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Comment by hermitdev | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to be dismissive, but isn't this old news? Hasn't it been the case that _all_ "smart" TVs have been spying on users since they came out? I've personally operated as if they are: my TV is not connected to the internet. At least, not through my internet connection. It's not on my wifi, nor is it connected to my LAN.

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We knew they were reporting back our watching habits of the built-in stuff. Then we learned they were doing video capture on HDMI ports to report back on what we watched on external sources (Xbox, Apple TV, etc). Then we learned that they did botnet-like stuff in the background even when they were switched off.

NOW we're learning that they're spying with their internal microphone when switched off.

A real problem is that you might not even need to give these internet access. If your neighbor gives their TV internet access and it can establish a mesh connection then it might be able to exfiltrate data that way. I don't know of any TVs that do this, but it's always been a possibility.

Another possibility is even if you don't give it access to your wifi, if you eventually give your TV away or sell it, the new user could connect it to wifi and if it has any persistent storage then it could upload all of its stored data about you at that point.

Companies that do this need to end their entire brand, because they're just helping the CCP.

> A real problem is that you might not even need to give these internet access. If your neighbor gives their TV internet access and it can establish a mesh connection then it might be able to exfiltrate data that way.

No TV has ever been shown to do this. Please stop spreading this rumor.

I didn't say a TV had been, if you read. I will absolutely not stop spreading the possibility, because it is in fact a possibility. This is more true now than it has ever been, because even if a manufacturer doesn't do this we're now in a world where AI could potentially exploit devices and make hops like this. The risk is higher in areas with higher population density though, like multi-story apartments.

We know that device connection sharing is a thing that has occurred and it's not unreasonable to see the risk of it coming to TVs.

Why, do you work for a TV company?

Partly it annoys me because the answer to the question "how do I protect myself?" is simply "don't connect it to wifi" and that's it. These rumors make it all complicated to answer when it's really not that deep. This isn't deep NSA spy craft, it's shitty software uploading logs and half-assed data collection to the Internet. That's it.

But if I'm honest, it's mostly because I'm disappointed that they don't do this. It'd be a fascinating story. Imagine the braindead balls it'd take to make a feature that insanely abusive, and how good the outrage out it would be to read. That'd be a killer story for someone to break, it'd be like the xz backdoor or the Snowden NSA leaks. Instead we get these dumb "Mew under a truck"-quality grade school rumors in comments sections and it's just so stupid and disappointing.

(And honestly-honestly a tiny part of it is trying to goad one of these commenters into actually doing the work to find someone who really is doing this, so I can read that story.)

The story is both a little overblown and a little underblown, just different parts of it. More people need to be thinking about the feature level of devices and understand that "off" doesn't really mean it most of the time. Does the TV need a camera? Does it really need a microphone? Does it need to be smart at all? The matter of whether it is abused is increasingly less important than whether it can be abused. There have been all kinds of clever abuses we've been lucky not to see over the past 3 decades, but I'm afraid that relative quiet may be over.

I still don't understand why there wasn't an absolute outrage about internet providers putting their own routers inside your network and blocking other routers by default unless you call them. Suddenly all these providers have managed hardware inside your network and if they wanted to, they could scoop up all of the LAN traffic.

On top of that, some of them even portion out wireless to people outside your network from the router you're paying for while increasing attack surface.

The big tech companies, the providers, the government and foreign adversaries are winning bigtime. It does feel like there's a little bit of hope that people are wising up about AI exploding privacy and security risks, so more people are thinking about the dumbest things which have become the norms.

The guy can't read, he only knows how to keep saying "there's no evidence TVs do this" over and over, even when you already said there wasn't evidence yet.

This is straight up dystopian level spying. Streaming microphone inputs all the time, knowing everything that is displayed on the screens via object recognition and stuff. Scraping your local network. If I’m not mistaken there is the possibility for the tv to connect to public/open networks to send this stuff without you knowing. Magically syncing with your phone. It’s truly terrible, and a class action is all but guaranteed to come. Gamers nexus has a great video on this.

This is a known feature that is not hidden which is not automatically turned on by default.

You must set your TV to a different standby mode and enable LG voice control.

When you do this, it very plainly tells you that it can listen with the screen off so you can control the TV with voice.

Failure of User Awareness, not some nefarious spyware.

No, you're not up to date with the latest news. There's a separate feature that records you all the time, transcribes it to text and uses it to select ads for you

Do you have a source for this claim?

The gamer's nexus investigation

That is exactly what I am claiming is false. Later LG even came out with their own statement saying basically the same thing I did.

What is this separate feature you claim that is not the same as the one I refer to?

> If I’m not mistaken there is the possibility for the tv to connect to public/open networks to send this stuff without you knowing.

No, there is no evidence that any TV has ever done this. Please stop spreading this rumor.

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