LG: No. ACR in LG TVs does not collect or store screenshots, screen images, screen recordings...
Hold on, we already know this is not true. There is even an option in the settings to disable this (which is usually automatically reverted by LG within a week).
> ACR in LG TVs does not collect or store screenshots, screen images, screen recordings, or video recordings from the TV. Instead, it uses audio fingerprints generated from content audio using the TV’s internal soundboard (not a speaker) to identify the content being viewed.
So based on the fingerprint they know what content is being displayed, but they can say they're not recording your screen.
I think this answer might be one of ‘technically the truth’, as in they might not be doing it BUT:
i know my LG TV(made in Q1 2026) has the capability to capture inputs(regardless of the input)….I know because I rooted it and built an out of band vnc server using the image capture binary.
(Its slow and limited resolution.My best guess that the intent was to ACR)
There's a lot of "carefully written" nonsense going on.
For example, I remember when whatsapp was end-to-end encrypted. However the app could analyze the images for specific patterns like CSAM and send notifications-about-the-image-that-are-not-the-image out-of-band.
I would expect this could also coincidentally analyze messages/images for other patterns like other keywords. This way you could have end-to-end encryption that could still build up advertising profiles.
It seems to be little known to people, but when you go through airport security simply say "I decline to have my photo taken" and they won't ask you to take the stupid photo. They look at you, they still scan your DL, but no photo.
I've never had any pushback and apparently it's a legal right to not have a photo taken.
Correct. You can even go through with an ID. I have.
A couple other notes of interest. There is an active bill[1] that seeks to codify a prohibition of involuntary facial recognition for citizen travel screening. And I suspect that as many conservative Amish, Mennonites, Jews and Muslims have religious objections to having their photo taken, a first amendment protection against facial biometric collection may continue to exist for some time as a bare minimum.
not the guy who downvoted you, but you shoehorned in something you wanted to talk about 4 comments deep on a chain as a counter point to a very casual remark that was fully appropriate in its context and didnt call for a hard counter
and the topic you wanted to talk about was so information dense (if steel manning) as to be seen as gibberish
its not that deep, you are using your own short hand language that no one else is familiar with - it is the equivalent of saying a bunch of corporate buzzwords together. thats not to say there is no meaning behind it, just that the information cannot be discerned from the signal.
your message is encrypted, so it looks like gibberish. people will downvote that. i could run this through a hashing function and give you the result and you would downvote it because it would mean nothing to you. it doesnt matter what the truth of the message is if the actual communication does not exist
I work in marketing. LG literally offers to target people who've recently watched a competitor's ad. When I asked how that's possible the sales guy openly admitted that "they know what's showing on their panels."
Maybe he just said that to make a sale, but yeah the fact they offer that targeting alone is quite telling.
> "we know who's in the LG household. We know which devices are there. We know what you're exposed to on TV and we know how to extend that reach into mobile."
> "Most streaming households subscribe to multiple streaming services. So, our line of sight to the screen can really help our partners."
> "We own the glass. We own the TV."
> "We own the glass"
> "Since we own the screen, and we own the operating system..."
LG's statements about how much they can help their advertising partners just get so much worse as the rest of the video goes on.
LG absolutely need to be slapped out of thinking they "own" anything after the point of sale, and the only way to do this, given how laden with spyware these TVs are, is to NEVER BUY THEM.
"own the glass" refers to the very last step in the advertising display chain. You might not notice it because it's invisible to the end user, but basically every step in the signal chain from studio to eyeball is trying to rip out the previous step's ads and overwrite them with its own. Glass is the last step before eyeballs, so it gets ultimate authority.
They are lying through their teeth. We know from independent investigations and reverse engineering efforts that the TVs capture audio/video for the mothership. Also, the devices are effectively remotely controlled and can be updated at a moment's notice to suit the current commercial strategy of the true owner of the device (it's not you).
note they didn't say "LG TVs do not…" which might indicate whatever lawyer drafted this found a vaguely legally plausible way to attribute that to something other than ACR
Every word in that statement is key for it to be true.
For example, if they screen-scrape locally and extract/collect metadata, then the statement is true technically true. I'm sure you can think of many other subtle variations of the truth where the statement is not false but still misleading.
I don't think they're denying anything. I think they're muddying the technologies. They're saying "we don't need the screenshot to know what's displayed on your screen". With ACR, you don't need screenshots because you know what the content is. My understanding is that ACR is basically a fingerprint of the screenshot.
Right, that hash is an entrypkint to match to a screenshot elsewhere. A perceptu hash, pseodo anonymity. A lawyers-coders lie. A polices parallel construction. LG still knows what you watch.
One aspect, perhaps worthy of some scrutiny, is how the database of hashes is produced. One presumes there's an assortment of cable boxes and/or satellite dishes feeding hundreds of channels into an ingestion mechanism that stores the fingerprints into a database. There are a lot of edge cases that are technically challenging, especially when considering the 210 or so local markets in the US. It'd be interesting to learn how that is done and whether any digital locks are circumvented in the process.
You don’t have to be perfect, just best effort. Sticking to the top dozen channels, commercials, plus the rolling list of top ten streaming movies/tv shows, probably lets you get 70%+ hit rate.
There will always be unidentifiable content (home movies, one of a trillion YouTube videos, video games, etc).
You jest, but ssh/git has a similar problem. The client tries every key it can if the config is naive enough. So, the server knows which cluster of public keys identify the same person. Github is said to do this kind of fingerprinting.
Actually keeping screenshots would be expensive. They of course don't care what the content is. You care what the PGP content is.
They care about what you're watching, so in the dystopian future, they can tell a government that your bin of hashes are 90% banned content and you should be denaturalized because you're clearly a communist cross-dressing monkey from mars.
