By Jeremy Hsu on September 24, 2024
Popular smart TV models made by Samsung and LG can take multiple snapshots of what you are watching every second – even when they are being used as external displays for your laptop or video game console.
Smart TV manufacturers use these frequent screenshots, as well as audio recordings, in their automatic content recognition systems, which track viewing habits in order to target people with specific advertising. But researchers showed this tracking by some of the world’s most popular smart TV brands – Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG TVs every 10 milliseconds – can occur when people least expect it.
“When a user connects their laptop via HDMI just to browse stuff on their laptop on a bigger screen by using the TV as a ‘dumb’ display, they are unsuspecting of their activity being screenshotted,” says Yash Vekaria at the University of California, Davis. Samsung and LG did not respond to a request for comment.
Vekaria and his colleagues connected smart TVs from Samsung and LG to their own computer server. Their server, which was equipped with software for analysing network traffic, acted as a middleman to see what visual snapshots or audio data the TVs were uploading.
They found the smart TVs did not appear to upload any screenshots or audio data when streaming from Netflix or other third-party apps, mirroring YouTube content streamed on a separate phone or laptop or when sitting idle. But the smart TVs did upload snapshots when showing broadcasts from the TV antenna or content from an HDMI-connected device.
The researchers also discovered country-specific differences when users streamed the free ad-supported TV channel provided by Samsung or LG platforms. Such user activities were uploaded when the TV was operating in the US but not in the UK.
By recording user activity even when it’s coming from connected laptops, smart TVs might capture sensitive data, says Vekaria. For example, it might record if people are browsing for baby products or other personal items.
Customers can opt out of such tracking for Samsung and LG TVs. But the process requires customers to either enable or disable between six and 11 different options in the TV settings.
“This is the sort of privacy-intrusive technology that should require people to opt into sharing their data with clear language explaining exactly what they’re agreeing to, not baked into initial setup agreements that people tend to speed through,” says Thorin Klosowski at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy non-profit based in California.
LOL “if it was opt-in, no one would do it!”
no fucking shit. there is nothing worth watching that i would buy a smart tv for
One issue that has come up recently in discussions on here is that it’s hard to get dumb TVs or computer monitors in large format in 2024.
Not impossible, but surprisingly difficult. I went looking for a large computer monitor for some user who wanted a large one. I eventually found an older one on Amazon still for sale, but it’s not that easy to get large computer monitors, which I think is part of what drives people to use smart TVs as computer monitors.
You can get projectors, but that’s not what everyone’s after.
A smart tv without an internet connection is usually close enough to a dumb TV. It’s not like your TV needs regular security updates so leaving it off your home network is fine.
I do not know how true it is, but I’ve heard that some of them will create a mesh network if your neighbor has the same brand and it’s connected to the internet.
I’ve always meant to look into it but I have big dumb TVs that work for now.
Would love to know how true this is as I wouldn’t put it past manufacturers
There’s another reply further down that goes into specifics. I ain’t the one because I didn’t come with receipts and I’m just a drunk.
It’s called wardriving, a practise Samsung TVs are infamous for.
I never put that together with wardriving but that’s exactly what it is. Thank you for that.
Unrelated story: ~20 years ago I was in the military and broke as hell. I went wardriving in my neighborhood looking for open wifi and found a business not too far away that had it. So I built an antenna out of a coffee can, mounted it up just outside my window, and got free wifi for months.
I will not give them the satisfaction.
Smart TVs are only smart when they are connected to the internet.
As mentioned by others, they sometimes network with nearby devices such as your neigbor’s TV or an unsecured wifi.
if it was opt-in, no one would do it!
Which should be telling them that not only does no one want it, but maybe just maybe we already paid for your fucking TV. Either raise the price or stop being so fucking goddamn greedy to the point that you force us to make the government force you to stop.
Of course the bought and paid for US government won’t, but hopefully EU governments will.
