DNS lookups are redirected or blocked (53 redirected to my local DNS resolver, 853 blocked), and DoH is blocked as best effort though it's hard to block HTTP DNS traffic, which again is why the devices are blocked in the firewall.
All streaming is done via AppleTV, which is a platform I trust infinitely more than LG/Samsung/whatever.
It's a trade off I guess. I use Home Assistant to control TVs, so kinda need the access.
My guess is: not much.
Where is a web link indicating partnerships, and compatible hardware lists? My ISP does not sell any TV sets.
This seems far fetched to me. Have you seen evidence or reliable reporting of this?
Comcast sets up a secondary wifi network on their routers in your home that they use as the backhaul for smartphones. Why wouldn't they make a deal with LG or whoever to use that data? We've already established they'll do about a half-a-Stuxnet to get at this data, you're telling me they won't do a couple bulk deals with common ISPs?
5G connectivity is cheap. You can put a 5G modem in pretty much any device for $10 or less, and pay roughly $2/year in subscription fees. My local water utility with ~900 subscribers pays $2/year for 5G connectivity for water meters, and I have no doubt you can get it much cheaper at scale.
They don't even have to tell you about the 5G modem. It could exclusively be used for exfiltrating data about your viewing habits. It's virtually undetectable and more or less impossible to block. The TV could behave nice on the Wifi, you can block all the DNS servers you like, it would still be able to phone home.
You are asking for $20 increase in BOM, which means they somehow has to extract $20 from your private data, which is hard.
And if they're not expecting to make $20 over 10 years selling your data, it hardly seems worth risking your reputation over.
Why wouldn’t LG allow their devices to talk to each other locally, without needing to join a network? With private SSID or something like that? Only one appliance would need internet access.
This shit already exists. Like Amazon Sidewalk: https://ring.com/amazon-sidewalk
Now, I’m not saying LG is doing it, but this is not a far fetched technical concept. The only reason they’re potentially not going that far is because most people probably just connect it to the internet so why bother about the few who don’t.
The devices are already scanning the network for any devices and software they can find, and mapping your phone to your TV viewing habits for example. The LG execs are on record bragging about it. So I don’t see why it’s absurd
i think it would be significantly more far-fetched that cable companies don’t sell them access. i would be shocked if they didn’t.
The part about ISP routers broadcasting an alternate "hotspot" SSID is documented [1] and can be easily observed. Walk around any city, open your phone's wifi settings and see networks like "xfinitywifi" or "optimumwifi". As an end user, if you connect to one of these networks from your device, you'll get a captive portal web page that makes you sign in to your ISP account. Once signed in, you get internet access courtesy of the router sitting in whatever home or business you happen to be near to.
In addition to ISPs allowing their own subscribers access, there are examples of corporations cutting deals with ISPs for hotspot network access. For example, Google's MVNO Google Fi has a deal with unnamed partners that allows subscribers' phones to connect to hotspot wifi networks for extra coverage, branded "Wi-Fi Auto Connect+" [2].
From the user's perspective (and personal experience), this connection is handled seamlessly and outside of the OS' normal wifi UI flow. If your phone sees no saved wifi networks but does see xfinitywifi (et al), it auto-connects in the background. Authentication with the captive portal happens automatically and non-interactively, presumably with some keys provisioned to your device. Your traffic is VPNed back to Google, so the router and ISP don't see anything. The only indication that any of this happened is that the "5G" icon changes to "W+"; the normal WiFi icon never shows up.
In the case of Google Fi, this is actually a pretty great deal for users. You get better coverage (especially indoors in cities, where cell service can be spotty) with no real downsides to you – your traffic isn't meaningfully exposed to another third party, it doesn't cost you extra, and you don't have to bother the staff for a wifi password.
But given all that, it's not a huge leap to believe that ISPs are also more than willing to quietly take LG's money in exchange for an all-access pass to their hotspot network.
It's easy to imagine that an evil company could ship their TV with a key that allows it on an ISP's hotspot network. No extra suspicious hardware like a 5G modem needed, and no MAC address spoofing required. The TV software could easily connect to the hotspot network with zero indication in the UI, and then use the surreptitious connection only to transmit your kompromat back to HQ.
If done intelligently, you'd never notice. By only transmitting spy reports (and not downloading new ads), even a keen observer wouldn't notice any behavior on the TV that would trigger "how tf did this thing get a network connection?" Even more insidious, you couldn't really see what traffic was happening, since IP packet captures on your network are useless in this scenario. You'd need special hardware to capture what the TV is actually doing on the air.
If truly evil, the software could do this hotspot dance even if you've configured your own WiFi network on the TV. If the software finds it can't reach ad HQ because you've firewalled it off, then despite your best efforts to contain the disease, it still can spy effectively thanks to your neighbor's router with its default-enabled ISP hotspot. Just do a daily upload while you're sleeping and otherwise sit innocuously on your locked-down VLAN.
Everyone evil wins: ISP collects that sweet bonus revenue at zero marginal cost, TV manufacturer doesn't have to foot the hardware bill for millions of 5G modems or (relatively) expensive cellular agreements, and advertisers get to be that much more creepy targeting you. I'm sure the wanna-be despots of the world don't mind the spy apparatus being built for them either, conveniently under the control of easily-compelled corporations.
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Now to be clear, I have no proof that any TV manufacturer is surreptitiously connecting to an ISP's hotspot network in order to exfiltrate your data. But all of the building blocks to make that happen provably do exist, and I seriously doubt that capitalism will allow them to go unused.
It's anything but far-fetched.