It's bizarre you think it's equal to knowing a PGP key. It's not, the point is the database of hashes are good enough to tell them things about you. They could do a lot of different malicious things with that knowledge, primarily because it's not anonymous information. They likely have GPS, so they know where you are at the same time, even not having GPS, they include wifi, and some have cellular chips.
If you think what we're talking about equates to PGP, you are seriously confused about how privacy works.
Makes sense, in a dystopian future the dystopian government would issue 2026 era TVs to everyone but strangely ban all 2026 monitors (which aren't smart), closing the gap where the dystopian government is unable to stop people from rooting their amazon fire tv sticks (somehow).
My point is, the "slippery slope to dystopia" is full of rocks and I'd like to force you to mentally crahs into a few before anyone accepts your premise, show us you're worthy.
"ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker) to identify content and does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV. Where ACR is available and enabled, ACR-related information may be used for audience segmentation and viewing or audience trend analysis. Interest-based advertising and cross-device advertising require separate user consent through the applicable advertising-related agreements."
... and later ...
"ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology to identify content. Rather than collecting screenshots, screen recordings, or visual content from the TV screen, ACR extracts a digital fingerprint of the TV content being viewed using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker). ACR does not collect or store voice recordings, other audio recordings, screenshots, screen images, or video recordings from the TV."
Interesting that in the beginning it says 'We know that many TVs use automatic content recognition (ACR)' but according to answers none of those manufacturers do.
So which TVs do the ACRs, and why Verge did not send those questions to them? Hisense?
None of the manufacturers who answered that question admitted to using ACR via screenshot. LG uses audio samples, which is basically the same. Google admitted that some of their hardware OEMs may install ACR. Sony and Hisense didn't answer, but have both been reported to use ACR. The TCL TVs that come with Roku I assume do it as well.
Wait did they claim to not use screenshots during ACR generation? Or did they claim they don't _store_ screenshots.
I think they're using "collect" to mean something specific and "store" to mean something specific, neither of which fit our definition of collect and store.
Sony Bravia TVs, at least the 2015 model, bundle the tv.samba.ssm package, and the TV made periodic requests to the samba.tv domain without opting into anything. Samba TV is a spyware company in the ACR business.
FYI I disabled the app (alongside many other undesirable apps) on my Sony TV via adb and there's no longer network requests to samba.tv, and everything I care about is still working fine.
That the Television Business transformed from a) an advertising conduit to b) a propaganda conduit to c) a live-surveillance technology tells you all you need to know.
Whether the Corporations answer your questions or not, their claims of doing The Right Thing are untrustworthy.
watch videos on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Netflix, Apple TV, etc. so that the telemetry at least goes directly to the vendors and their partners in an accurate, compressed channel directly associated with your subscription account
(i am joking but the cognitive dissonance about telemetry is so stupid. you are watching TV on a subscription service, someone already knows who is watching what.)
That's a fine argument if you're watching videos on those platforms, but ACR also phones home when you're watching local content, too. Your Jellyfin server, Blurays, video games, content from your computer, it all goes back to the mothership.
your internet connected videogames on consoles report telemetry
you are running jellyfin on a device, like a NAS. it reports telemetry. docker reports telemetry. you download jellyfin, microsoft gets the telemetry. you update jellyfin, it gets the telemetry. you download radarr, docker and microsoft get the telemetry... all of this stuff reports telemetry. github, you can see your own repositories' usage and telemetry! graphs/traffic. it's all there...
> you are running jellyfin on a device, like a NAS. it reports telemetry
Jellyfin Server packages are hosted on repo.jellyfin.org, so the Jellyfin organisation gets the data that you're probably still running Jellyfin and want updates, not Microsoft. I will accept that if you use the Dockerised version, Docker or GitHub will get that data instead. None of this is "telemetry", e.g. detailed usage information. It's quid-pro-quo; you want to know if there are updates, you ask the update server, it records that your IP looked for updates.
Jellyfin Server collects data and stores it locally on your device in logs and its database (e.g. viewing data, login sessions). This data doesn't leave your device.
What Jellyfin Server _will_ share a lot of, is data about your collection, to its metadata providers. You chose those when setting up your libraries. In return, they hand back nice metadata and pictures. So TheTVDB.com, OMDB, MusicBrainz and others you've configured, get queried about "Film name (year)" or "TV series S01E01" or "Band name Album name" and thus learn everything that's in your collection... but not whether or when you've watched it.
I play games, I know Sony knows about what I play.
I watch netflix, I know Netflix knows what I watch.
Etc...
But there is a difference between the company whose services I use knowing about the service use, and the television mfg knowing about all of my activity.
As others have pointed out, Microsoft does not get to know what I'm watching, when I'm watching it, or that watching it ever occurred. They may know that an IP which is occasionally associated with other things I do pulls a number of container images from GitHub every so often, and that a small minority of those container images are for applications that can host local media content.
Conflating that with actively spying on the content of my television programming is wrong.
you pay for a subscription, the subscription service knows what you are watching. 90% or so of people.
you download a torrent, bro, your IP address is shared in the swarm that anyone, without authorization, can see.
you are in a private tracker, every profile is open!
you visit some website for a stream. the website has tracking.
somebody, somewhere, somebody big and knowledgable and sophisticated in all the scenarios, not some little adversary but all these 1,000 or so ad-tech and analytics companies, knows what the content of you, you specifically, you are watching.
That's not the point. They're all terrible stewards. It's a trade off, as they each provide me services that suit me. It's also why each one only gets a limited slice of my data.
But my television - bought and paid for - doesn't provide me any service beyond displaying images. It is a commodity, and TV manufacturers are trying to get not just a slice (which would also be too much), but their own copy of the whole pie.