If they raise the price, then they only get money once. If they sell your data, now they have an income stream.
These are criminal violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Jail the motherfucking felon CEOs!
So LG and Samsung likely have tons of illegal (copyright) content on their servers then? Ownership is 9/10ths of the law so they say. That’s gotta be exabytes
Most likely yes… And other privacy sensitive information like banking details, passwords and more.
awful ethics aside what a disgusting waste of processing power. software already barely runs
now you know why
Screenshotting every 500ms is insane.
TVs I’ve come across are such displeasure to use, it’s incredible
Would be nice if we could have some technological privacy laws written in this century.
We need all the boomers in Capitol Senior Care Home to vacate first
You have it backwards. You have to EVICT them.
Until then just desolder the antennas good luck sending data with no way to connect to the internet.
For example, it might record if people are browsing for baby products or other personal items.
Don’t mind baby products and dildos or whatever.
They could see bank activity and even login credentials when someone is temporarily displaying their own passwords.
This basically ignores all security measures regarding everything. Sensitive communication, company secrets and so on.
That’s fucking seriously huge. What the fuck?!
Right? But we’ve been convinced the Chinese government spying on us through Huawei is a problem.
Every major tech major brands and business, even cars like BMW and now also TVs like Samsung or LG are all spying on their customers. And why isn’t this forbidden by lawn already?
even if it was forbidden by lawn, most people with smart TVs keep them inside the house.
And why isn’t this forbidden by lawn already?
Money & Corruption, the movie.
They are. They just aren’t the only one.
And what are we doing about the others?
They’re both problems.
Yes but one is treated differently
Because that’s a chinese corporation making money.
It’s fine when a US one does it
I know right!?? I connected my htpc to my Samsung tv. Omg!
But it’s not sending images. It’s content recognition, so it can tell you’re on a bank site but not decipher your password if it showed briefly
.
Like content recognition can’t recognize text, if that’s what it’s been configured to look for?
Actual paper here.
https://arxiv.org/html/2409.06203v1
It is not sending full screenshots as anybody technical would already have guessed. It’s a few KB over an hour, so it’s content recognition hashes.
Opt out anyway. Their study shows the opt out option does indeed opt you out of it.
You hear that? It’s a whisper… It’s a multinational multibillion dollar class action lawsuit coming after Samsung and LG. WTF!
Okay. So how do we turn it off!? I’ve read nothing in my Samsung manuals about this “feature” and here no instructions for turning it off.
Just don’t hook it up to your wifi. Don’t use any of its included apps. If you must stream get a separate device to do it.
This is the correct answer. I actually disabled LG’s version of it when I first heard about it. A few months later it had been reactivated in an update, so I just factory reset it and connected an old laptop.
You can’t trust anyone — corporation or government — to protect or respect your privacy. Ever. If it’s not open source and E2EE, assume that a criminal is going to view and process it for profit.
No it is not the correct answer! The correct answer is to put the CEOs who perpetrate this criminal shit in prison for millions of counts of hacking and stalking!
Merely shrugging and implementing a technological workaround is not an appropriate response to someone perpetrating a felony against you!
Okay… Though I agree the system is run by criminals, I’m gonna continue protecting my data as best I can, and recommending everyone do the same, while you live in a magical fantasy land where we don’t live in capitalist plutocracies and the rule of law applies to everyone, equally!
The downvotes are because your “solution” is not based in the reality that the rest of us live in.
There are no downvotes, so I’m not sure what point you think you’re making.
I have a Samsung smart TV that is not connected to any networks, and every few days it will display a ‘detecting device’ loading screen when switching to my input that fails after 30 seconds or until I cancel it (canceling does not seem to impact its functioning)
I have no evidence but I strongly suspect this to be related to attempting to record and send device data to a remote server.
I have noticed this too, I have to press the ‘back’ button on the remote to get the computer output.
