks. I'm not sure this has been proven but it seems a bit hard to catch and it seems like a thing that could be done in the name of accessibility. I'd be interested if anyone has dumped firmware and looked to see if it does or doesn't happen.

Either way, not connecting your TV to wifi isn't an excuse for the behavior. Good for you, but that doesn't justify their actions or make anybody who is not up to date with what kind of spying happens any less of a victim. It shouldn't happen even if you are able to get around them. You should be able to use wifi AND not be spied on. Full stop.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210912135232/https://forum.dev...

I have seen it. I like to run an open wifi AP. The way I have it set up it sort of sucks, throttled about as low as I can get it, you could read HN on it but most websites are very unpleasant to use. Anyway, the point is, for the most part my only customer is my neighbors samsung tv sending some sort of click and navigation updates back to the mothership. Now I don't "know" that it wasn't attached to intentionally. but I suspect the tv was just happy to attach to anything it could find.

You ever think about asking your neighbor? Could also make an interesting blog post as I think there are a lot of people interested in this subject. It's also not that easy of a topic to Google. The results all focus on how to connect your TV to wifi rather than trying to find the specific issue. There's definitely HN interest in it

So you are knowingly helping Samsung spy on your neighbor. Have you thought about the ethics of what you are doing.

Anyway while I would not call the original accusation of the TV using any open WIFI automatically out of the question this experiment provides little evidence of that. It's hardly unthinkable that your neighbor or someone using their TV just clicked OK on some prompts to make them go away and thereby selecting the first network in the list. It's also not unthinkable that your neighbor wanted to use some functionality that requires an internet connection to setup and just didn't pay attention to the WIFI network selection.

I think Fire TVs may connect over Amazon Sidewalk to someone walking by your house. Samsung was caught sending screenshots of people's smart TVs, which could be being used as desktop monitors.

It’s called ACR, Samsung is very proud of it and sells it to whoever will buy it. They can tell what you’re watching even if it’s from a divx file on your SD card.

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