> you are running jellyfin on a device, like a NAS. it reports telemetry. docker reports telemetry. you download jellyfin, microsoft gets the telemetry. you update jellyfin, it gets the telemetry. you download radarr, docker and microsoft get the telemetry...
Not if you run one of the "good" Linux distros and FOSS tools like Podman. Then there is no telemetry at all.
The AOSP (Android core) does hardcode some Google services like a fallback DNS. I patched that out of the source for an x86 Android build that runs on my TV box. So there can be zero or very little telemetry if you actively avoid it. You mostly need to avoid Big Tech stuff.
My Jellyfin server is not allowed to contact the internet. Videos are downloaded from Usenet then rsync'd over to the Jellyfin server for viewing. I don't use Docker because it's a black box I don't understand. I don't use Microsoft. The Jellyfin server is updated from my local deb repo. I don't use Github because it's microsoft trash. I don't play games on modern consoles.
Just because you took the easy way out doesn't mean it's hopeless.
Did I consent someplace to having my TV tell its manufacturer that I am using an Amazon fire stick? No? Then it's wrong for my TV to send that info out.
We need to differentiate "actually consented" versus "clicked accept on an intentionally misleading, long EULA that popped up on the screen once".
These companies get away with these things in part because they can point to users accepting some agreement by using the service where clause 12 subsection 4 addendum C says they can do it, using some terminology nobody reads or understands.
Also, how accessible is the EULA before your purchase of a large hardware object which you are not designed to use to read an EULA? Where's my TV EULA?
My LG TV did pop up asking for EULA consent before being able to use WebOS. I did not consent to microphone terms (which has the infamous terms saying it’s your responsibility not to break eavesdropping laws). So the microphone function doesn’t work, which is fine.
The EULA terms I did agree to likely had a clause allowing for returning the TV to not be a contract of cohesion. As for why I consented to ACR, I guess I have a lot going on and privacy (for, say, location data) in a contractual way is difficult.
Supposedly the LG TV does not send ACR data out without agreeing to the EULA. It gets into non-falsifiablity to just say “duh, of course they do.” Well, it’s what they say and there’s no evidence they do if the EULA isn’t agreed.
Now the fire stick and its services have their own EULAs.
The libertarian contractual ideology obviously falls apart in real-world conditions. I had to agree to a lengthy contract to pay for parking after I had already parked. I had to rely on unconscionablity or some practicality (I.e. assuming I didn’t sign over one million dollars in the parking EULA) to get through my day.
Have to make it regulation and law, with penalties for lying. Regime change has made this more likely, call your Congressional representative. Loop in Louis Rossmann and fulu.org if necessary.
It is fundamentally a citizen data security and data privacy issue, which only regulation and the law can solve for (i argue, based on all available evidence and information). But asking nicely or trusting corporations and management? lol, rofl even.
Nihilism is free, you are welcome to it. They haven't even been seated yet (takes place on January 3rd, 2027), we should give it a chance, I think. The nihilism remains available if we are disappointed by giving new folks a chance. Hope is not a strategy, but we must keep some, as a treat, imho.
At least we know what their (most anyway) answers are and security researcher can start verifying where they are lying. You also have to look very hard at the language used to answer many of these questions as words can often be misleading...
The problem is the regulators in the US are in bed with the companies so they can say whatever and do the complete opposite and then get fined a trivial amount of money and just keep doing it
Yeah. This is exactly the problem. There is too much of a disconnect from the action to the impact in this case. I think if most people saw precisely what data is collected on them and how it is used (and how often it is part of data breaches from these identity resolution platforms and third parties), I think they'd care more.
But nearly everyone has more urgent and pressing concerns like making monthly rent or a medical bill or gas money. So ACR on a TV doesn't register.
> if most people saw precisely what data is collected on them and how it is used (and how often it is part of data breaches from these identity resolution platforms and third parties), I think they'd care more.
What are the chances of an individual being negatively affected in a serious way?
Intuitively, I expect it to be so negligible that it isn't worth losing sleep over.
I would say the chances of a negative impact is on par with the chances of negative impacts on most of the hottest debate topics such as guns and abortion. Identity theft, swatting/doxxing, and stalking can have serious impacts and are not that uncommon. They're just uncommon enough that most people don't care until it happens to them.
It's more profitable for LG to sell your data to advertisers than to build and sell the TV itself
The negative effect is the exact sky high prices that Americans keep complaining about. The point of all that advertising data is to nudge you towards accepting higher prices or buying things you otherwise wouldn't.
Every dollar of revenue in the advertising industry is money taken from consumers and spent on unproductive waste to get you to spend more money instead of anything like making a product better or investing in capacity or researching and developing new products.
Google makes money by making you spend more money. Facebook makes money by making you spend more money.
This is one of those things that is hard to quantify. Although I'm sure someone has. It negatively impacts society overall, very slowly over time. It has the effect of eroding private life in subtle way that it's barely noticeable until we find ourselves in a surveillance state where corruption is everywhere. Let me know if that sounds familiar to you.
I did a presentation on surveillance capitalism awhile back[0]
I really don't think most people would care more when you show them examples of others. Some people would, but most would not. We see this all the time with legislation around rights in the US. Much of the voting population lack the capacity for deep critical thought and don't care to practice empathy from even a devil's advocate perspective. Stuff like tracking speech/identity online, abortion debate, gun debate, etc. Nobody cares unless they are directly affected.
Take guns for example. If you use guns, then you see a value to them and generally oppose mire restrictions. If you have been shot or robbed with a gun (or know people who have), then you dont see the value of guns and want more restrictions. If you are neither of these things then its easy to not care and say sure to more restrictions because they don't impact you and aound like they might provide some benefit, especially if just looking at the surfqce level stats. Same concept for abortion and online tracking/identity, especially once you mix in the think-of-the-children arguments in each of these.