Question, what separate device is best and most privacy focused? I just imagine getting a firestick, google Chromecast, etc would also give away data?
There are some open-source systems for media PCs.
Kodi seems to me to be popular, though I don’t use a media PC myself.
You’ll need to have the technical knowledge to install it yourself.
Again your media PC (or HTPC) is still connected to a smart TV. And the problem is with the TV recording HDMI data. In fact, if you read correctly, the Smart TV does no record data from the built-in apps like Netflix.
It still can connect to untrusted wifi access point (without password protection). So also try to go to: Settings Menu -> General & Privacy -> Terms & Privacy -> And there is a whole list of privacy setting. Try to find the option to: Do not agree with all. Or you need to manually disallow each privacy option… Good luck!
No Internet for the device
They have been known to connect automatically to nearby compatible devices or unsecured wifi.
Use Pi-hole and block their domains
They’re getting smart to that and are starting to hard code server IPs, circumventing any DNS you have in place.
Joke’s on them. Their telemetry server is in another
castleVLAN.TV: mamma mia!
Do you know where I can source the domains?
https://blocklistproject.github.io/Lists/ the Smart TV list under their beta lists.
I use nextdns on my network and there’s a filter there for smart tvs. Samsung seems to want to call home the most.
Pihole will log DNS requests. The requests come.from the TV. So when it pops up, Block it.
Disable internet.
You’ll have to insulate your home from any outside unsecured wifi and compatible devices to stop some of them from networking.
Since it can also connect to untrusted wifi access point (eg. without password). You need to live in a Faraday cage …
You know that part of the manual that tells you to connect the TV to the Internet?
Don’t do that.
That sadly doesn’t work well enough. They will connect to things on their own.
I got an LG because despite how it looks, you can just refuse to agree to a bunch of their privacy agreements and be fine. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than it would be otherwise, and miles ahead of Samsung’s lack of options.
I have come to realize this and have declined all the T&Cs except for like 3 that you just have to accept to make it function.
Yep, same. Works fine for me, I never wanted the features that disables.
I love my Samsung because I never gave it the wifi credentials.
Dumb TV is better. My PS5 can do everything I want and I already give all my metrics to them just playing it
Hello 8th person I’ve had to explain this to: they still connect to stuff. Even if you disable WiFi on the Samsung TV they can mesh network with other TVs in your neighborhood or with your phone (Samsung is particularly pushy about wanting you to install and connect your phone).
Ok I’ll look into this. I have not witnessed any evidence of this behavior. What frequency would this be meshed on? Any 2.4GHz and 5Ghz I would have already seen.
If there are open wifi networks near your TV that you can’t lockdown, you’ll want to confirm it your make/model is known to automatically connect to those, and then take whatever mitigation steps are justified for your own use case.
For example, if you have multiple TVs, maybe you can swap models around based on their capabilities and location, or look up the schematic for the TV and see if it’s easy to block it’s internal antennas.
Or maybe that seems like too much of a hassle and you just say fuck it, and don’t worry about it. Which is always an option, because given how much data already gets sucked up by surveillance capitalism, my evening TV viewing habits have to be some of the lowest value data points, as I already block ads and avoid all ad supported services.
Its real tricky to get into and overwrite some of the SoC processors and ARM chipsets, but pretty earlyon the hacker crowd was turning Samsungs Smart TVs dumb.
They’ve acrually got some great resistance to screen burn.
You can go to Settings Menu -> General & Privacy -> Terms & Privacy -> And there is a whole list of privacy setting you automatically agreed with (which you didn’t). However, you should find an option for: Do not agree with all. Or you need to manually disallow each privacy option… Good luck!
Okay. So how do we turn it off!?
This is probably not the reply you want, but as someone who (in the past 40+ years) has never owned a TV, I simply can’t refrain from asking: Have you considered simply not owning a TV?
“I keep overcooking my steak, any advice?”
“I haven’t had meat in 40 years, have you considered simply going vegetarian?”
