How I Discovered My Smart TV Was Spying On Me
Proceeds to never explain how.
When I Noticed My Smart TV Was Spying on Me
Proceeds to never say when this happened…
Can we get an article that isn’t vapor clickbait maybe?
I will summarise my experience.
When I bought an LG Oled C5 TV and started it up I read the EULA and privacy agreements, there were five of them for some reason. I declined all except for the first.
Buried in the fourth agreement are details of screenshot capture of content being watched, of photos of viewers, facial recognition for age and demographic identification and voice recording of key words for advertising purposes.
So my LG TV doesn’t get internet access.
That’s sucks and all mate, dunno if it has anything to do with what I said though :x
My issue is the entire posted article appears to just be AI generated nothing-script.
It has headlines that have nothing to do with the content.
I also have started to notice gippity content has certain patterns it always follows, especially it’s last few sentences seem to always be very “In summary…” style.
When I see content written like this so poorly I just assume now it’s AI generated garbage.
I carefully declined everything, and disabled automatic updates. Then I updated manually, and the update auto-enabled everything I declined.
So I factory reset the TV and didn’t connect it to the Internet again.
These criminals should be in prison.
No.
They can even use non-streaming protocols, such as HDMI, to send data back to the manufacturer or share it with advertisers.
[citation needed]
HDMI has an Ethernet channel builtin to it. This was designed along with the audio return channel and the remote channel to make it so you only need one cable between your smart devices.
Its lovely really, other than the privacy concerns. USB-c takes it one step further and let’s you power devices over the data cable. So you might really only need one cable to link all your devices.
I’ve been worried about the data over HDMI standard for a while, but I don’t think many devices implement it. At some point there probably should be a revision to the standards (if there isn’t one already) to require pairing permissions in the next version. Otherwise manufacturers will eventually start using this back channel to spy on customers, even when you don’t enable WiFi on the television.
“Eventually” doing a lot of work to correct the quote above.
That said, I don’t know what the quote means, since it’s dumbing this down for normies to the point of meaninglessness. I’m not sure if it’s claiming that it can run automatic content recognition of the stuff you send to it over HDMI or some other arcane way to share data with homebase over HDMI.
Given that the first thing is a thing and the second is not, to my knowledge, I’m going to assume it means the former, but it’s really muddy writing.
Ouch! TIL “HEC.” Presumably the device you connect to needs to proxy that channel. My LG TV keeps saying it needs an internet connection to access any of its smart features, so I guess my Apple TV doesn’t do that (or my TV is sneakier than I’d like to believe).
Thanks, good to know.
My LG TV even asks me for permission to do so. But at least it’s asking me. 🤷♂️
To them it’s High Definition Media Internet
Why would you connect it to the Internet, dumbass?
Ostensibly, that’s what it’s for.
Of course, the online features are bait on the hook.
If you had read the article, you’d know that they only used it for inputs, not its “smart” features.
Another person just answering your question lol.
Did you mean to ask a different question, maybe? You seem like you’re even replying about something unrelated to your question…
Read the damn article, buddy.
To watch content?
You don’t need the tv to be online for that. The tv should (and can) just work as a monitor, which you plug into your own computer. Then the tv remains dumb and unable to spy on you.
I don’t need it to be online for that, no. But it sure is a lot more comfortable to control via the remote, and cleaner without a whole damn PC nearby. Of course, you could put in a lot of effort to hide the PC far away and somehow control it from far away, but… [Connect to WiFi] is right there for most people. 👍
Yes, and that’s how the author said they used it.
I mean… sure.
Then it’s your computer spying on you.
I hear this advice a lot, with no nuance. Replacing your TV’s built-in “smart” features by a dongle from Google, Amazon or Apple does zero things for your privacy. If you’re using a set-top box THAT is doing the spying as well. If you are using streaming services from a PC media server, guess what?
Unfortunately limiting the spying is a bit more complicated than that and takes a lot more work than just not setting things up.
Admittedly, you will see less intrusive spying from your other spyware devices. TVs these days are insanely up front with their UI and especially in regions where they need authorization for some of that stuff they just keep prodding you about it. You may want to move the spyware elsewhere just for convenience. Just be aware of what those are actually doing if you have no other tools to block it.
If you had read the article, you’d know that they only used it for inputs, not its “smart” features.
I know, my TV asked me for permission to do the same, which I denied.
But you asked why anyone would connect their TV to the internet, yes? We do it to watch content via the internet, using the TV. 🤷♂️
I only gave you an answer to your question.
No, the comment was clearly directed at the author. Why would I call everyone, collectively, a singular dumbass?
And why would you not answer the question in the context of the article?