Or because it's so secretive the people don't even know the source was from their device spying on them. "Oh, some hacker on the darknet stole my data" is the track that many non-tech people would see this.
The worst thing for privacy advocates is that there has yet to be a general public reckoning with the ad-economy of the last 20 years.
For all intents and purposes, the average person who has paid no mind to their privacy over that time period is really no better or worse off than the person who has devoted hours to combating all forms of invasion.
If there was a mass scale visible event of privacy loss, i.e. Meta somehow ends up in a shamelessly evil sociopaths hands who decides to start very publicly embarrassing random people with privately collected data, there would be very swift and immediate action (yes the parallels here are not lost on me, scale is the difference)
Just look at datacenters. The public didn't even know what a DC was 6 months ago, and now politicians are getting elected to ban them. What happened? AI gave the mass public a common sensation of fear. Privacy has still not had it's "AI fear" moment.
You see that, Timmy? Every time someone complains about something, somenone says that it happens because no one cares. What’s the logical conclusion, then? To not care yourself. Because it would be too difficult to change anything if you’re completely alone. And so you have thousands of people each in their own bubble, each thinking that they are alone in caring about, well, anything, and that therefore nothing can be done.
they should portray the tv companies as child predators that spy and record children , cuz they are perverts and need this data feed their sick habits and csam training models.
cuz atleast think of the children , while u fudge the adults.
Because they have other things to worry about. Certainly you realize how privileged a world you have to live in to be able to spend time worrying about whether your TV is spying on you, right?
You put those things in the same sentence but they don't even remotely carry the same weight. People are sick and dying and have to weigh weather or not they want to declare bankruptcy or go to the doctor. Or buy their medication vs buying food. Their TV serving them directed ads isn't even in the same universe.
Ok sure, but if you're going to play that card, then you have to also say that they can and should recognize that those "other" things are often also symptoms of the same disease.
People are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time (and they are capable of placing appropriate energy towards the walking to not trip because they were too focused on the gum chewing...)
I'n not "playing that card", i'm explaining that the "because the news is in bed with them" is not even close to a major reason why they don't care. You are correct they can walk and chew gum, but maybe not spin 1000 plates in the air at once.
When people have tons of things to deal with, this falls by the wayside, news or not.
When they don't, sure, maybe the news would matter more.
On the flipside, how fucked up the world is that TVs spying on you had become normalized.
The problem isn't with people being too busy, it shouldn't be up to the people, it should be a government regulation problem. There's a lot of 'todo' around potential breaches of PII, so why not do something about the ridiculously large and seemingly increasing trade in exactly that from almost anything you purchase nowadays, including the place you purchase it from. And they're all selling it to aggregators and advertisers and any other shady c*nt with enough cash to buy it.
... and now it's all going to be fed into AI for additional pattern matching and de-aggregation and re-identification, because that's where the return on investment is. And once it's in there, there ain't no cleaning it out again. You're in the corpus, all your personality fingerprints, forever.
Gross governmental negligence across the entire West.
The news? Or the underprivileged? The news doesn’t cater to the underprivileged in general, and might well be “in bed with” companies on this point.
It’s curious this ritual of relatively well-off individuals—and your bio supports that theory—pointing fingers at each other for having privilege. Certainly when they are talking about a topic that affects everyone with a TV, not whatever people of their means get up to that the underprivilged don’t.
People who care could do the work for all of us. It’s not like everyone needs to care about surveillance in television gadgets in order to make a difference.
Or, you know, not necessarily that focused. The comment you are replying to just said that the news are in bed with companies. That often generalizes beyond tech gadgets.
I don't really many (or any?) people suggesting that they're currently using 5G modems. Just that it is a likely next step assuming hardware costs go down to make it worth the hassle as a secondary channel.
The public wifi one is funny. It seems totally like something they'd do, but totally open wifi doesn't really exist anymore so the window for that scam is likely closed. I doubt they'll bother with it at this point.
More likely would be cutting Comcast in on things in return for using the public wifi channels they have on their customer's routers that they already use for cell service. But it might be easier/cheaper to just make not connecting to wifi more and more painful for customers instead though, you only need to trick/wear down one user of the household to win this battle so if they just slowly turn up the harassment feature they'll get 99% of people in the end.
Many ISP-provided routers also include, by default, a completely separate WiFi network (that, as far as I know, is usually separate from your plan bandwidth) for other customers of the ISP to be able to use while they're out and about. It would be trivial for TV manufacturers to enter into agreements with those ISPs authorizing them to connect to those SSIDs.
Amazon also could try connecting to their sidewalk network that many of their ring/Alexa devices use to connect to a neighbors 'internet' via LORA. so asking specifically about wifi is not broad enough of a question.
Yeah, sure. I'll buy a powerstation while I'm at it. Why not? My TV doesn't even fit in my car, so I guess I'll have to buy a bigger car too. Just so I can figure out if the TV connects to any random open AP.
Always good advice, but to answer their question, only Samsung mentioned that their TVs do not connect to open wifi networks on their own, and the question specifically was not asked.
The article doesn't adequately address this actually.
The interviewer asked "Does disconnecting a TV from the internet prevent all these forms of data transmission?". Obviously if the TV is completely disconnected from any internet connection then it can't transmit the data, but that would require removing the wifi radio itself.
Disconnecting the TV from your home wifi still means they can try to connect to any other public wifi. Samsung were the only ones who explicitly addressed that in their answer: "Samsung TVs do not connect to open Wi-Fi networks on their own."
I unfortunately bought an LG tv a while back. Even if you didn't connect it to wifi, they apparently connect to Comcast/xfinity wifi, which is very common in the world.