Edit: FYI the key to cooking a good steak is salt, butter, and to flip it every 30 secs, until you’ve reached your preferred level of doneness. If you’re really trying to impress, and don’t care about a heart attack, you can also baste with butter in between each flip.
Now, learning how much time it takes for each different type of cut and the variations within, that mostly comes with experience.
Movies and television shows can be an excellent form of entertainment and a great source of educational materials. And this is the golden age of television. Sorry you’ve been missing out on that
THIS is piracy. Along with all the other personal data selling.
Yeah. My Samsung claws my firewall like a squirrel trapped in a box. It intensifies on certain hours of the day. I’m quite sure it also tries to send what devices are connected and filenames are in attached memory sticks. Maybe also some media file checksums.
Do your firewall rules allow you to block your tv’s telemetry, while allowing you to still use the internet on it? If so, would you mind sharing how you did it?
You should look into PiHole, if you’re half-savvy with computers. They should be able to block all the destinations smart TVs are trying to connect to
Sinkholes can be negated by manufacturers using static, hardcoded dns addresses. Be careful and check traffic regularly.
And those can be blocked and even redirected at the router level. Though not as simple as spinning up a pihole.
Actually simpler, if you have an Asus router. Just remember to disable its telemetry stuff…
… Sending telemetry to Asus about the TV sending telemetry to LG? Wtf is this timeline?
We are on the “let’s see how back corporate greed can get” simulation server.
Blocking telemetry would not include blocking 8.8.8.8 though.
And they do. My Philips TV didn’t even ask for DNS until hardcoded IPs for Netflix et al. timed out. And when it did, it asked Google, not my router.
This is why you need to do DNS hijacking to handle hardcoded DNS requests.
Very easy to circumvent
Pi hole won’t help.
Imagine the amount of bandwidth and energy saved, if they didn’t do any of this bullshit.
They are essentially using someone else’s money to get themselves more money. Fuck these people!
This is why our “smart” TV is not allowed to be connected to the internet.
But can you really be sure that it doesn’t connect to another network? i have to check again but if i recall correctly there are TVs that try to connect to other open networks or even look for other TVs from the same manufacturer and connect through those to the internet. I have to double check this again, so take this with a grain of salt
If that’s true - lan for your own content with network isolation and ripping out the WiFi antenna, I guess?? I hate this
There is such a thing called HDMI Ethernet. If you connect some sort of Android box to your TV it might establish an Ethernet connection with it and thus connect to the internet.
If you use an Android TV system you don’t get to complain about your video output device tracking.
I have searched for alternatives. There are none that I am aware of. I just want a streaming box that can run jellyfin with a simple remote. I really don’t want to use a keyboard in bed.
If anyone knows a simple setup that boots straight into jellyfin with a remote, I would love to hear about it.
Maybe put Lineage OS on a compatible Android TV box. These do have remotes and have almost no Google telemetry.
A smart TV is not allowed on my property.
I am a bit puzzled about the “even when your laptop is connected” part.
I have a small android box connected to it and am not using apps on the TV so it should have no chance of sending screenshot out even if it takes them.
The TV itself is not connected
what kind of Android box do you have? anything you recommend? (looking to have some sort of streaming client)
Nvidia Shield. The bigger one.
Yes, it’s a couple of years old at this point, but it’s still the best device of its kind.
Not to mention the remote is FANTASTIC.
It’s a Chinese one that I used at first for retro gaming with emuelec. Now it is dual boot and I have kodi and newpipe on it too.
Sorry for being paranoid but can the TV piggyback the connection used by the the streaming device/android box to send data back to the TV OEM?
The only connection the TV has is hdmi. I do not think that back and forth communication is possible there.
If the TV has wifi, it can do its thing but that would also be easy to disable.
