A hacker reverse-engineered his own Samsung TV and found alarming spying activity, including code that used connected devices’ microphones to listen to users.
It there any TV brand that we can still buy?
I’m not really sure how I will be able to setup TV or something that allows watching TV at this point.
You can use androidtv with adb and universal android debloater next gen to get rid of telemetry. Hisense is a decent choice. It’s also possible to completely uninstall launchers with ads and replace them with flauncher which loads almost instantly
1996: cameras, microphones, radios, in your appliances? You’re schizophrenic
2026: removing the cameras, microphones, and radios from the appliances we use to spy on you is illegal.
It is very irritating that ppl just accepted that. It wasn’t forced on us by law. We just… bought the stuff. It was so shiny! Now we have a mass surveilance apparatus that would make the Stasi blush.
Lots of us saw the terrible potential. But way more of us didn’t.
It was genius. Instead of installing surveillance systems in everyone’s homes, they marketed the surveillance systems as luxury products and let our consumerism do the work. Instead of forcing it on the general public, they made us want it to the point where they can cite consumer demand as the reason they don’t even offer products that don’t invade your privacy.
Even more genius than that, they understand that they don’t need everyone’s cooperation. For example, you only need enough people buying certain doorbells, and you’ve effectively achieved full coverage of even those that don’t consent to mass surveillance. The remainder then gets effectively treated as a second class citizen, because now you can’t participate in society without being forced to concede. It’s a disgusting advantage.
Someone who was 55 in 1996 lived through an era where you could start a new life by moving a part of the way across a state in the US and nobody would think to research, or it wasn’t uncommon for people to have two whole families that never knew about each other (bigamy). Who cares about security cameras because nobody has time to look through all the footage? Who cares what you got up to in your 20s1 when you’ve got a family and a job in town?
Then storage got cheap enough to store it all, and computers got fast enough to look through it all (but there’s still no time to figure out who egged your car over a weekend). All those old people don’t have to live in the world they built, either, AND the world is built so it can’t be undone. All that data will always have value to someone, and storage is only ever going to get cheaper in the long term.
[1] Old busybodies need to get off their high horse judging people. Data miners are already working their way backwards looking for something of value, and if you spent a nine month summer in Europe sometime in the late 50s then it’ll eventually come it if someone bothers to look.
Dang, I want to upgrade my TV for christmas, and was thinking of a nice 65" OLED Samsung, as the “hospitality” TVs of the same size with OLED are like twice the price. I don’t have open WIFI, I use a computer and just the TV as a display, I thought I’d be OK. But I have a soundbar as well, so it’ll be listening to me regardless? Jesus fucking christ. The future we’ve built is terrible.
Never connect your proprietary appliances to the internet. A TV is just a display, use another device to manage what it displays.
Is there any reason to think separate steaming boxes behave better?
I am pretty sure my Debian box that runs Kodi has fewer trackers than my TV.
I’m sure your experience using a remote to watch various streaming services and cable tv and pirated shows is all just totally simple and just works and the average person wouldn’t have an issue using it though, right? This is the crux of the issue.
Everyone has access to a wireless keyboard, most devices give you a code to input to pair, no passwords. It’s easier than you think putting kodi on a firestick. I haven’t done it in a few years, but my Plex works great and it’s cathartic building my own library. Stremio is my backup and isnt any harder than navigating netflix.
Chill Winston.
New firesticks run a proprietary OS, no longer Android :(
Actually yes. Requested through Seerr, added automatically to Jellyfin, streamed to the Kodi box. Simpler interface than Netflix. Setting it up is though not simple, but if a toddler has learned to use the TV remote they’d be able to use it. And there’s about 30TB of content already so Seerr is rarely needed.
For context I’m spreads doing this I run Plex and jellyfin in tandem, but many times I’d rather not host the content if it’s already on my streaming services. Good luck having a good experience with those on these types of setups. That’s my gripe.
My kodi box, running librelec not debian, works with a remote and is just as easy to use as a Roku or whatever. Kids, old people, and all ages in between have used it with zero coaching.
I’ve done it, what am I missing? What remote are you using? How are you watching Netflix and Disney+ with that setup?
And also do your best to not live near unsecured wifi.
Just because you didn’t explicitly connect it…
RIP anybody in a NYC or Tokyo high rise with a few thousand neighbors in wifi range.
Or anyone that gets deliveries. Some vehicles have open wifi networks.
These events need to be crimes.
join the political pressure for it to be so
Not like that, OpenAI!
Samsung has been banned from my house.
How do you use ai to record audio? I mean, recording audio is just procedural code. You can use ai to process the recording, of course.
That’s Apple’s (Watch 18) newest semantic shenanigans to get around privacy laws, and it’s being echoed by Amazon (Bee) and now Samsung, apparently. They argue that, if local AI processes an audio input stream, produces a transcript and does not store the audio as a file, that does not constitute a “recording”. I’m looking forward to the look on the judge’s face once this bullshit reasoning inevitably reaches their court…
I kind of need a tutorial how to use a samsung (or whatever brand) smart tv without them tracking us like that - but with still being able to stream netflix and stuff, I just wanna have both, streaming & privacy 😭
I’m sorry to break it to you but streaming services and privacy don’t mix. Your best bet is to sail the high seas.
Yup, ‘smart’ TVs should never get a live internet connection, ever. Don’t give it a WIFI password, if you have made that mistake change the password now. Attach a computer, preferably Linux, and use it as a monitor. Even if you then go ahead and use a streaming service (boo), at least you’re not just giving audio/video of your living room to Samsung as well.
I have an antenna for local tv and if there’s a movie I want to watch I load it onto a USB stick and plug it into the side of the TV.
This right here!
Ever read the ToS of a streaming service in detail? Even if you subscribe to the premium ad free plan you agree to let them profile your habits and sell those to others for advertising purposes, etc.
A service remembering how I used it is not the same problem as its app spying on my living room.
Completely false. I stream without problems, while still retaining all my privacy. (I stream from my friends jellyfin servers)
How did you get rid of the content recognition?
I have some rules in my firewall! Everything is blocked! Only github and my friends domains are let through! Github because i use obtainium.
By using either streamio or jellyfin
Disconnect your TV from the internet and use a streaming stick. AppleTV is the least evil among the commercial ones. So you still have the normal streaming experience without the TV spying on you. However, as others have mentioned, these TVs are so bad that they try to find nearby unsecured wifi to transmit your data. So unless your immediate neighbors all have password protected wifi, and no one with an open hotspot gets in range, there’s still a chance.
All of the ACR “features” and the audio capture features are behind separate, optional EULAs that the TV will work fine without. The GN video about LG was behavior if you agree to every EULA as well. You can add on a pi-hole and a smart tv blocklist for added protection, e.g., https://github.com/hkamran80/blocklists/blob/main/smart-tv.txt
It’s very easy to setup Wireshark and capture the traffic coming off your devices as well if you want to be sure.
a region-specific convolutional neural network (an AI)
That parenthetical annoys the hell out of me.