I want to figure out how to disable the connection inside the tv, because I don't trust their software setting. Has anyone described how to do that? Is there an antenna that could be removed, is there wire that can be snipped that would block it from transmitting?
I think it is better to use AI to root the devices, get them to run linux and run an open source media app. The TV manufacturer's default OS is low value.
Yes, because the price is not subsidized from the selling of personal information.
> “The business model is shifting away from making money on TV sets and instead to making money on ads and data that is delivered by those TV sets,” said Paul Gray, Omdia’s Research Director, Consumer Electronics and Devices, at last week’s HbbTV Symposium in London.
Ah beans, I bought mine a while back, and assumed since they were still listed on the website they were still available. Guess there is no option anymore.
That too, although more higher-end OLEDs are equivalent. The problem is that you can't buy the commercial displays: I recently wanted to replace an old LG and tried to get the Sony FW-65BZ40L (which has amazing specs), but I couldn't find a reseller willing to sell it to me. I called a couple of them, but they were not interested in dealing with a private individual, only with companies.
Problem is that they have wifi chips that will scan and connect to cell phones. The TV manufacturers have agreements with the cell providers for open wifi services on all their phones so you can't block it unless you live in the middle of nowhere and even that may change with LEO satellite service.
I opened up my LG TV because I saw it doing aggressive wifi scanning even when the wifi was "disabled" and physically removed the antenna wire and wrapped the whole guts in RF blocking foil.
I believe you on the aggressive WiFi scanning but I’d have to see concrete proof about the phone part to believe it. Draining users phone batteries via WiFi hotspot functionality that the phone doesn’t even show to the user would be a very big deal.
I imagine if they were going to strike a deal with the phone companies they’d just embed cell chips in the TVs and connect directly.
There used to be several different things for free wifi for subscribers that also got used by national networks. Cellco, AT&Ts home boxes had open wifi that was available to any AT&T subscriber for wi-fi calling, etc.
I don't know if they do it either, but if they use hashes they are in no way draining the battery of someone's phone to send a few bytes every so often. That's not me saying it's okay, mind you.
I've told myself if they start putting 5G in TVs I would either glue a faraday mesh to the back or open up the TV and ground out the antenna or remove the WiFi chip if possible.
If they would keep the spying to matching my shows with programs that are being aired or on popular streaming services, sports, or whether I mute the commercials, that wouldn't bother me. Screen grabs would , especially if I use it on my computer. But history has shown this starts off benign and eventually devolve into listening to the room at all hours and keeping it forever in a Bluffdale data center because "think of the children" / "national security".
> if they use hashes they are in no way draining the battery of someone's phone to send a few bytes every so often
I was more thinking of the discoverability aspect. The phone (presumably) would have to be constantly advertising the availability of a hotspot.
But honestly the bigger thing that makes me not believe it is the scale of conspiracy required. All companies, Apple included, would have to secretly be in on it.
I’m sorry what? There are phone network providers that pimp out your phone’s wifi and data connection without telling you?
I’m not sure I believe you? (Not that I can’t believe a company would do something dodgy behind your back, but I just don’t think our phones would go that far off piste - opening a wifi network has battery power implications that I think would have been discovered/widely known before)
Not only that, if you have home internet they will pimp it out to nearby cellphones because that helps patch up weak network connectivity in certain areas.
Comcast / Xfinity definitely does this. I have gotten many 'suspicious activity' CAPTCHAs on popular websites while using my home internet because of this. The routers provided by Xfinity are very locked down so you can't do anything about it.
Let's not even get into WiFi Motion which uses WiFi to track you inside the house. I'm sure it is enabled by default in most households [1]
Found this - looks straightforward, nothing crazy like messing with a board, just look for the wifi module circuit board inside the tv - and remove it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9WOI5fFtj0
I know the services exist for various things but specific to TVs, it was just a hardware hacking thread on Reddit and a few mentions on X. Nothing concrete.
May I ask what model of TV and if it didn't have a e-key wifi module that could be removed rather than wrapped inside? Mine is older but the service manual seems to indicate there is just a regular module in there I could pop out.
From last year. It has a board at the bottom, but I didn't want to remove it (the TV gave all kinds of warnings and took forever to turn on if it was removed).
> the TV gave all kinds of warnings and took forever to turn on if it was removed
Ugh, I was afraid of that kind of thing. The manual for my older LG indicates there's UI option to disable wifi entirely. Of course, it doesn't actually exist.
Yes, a common response is not to connect to WiFi, but I'm not 100% persuaded that it's a good answer. I don't connect my Kindle or some medical equipment to WiFi, but somehow they both (possibly Over The Air tech) are shared with the companies. Also, Amazon Sidewalk shares my bandwidth with others nearby against my stated wishes.
Are they shipping TVs with that capability, though? I understand a medical device needing cellular in case wifi goes down, but would they go through that effort for a TV?
Oh ok. Sorta figured (and hoped the was the case). I bought a TV 4 years ago and refuse to hook connect it to the internet, but I've always wondered if newer ones are making that less effective.
...just like "These TVs are recording what you're saying and analyzing what you're watching and sending that data back to HQ." was a persistent myth.
These companies have been demonstrated to give zero shits about your privacy and -at least in the US- won't be meaningfully punished for behaving in profoundly antisocial ways, so the smart move is to expect that they are or very soon will be making full use of the hardware that's installed in that TV that you paid to take home from the store.
The "analyzing what you're watching and sending it back to HQ" has been known about for years, certainly since shortly after the tech was rolled out widely. I don't recall anyone ever calling it a myth. So why you're comparing it to something that lots of people talk about and not a single soul has ever proven (despite it being dead easy to prove) is a mystery.
