421–430 of 1001 posts
Nothing gets connected to wifi. If temporary connection is required it gets a random one time use guest network SSID and pass that I remove after. (Yes they can collect and send setup metadata during this temporary access period but sometimes it is a worthwhile tradeoff)
I've bought an LG Smart TV 5 years ago, read t&c where I was supposed to grant them any data they wanted, decided to disagree and kept all network functions disabled. I was ridiculed by my friends for that. At some point, I thought - maybe I'm really crazy to do so? Who am I, a caveman, a luddite? Oh well, I'm not. Not a bad tv though, many HDMI ports!
The sad part about the privacy discourse is that people not only don't care, but they would argue for the invading party. And I am not talking about your average teenager looking for their next brainrot fix, but highly educated and extremely intellegent people!
I've long since gave up trying to talk to people about these issues. Which unfortunately means I'll surrender to exposing myself to this plague to some degree, considering how herd immunity principles apply here as well.
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Why not just disconnect it from internet?
Works til they put a 5g modem in the damn things. My Samsung asked for internet access and I just laughed and said nope. It exists to displays pixels from a Linux box, utterly sick of living in a world where "is my TV manufacturer bugging our house?" Is a thing anyone has to ask.
If you're not using the defining feature of a TV (the OTA tuner), why not buy a monitor instead of a TV?
(Next time I have to replace our house's TV, I'm seriously considering buying a separate SBTVD tuner and a monitor instead of a TV, if ignoring the "smart" features of these TVs by not connecting them to a network starts getting too difficult.)
Modems becoming super cheap is gonna be a big problem for this, because those make it even harder to prevent such snooping. Just imagine having to jam the devices in your own home just to stop them from profiling you. Better pray to your deer god that modem + data contract is gonna stay more expensive that the expected value from selling more data... We really need regulation to stop this.
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And what exactly would they use that particular access path for ? 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 "…
> And what exactly would they use that particular access path for ? 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 thi…
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>
Understood: never buy LG devices again.
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Watch the video the article is based on - not connecting to the internet doesn't keep you safe in many cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA
"Watch this two hour long video" is not a particularly useful reply. If you think the TV can exfiltrate your data without an internet connection then you should be able to explain how it could do that in your own words.
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Why not just disconnect it from internet?
Works til they put a 5g modem in the damn things. My Samsung asked for internet access and I just laughed and said nope. It exists to displays pixels from a Linux box, utterly sick of living in a world where "is my TV manufacturer bugging our house?" Is a thing anyone has to ask.
Okay, but it does work until then. "Things could change in the future" is definitionally true.
Never connect the TV in the first place, and you don't need to physically alter the hardware, firmware, or TOS agreements.
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newspapers didn't follow you and your friends everywhere you went to feed all your metadata back into an addiction algorithm people massively underestimate how insidious having millions of data points about a person is, these companies are literally modeling your behavior
I strongly believe the worst vices of social media would all persist if there were zero advertising. You can see that by looking at more minor or fringe social media sites. Public "liking" is literally all it takes for people to degenerate into performativeness, sensationalism, grandstanding, misinformation, etc.
To associate contextual advertising based on large scale demographics and location with spying, lying, cheating and thieving at an individual level, is a great example of this in real life.
In the old days, the tabloids were obvious. The sensationalism was easy to identify and passive in its voice. They sat on the end caps of grocery stores, far away from the News. TV news was regulated and there was a strict ethics code in place. Today, all news is tabloid as they all chase attention. They have all become the Weekly World News and as a result, we have clowns and ignoramuses running things.
And people fell for it. They actually fell for it...and continue to fall for it.
That is why it's a cancer. Ad tech eats everything in its path and destroys everything good in the process.
When you cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction, you have lost the plot.
Okay. This is insane. First the monitor that uses a windows feature to automatically install a small helper tool with root permissions and then starts showing adds in certain regions. Now a tv that is actually actively snooping around on top of the known fingerprinting. What else is next? In the previous topic I got ridiculed for not wanting to buy LG anymore because I could use an agent to modify to strip out the of…
I would like to send vast amounts of garbage data to the LG servers. They aren’t being respectful of our bandwidth and data, we don’t need to be respectful of theirs. This also applies incentives in the correct direction. Their database of customer information becomes less valuable if there’s bad information in it. Disconnecting your TV from the internet doesn’t affect LG, feeding them bad data does.