[1] eg https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/xfinity-wifi-hotspo... and https://www.spectrum.net/support/internet/spectrum-mobile-wi... and https://www.optimum.net/pages/internet/hotspots/faq.html
[2] https://fi.google.com/about/wi-fi-auto-connect-plus and https://support.google.com/fi/answer/10091529?hl=en
They gave every assurance that it would be secure, completely separate from the users own network, and the bandwidth consumed would be added on top of whatever the user had a contract for.
It took a couple of days after launch before somebody managed to gain access to someone's private network from the public network and they shut it down again and never opened it again.
Anyway, I may be spoiled from living in Denmark, but I'm using my own router, which is an option when ordering, so I'm fairly certain nobody is sharing additional wifi hotspots.
And it's not just me. The majority of people I know use some kind of 3rd party router with their ISP. Granted, some of them just use whatever the ISP sends them, but even then I haven't ever seen any additional wifi networks, and the ISP prints the router admin password on the box itself, so you can poke around if you like (though the ISP has a backdoor, which is also why 3rd party routers are a thing).
I could see a threat if the TV had access to the internet and could establish a TLS tunnel or similar from the mothership, and execute commands on my LAN (or IoT network as it stands), and report back. That could establish a command & control channel that could potentially orchestrate an attack on my infrastructure via the TV.
However, reporting that "network X exists and has these devices" over a different network complicates things a fair bit. In theory they could still use the TV as a command and control platform, but it would have to switch networks between my closed network and the open network in order to execute commands and report results. Not saying it's impossible, just very unlikely.
Besides, the TVs are not alone in being cut off from the internet. I have two IoT networks, one for trusted devices (AppleTVs, Sonos, and the likes), and one for untrusted devices like TVs. They run on different VLANs, and anything on the untrusted IoT network can pretty much only talk to itself (client isolation) and the gateway, and there's no internet and no open ports to any other VLAN.
Uploading the weeks, months, or years of locally-stored activity [0] data? Text compresses really well and local storage used to be very cheap.
[0] ...mic voice transcription, how often you use the thing, for how long, and a best guess (because of lack of time sync) at when, "automated content detection" logs [1], names of files you've fed to the thing, -if equipped with a camera- number of people in the room and interesting information about them, etc, etc, etc...
[1] ...assuming that that can be done with data loaded from the factory, which I kinda doubt...
1) What I called "automated content detection" is apparently called "automated content recognition", abbreviated as "ACR".
2) That weeks, months, or years of locally-stored activity I mentioned can also contain historical ACR records. Given that the audio and video of what's being displayed on the screen is "fingerprinted", those fingerprints can be saved just like everything else picked up by the "TV" and uploaded whenever the thing next has Internet connectivity. The "TV" manufacturer will lose the "what are they doing right now?" aspect of the feature, but the "what have they been doing?" aspect of the feature will work just fine.
Directly related is this section of this Gamers Nexus investigation, but the entire video seems to be worth watching if you're not rather familiar with the topic: <https://youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA&t=26m47s>
1. Do not connect to network 2. Create unauthenticated WiFi network 3. Monitor WiFi network
Strange no one has ever done this simple af test to backup their claims
It's much easier to just throw a $10 5G modem in there, pay the $2/year subscription fee for service, and extract data that way. Assuming a 5-10 year relevant lifespan of the TV, they'd throw $20-$30 on top of the sales price for the modem and 10 years of service.
The 5G modem could run completely independent of the wifi network, be a completely different circuit, and you'd never know it was there.
even the ones that aren’t yet, we’d be incredibly incredibly naive to think it’s not on their radar.
The linked image shows a module meant for easy integration, but it could also simply be a part of the main board of the TV. They could "hide" the GSM antenna alongside the wifi antenna.
Soon you won't be able to IoT network or block these devices as they begin to partner with Amazon and the likes that sell Internet for near-by IoT devices. Then your only option then is physically removing / de soldering radios from the board.
Laws needed, like yesterday.
Assuming they install some 5G modem in the device, which is pretty much dirt cheap these days (our local water utility uses 5G for meter readings, and the cost per meter is something like $1/year), there's literally nothing short of a faraday cage you can do.
The can report on what you watch freely, and only consumer laws can stop them. However, without a wifi connection they can't snoop on your local network, and they probably can't connect the data to you, assuming you don't register the TV for those 3 months of added warranty or whatever they try to get you to register.
I tend to avoid devices that are built to snoop on you, so no Amazon Alexa, no Google Home, no Apple HomePod. Everything I have utilizes local control via Home Assistant, and most of it is actively blocked in the firewall from accessing the internet. It's not hard to implement, and doesn't require a master of IT, but it does remove a lot of the convenience, which I guess is the reason people don't do it.
> My TVs are on the IoT network so that I can control them from Home Assistant, but they're blocked from accessing the internet. NS lookups are redirected or blocked (53 redirected to my local DNS resolver, 853 blocked),[...]
Unfortunately, from LG's surveillance capitalism point of view, the 0.001% of LG owners that can even think about doing that isn't even a drop in the bucket. They don't care about any one individual, and the vast majority of individuals don't care or understand what LG is doing as long as they can watch TV.
It's only a matter of time before another Cambridge Analytica situation pops up, except with better tools and vastly more data. Or maybe something we can't even imagine yet enabled by simply re-purposing ad-tech into something political and malevolent? Some people will be wise to it, of course, but if enough are caught up in it, it won't matter, we all lose as a whole.
I could possibly do it via HDMI CEC, but I have a couple of Sony Bravia TVs that more often than not completely ignores that, so I prefer having control over assuming it happens.
I believe LG doesn’t advertise such an api via Bluetooth
One could build a IR emitter but you need soldering skills for that or buy a usb one which cost north of 30€ + shipping.