I've heard so many people call it a myth. SO many. Even today, folks disbelieve it.
> ...not a single soul has ever proven...
A manufacturer that will do this [0] absolutely has the attitude required to configure their products to autonomously discover and connect to wifi or other data-transmission networks and phone home when that product hasn't been provided with an Internet connection.
To put it another way: If you see a raving guy out on the street who's very obviously crazy and is wildly brandishing a firearm, you don't wait until he squeezes off a round or three before deciding to behave as if he's capable of shooting someone.
Except testing if a TV connects to an open WiFi network when networking has not been setup/disabled is trivial yet not a soul claiming they do this has ever provided a shred of evidence.
Is there a way to connect a TV to LAN but not WAN? Because I don't use any Internet-connected services, but I do stream media to my TV from my personal Jellyfin server through LAN.
u need a router or switch that allows you to block things with a firewall and/or vlans
For example, put the tv on a vlan, that can only talk to the server. Add additional rules for other stuff
Then, someone's going to say that TVs could be automatically connecting to open Wi-Fi networks. I don't think that's a thing any more. I haven't seen any open Wi-Fi networks around me in a long time.
I'd love for a TV to include a 4G/5G connection that they pay for; it'll be hacked for free Internet before the first production run leaves the store shelves.
Is it always a separate board? I'm not too familiar with TV boards, but most other things designed to run embeded Linux have the Wi-Fi at least soldered on to the board, and at most part of the same SoC that contains the CPU.
"Your device of choice" is not a solution. Your device of choice is still "spying on you" per the definitions provided here.
They have microphones and listen to conversations while transcribing the words to listen for "wake words". THey are in fact always awake, and transcribing the words they hear.
They all send telemetry and usage data and they all scan for devices in your home and SSIDs.
The only difference is that you think you can trust these devices vs the TVs which use ACR.
That may be true. But remember to location track all they need is your wifis SSID and your IP. Opt out is good, most users by design have a hard time turning this stuff off. My wife has had many difficulties trying to turn off Siri and keep it off for years.
And, because this is HN, even though it is only 65":
Flanders Scientific: XMP651: 4k HDR @ 60 Hz (?? ms), up to 4000 nits QD-OLED, 1xHDMI ? (no HDCP) 4xSDI, OS: None?
I believe none of these have Wifi. None of them is perfect. Only the Flanders Scientific model has an OLED display, but it is roughly 10x the price of the others (this is a reference monitor, which is very much not targeted at consumers). It also only comes in sizes up to 65" and only has one HDMI port, which does not support HDCP at all. If you only need 55", they have a 2000 nit display (V550) that supports regular HDMI inputs (but is still quite expensive).
Of the remaining displays, the ViewSonic is the brightest, but does not have HDR support. The LG display supports the highest refresh rate and is probably the cheapest, but only has HDCP 2.0 (I think?), and runs webOS, which I view as the least trustworthy of the options. The Samsung display is the only one with built-in AV1 support (if that matters to you). They also have some older models (e.g., BE85FX-H), which may still be available somewhat cheaper, but I can find very little information on them. None of the displays appear to support HDMI 2.1 or 2.2, so 4k HDR is limited 4:2:0 chroma at 60 Hz. The ones labeled "OS: None?" clearly have an OS (the ViewSonic one advertises a 7 second boot time, for example, despite being labeled "OS-Free"), but it does not appear to be any of the major known-problematic ones.
I have no direct experience with any of these, so I cannot prove that they are not still spying on you.
Another dimension to consider might just be displays which are easily opened and the wireless hardware removed.
Unfortunately a lot of large displays really aren't safe to open -- you're likely to break the screen doing it. But I have seen some results on LG tvs that have the wireless hardware on a separate removable board that the TV runs fine without.
If the alternative is a commercial signboard display or a reference monitor though one might be better off buying N consumer TVs and accidentally destroying a couple. ... and the question of giving money to companies bundling spyware might be better addressed by spending the price difference funding efforts to stop the practice via other means (e.g. outlawing it... to the extent that its not already unlawful, lobbying state AGs to take action to the extent that it is...).
Just buy a consumer TV and don't connect it to the internet. Remove the WiFi board or desolder the chip if you must. It's better than paying five times as much for a worse display.
I bought an LG commercial display at the exorbitant $1k price point a few years ago and every single time I walk past it I feel good about the money I spent. Does it look worse? Probably?
Did I plug in a FireTV stick that is also spying on me? Yes.
But I still consider it to have been preferable to just have a (relatively) dumb display that does not know when I play a dvd or blu ray and can’t tattle on me if I connect the TV to my Game console and play something embarrassing like Train Simulator 17 Nerd Edition.
(Wish Apple had an incredible response to every single question, but while I’m still a fan, not going to use this comment as a plug… A little disappointed)
Practically speaking I would just buy whatever and then not connect it to the internet. (Theoretically if there's an unsecured wifi network with no login requirement in the vicinity the TV could still connect to it and send your data, but no one has demonstrated any TVs actually doing that.)
You can pay a significant premium for a "business" TV but the cost effective option is to get a consumer grade television and never allow it to connect to the internet.
Spectre still sells dumb TVs. The panels are fine, though they don't have any OLED options. Sound quality is...Well, most people don't use TV audio anyway.
Apple did/does not want to take the Sony/Samsung product diversification path, but it is a shame for them not to branch out more. An actual Apple branded TV under Tim Cook probably would have honestly respected our privacy. I blocked my LG TV's MAC address from accessing our wifi.
I was impressed LG answered every question and quite directly, assuming they’re telling the truth.
I was quite disappointed in Apple for dodging so many of them and giving non-answers. They need to tone down the corporate speak and take a lesson from LG.