I think for the TVs internal wifi, it’s better to create a honeypot Wi-Fi exclusively for it, or a VLAN. It will constantly try to send data and fail. If we don’t let it connect to anything, the TV might start sniffing for other open networks.
yep, never allow them to connect to the internet
I don’t think my TV has ever been connected to the internet. As a safe guard to ensure that it never is I banned its wired and wireless MAC address from my network. So even if someone did plug it in…nothing.
A lot of shit makes a new, random MAC address for every new connection to an access point now
There is usually two types of MAC randomization and they both apply to wireless. One is pre-auth and is part of the IEEE 802.11aq Pre-Association Service Discovery spec. It makes it harder to track a user just because they got in range of an AP.
The other is when they actually connect to an SSID. Win10 and mobile OS’s started supporting this but it maintains a relationship between a MAC/SSID pairing otherwise you would have all kinds of network/auth weirdness if it didn’t.
Regardless if I noticed a device on my network behaving poorly by randomizing its MAC on every connection then I’d swap my network over to a grant list of MAC addresses and it can happily knock itself offline as much as it wants. Utilize a guest networks for visitors to avoid the headache of list management when a friend stops by and wants WiFi.
I can say I’ve never seen that behavior across all my devices though.
I’ve jokingly said this before, but just wait until manufacturers start adding 4G/5G to TVs explicitly for ads and telemetry…
Just like modern cars… I wish there was some kind legislation that would limit phone-home telemetry to emergency service telecommunication frequencies, and be opt-in only. That way any OEM operating under commercial cellular frequencies would thus be unlicensed, and subject to FCC violations and import bans. Like what OnStar was originally pitched as; only auto dialing to 911, and 911 only, if you were unresponsive after airbags deployed. OEM couldn’t use the telecommunication frequencies for anything other than networking with emergency service endpoints on the same VLAN.
Anything recorded by the vehicle would be required to stay on the vehicle due privacy regulations, like the black box recorder for warranted forensic investigations. OTA updates could also be distributed offline for users to download and flash via USB, like any motherboard bios, so transactions would be write only.
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No matter how much they ask
LG by now will have several weeks of footage of me scrolling through streaming services and failing to find anything to watch.
Diagnosis: ADHD. Display ads for stimulants.
Probably won’t happen as I’m not in the US, however if it does start to show ads it will be very quickly disconnected from the internet and relegated to being solely a display for the PS5. It’s not far off that anyway.
prediction if this becomes widespread: soon they will have their own wireless internet connection just so they wont have to rely on your network to spy on you lel😎
You joke but that’s literally what they did with the cars. I remember when that was an upsell, now you getting that modem you asked for it or not and it will ping the merchant when it detects that you are fucking your mistress in the back seat.
Welcome to to today’s America peasants
Not sure how ads for medications are legal anywhere.
Not ADHD, just very high standards!
Display ads for high-quality stimulants
Do not connect your Smart TVs to network people, seriously. Just a bad idea. Use a media center PC or some other device that allows you to stream content, and make sure the TV itself is just a big monitor, nothing more.
I hear but have not verified that they will connect to an open network without letting you know.
I have definitely had to forget networks, then have them connect to that network weeks later at random, then having to forget the network again. Don’t know how that’s legal.
Forgetting a network is only when your wifi is password protected. If the TV can find an open wifi access point, it could just automatically connect to the internet. “Forgetting” a network doesn’t help here…! Since there is nothing to forget (there are wifi points without password). But it should be forbidden IMO to automatically connect to these kind of access points. But even your mobile phone might do the same thing.
Yep, it was my personal, password-protected network. Either someone reconnected it (unlikely, I live with my gf who doesn’t use the TV) or it just cached the password until it decided to spy on my again 🙃
At least you should be able to block its mac address
This!
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Better yet, buy a big monitor.
If there were big monitors with the same color quality and in the same price range I’d do it. But usually large monitors are for signage.
At least that’s what I’ve found.
Where do I get a 65" monitor?