When asked if a user can erase everything the correct answer is not a thesis on privacy, it’s saying “Choosing Erase all settings and data will remove everything on the device back to factory fresh state”. They already have the perfect answer.
Apple has good answers for many of the questions they skipped too. But they look bad by not even trying to answer.
What makes you defend Apple when they won't defend themselves? If they have good answers why did they evade the question? Is it possible your basis for your belief they have good answers has changed and those answers will no longer be "good"?
I’m not defending them here. I was calling out the contrast between that and how their messaging looks terrible.
I know they do have good answers as I use the Apple TV and know what it does. They may not satisfy super hard-core privacy people, but if you’re willing to opt into the Apple ecosystem then within those constraints I think they’re very good.
But thank you for accusing me of being a fanboy. That was very productive.
My biggest problem with Apple not answering so many of the questions is they heavily market themselves as being privacy first. This seemed like the perfect way to show their advantage in that regard but their choice to skip so many questions I think justifies more skepticism. Additionally basically every response from every company sounded very weaselly.
For instance in the microphone part, Apple says that it only listens to the wake word and you can disable that. But they don’t say that you can disable the far-field microphones entirely. Why not? If it was really good for privacy, couldn’t they have said you can configure it such that the only time any microphone is active is when you’re holding the microphone button? Wouldn’t that be the stronger claim? Why are all these claims so weak?
Disabling using the wake word would disable it entirely. That’s the only time it ever listens. The button thing is because there is a microphone directly on the remote so if you are using the button, there is no point in using the microphones on the Apple TV itself. There’s already one in a better position.
Anyway, I agree with you. If you want to be the “privacy“ company, then choosing not to answer when some of the worst companies in terms of privacy answered lots of stuff is a very bad look. It doesn’t make any sense other than if you’re trying to be ultra careful about not saying the wrong thing, which doesn’t improve my view of you.
When I got to the first question, where Apple didn’t answer, I was like “OK, whatever, you can skip one“. And then they answered like one more in the entire thing and skipped the rest.
Maybe I’m overly skeptical, but my read is that the microphones and a special processor only do one thing and that can be disabled. However they don’t say that the microphones are disabled. They don’t rule out the microphones being used in another way, with a different processor. Or am I wrong? A AND B does this. What about A and C? “No comment”.
I trust it because this is the same thing they’ve been doing on every product since you started being able to say “Hey Siri”.
People have always worried they’re doing more, but Apple has repeatedly put out descriptions of exactly how it works because they don’t want people to think the devices are spying on them. I don’t see why it would change for this one product. They already have to fight that rumor that comes up every couple years that phones are listening to people to show them advertisements.
The answer also seemed exactly the same to me as Google and Samsung’s answers about how they listen for wake words.
"Do your TVs transmit any information that could identify the location of their owner, including their public IP address, Wi-Fi network SSID, GPS coordinates, and/or actual street address?"
They forgot to ask about the MAC address. That was the first thing that popped into my mind.
> 14. Does disconnecting a TV from the internet prevent all these forms of data transmission?
I wonder what other possibilities there would be here e.g. via radio or via Bluetooth to your mobile so that such a device can transmit? That would have been an interesting read
I could easily see a Sony tv or Roku communicating to a corresponding app on the lan, which relays to the relevant server. It was Meta that would have a native app open a localhost port and then websites in the native browser would use js to call out the tracking information to the installed app. That's how they got around Safari privacy protections
Well well well, we know now which cat has had their face in the cream (aka who is clearly visible most guilty).. that would be Hisense, who got caught today and had nothing to say.
For all the company’s who had reponses along the lines of “we don’t do thing X that some others are doing”.. full bets it’s Hisense doing each of these things.
Does Dell manufacture monitors with Internet connection and/or microphones?
Worst they could do would be through an automatically installed driver (on Windows, like LG did).
Monitors like the P2726DEB have Ethernet, a built in webcam and a built in microphone.
Mine only has the Ethernet port, since it has a built in docking station, but they still could take snapshots of what is on my screen. For now, I am trusting DELL a lot more, though. Part of that is having paid about three grand for my U5226KW. At that price they better don't need to spy on me to make money.
I was disappointed that the article described Apple's answers to some questions as not direct. They should have published the indirect answer. Let the reader judge the answers.
Disagree - when a company responds with mealy-mouthed corporate gruel, designed in bad faith to obfuscate and distract, there should be no obligation on the part of the investigator to propagate it.
Why not both? Have the reporter editorialize in the article itself but link to sources and references including the full response as a way of showing their work and letting readers validate.
I'd argue that this just descends into sophistry. If the journalist isn't as convincing as the corporate speak, the company could potentially pull the wool over a reader's eyes.
I think "chose not to provide a direct answer" is pretty clearly "technically they responded, but they waffled about in such a way as to have provided no meaningful information".
The article isn't sponsored and so is under no obligation to reproduce what likely amounts to ad copy.
That is called gate keeping or hoarding information. I read other answers that were full of weasel words and yet still published. Censoring is not the same as quoting.
Because the traditional press believes their readers are idiots that cannot think for themselves and so they require "the reporter" to interpret for them and tell them what to think about whatever topic the article concerns. This is also a big reason why traditional press outlets never link to original sources on their websites when such sources actually exist (despite the entire point of "the web" being to link together disparate sources)[1]. Doing so would mean their readers are not dependent upon them, the priests in the high castle, for learning what the priests want them to learn.
[1] The other part of the reason, and the one they will admit to publicly if pressed, is to maintain their ad revenue by not providing exit paths for their readers.
Ironic how two opinions can be completely opposite, yet both valid and well-founded, and unverifiable at the same time.
I personally believe that journalists should do their job and decide what gets written and how, and save readers from drowning in information we have too much of anyway.
The premise of the article was we asked 11 companies 17 questions about their "TV" product.
The article singled out only 1 company to not publish non-responsive answers. That only does one thing how bad an answer could it be to not be publishable?
Asking boards to volunteer information that harms their business revenue model is a suckers bet. Journalists have a tough job wading through the nonsense. =3
> I asked every TV manufacturer 17 questions about how they spy on you
OK, but why? Just so you can write an article? All those answers are useless. Even if they were true, a company's policy can change over night. It even says so in the legalese.
I don't have a TV in the house.
Just a laptop (works for 95%) and a projector (in the 1* per week case we watch a movie)
Really don't see the use of a specific device, especially if it is spying on you.
The setting has the obvious name of "Live Plus".
Their full answer illumniates what they are doing
> ACR in LG TVs does not collect or store screenshots, screen images, screen recordings, or video recordings from the TV. Instead, it uses audio fingerprints generated from content audio using the TV’s internal soundboard (not a speaker) to identify the content being viewed.
So based on the fingerprint they know what content is being displayed, but they can say they're not recording your screen.
I think this answer might be one of ‘technically the truth’, as in they might not be doing it BUT:
i know my LG TV(made in Q1 2026) has the capability to capture inputs(regardless of the input)….I know because I rooted it and built an out of band vnc server using the image capture binary.
(Its slow and limited resolution.My best guess that the intent was to ACR)
There's a lot of "carefully written" nonsense going on.
For example, I remember when whatsapp was end-to-end encrypted. However the app could analyze the images for specific patterns like CSAM and send notifications-about-the-image-that-are-not-the-image out-of-band.
I would expect this could also coincidentally analyze messages/images for other patterns like other keywords. This way you could have end-to-end encryption that could still build up advertising profiles.
This is the same way that the TSA says they "delete your photo and biometrics" after taking it at airport security.
It seems to be little known to people, but when you go through airport security simply say "I decline to have my photo taken" and they won't ask you to take the stupid photo. They look at you, they still scan your DL, but no photo.
I've never had any pushback and apparently it's a legal right to not have a photo taken.
Correct. You can even go through with an ID. I have.
A couple other notes of interest. There is an active bill[1] that seeks to codify a prohibition of involuntary facial recognition for citizen travel screening. And I suspect that as many conservative Amish, Mennonites, Jews and Muslims have religious objections to having their photo taken, a first amendment protection against facial biometric collection may continue to exist for some time as a bare minimum.
[1]https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/169...
So you're fine as long as you don't watch anything where the audio matches the video.
That answer is very sly. Wonder how many others are guilty of this too.
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not the guy who downvoted you, but you shoehorned in something you wanted to talk about 4 comments deep on a chain as a counter point to a very casual remark that was fully appropriate in its context and didnt call for a hard counter
and the topic you wanted to talk about was so information dense (if steel manning) as to be seen as gibberish
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its not that deep, you are using your own short hand language that no one else is familiar with - it is the equivalent of saying a bunch of corporate buzzwords together. thats not to say there is no meaning behind it, just that the information cannot be discerned from the signal.
your message is encrypted, so it looks like gibberish. people will downvote that. i could run this through a hashing function and give you the result and you would downvote it because it would mean nothing to you. it doesnt matter what the truth of the message is if the actual communication does not exist
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I work in marketing. LG literally offers to target people who've recently watched a competitor's ad. When I asked how that's possible the sales guy openly admitted that "they know what's showing on their panels."
Maybe he just said that to make a sale, but yeah the fact they offer that targeting alone is quite telling.
If they use audio-based ACR, they do know what's showing without needing to send any screen content telemetry.
They're describing ACR
"We own the glass"
You may do LG, or maybe you just think you do. Either way, I won't ever buy your TVs
How LG market their control over you to their customers (advertisers):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA&t=820s
> "we know who's in the LG household. We know which devices are there. We know what you're exposed to on TV and we know how to extend that reach into mobile."
> "Most streaming households subscribe to multiple streaming services. So, our line of sight to the screen can really help our partners."
> "We own the glass. We own the TV."
> "We own the glass"
> "Since we own the screen, and we own the operating system..."
LG's statements about how much they can help their advertising partners just get so much worse as the rest of the video goes on.
LG absolutely need to be slapped out of thinking they "own" anything after the point of sale, and the only way to do this, given how laden with spyware these TVs are, is to NEVER BUY THEM.
"own the glass" refers to the very last step in the advertising display chain. You might not notice it because it's invisible to the end user, but basically every step in the signal chain from studio to eyeball is trying to rip out the previous step's ads and overwrite them with its own. Glass is the last step before eyeballs, so it gets ultimate authority.
Advertising in the modern age is a very scummy industry and needs to be heavily reigned in.
All these companies are probably lying to some degree. There's no reason to trust them.
They are lying through their teeth. We know from independent investigations and reverse engineering efforts that the TVs capture audio/video for the mothership. Also, the devices are effectively remotely controlled and can be updated at a moment's notice to suit the current commercial strategy of the true owner of the device (it's not you).
They probably don’t have to lie. They can fingerprint and send that, like Vizio used to do.
Technically not sending audio or video.
language is not technical. its a lie
They say in their answer that they use audio fingerprinting for ACR instead of screenshots. Are you certain they are lying about this?
note they didn't say "LG TVs do not…" which might indicate whatever lawyer drafted this found a vaguely legally plausible way to attribute that to something other than ACR
"Not wittingly"[1] in a nutshell.
[1] "James Clapper claims the NSA does not carry out mass surveillance on Americans"; https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-committee/user-clip-james...
Every word in that statement is key for it to be true.
For example, if they screen-scrape locally and extract/collect metadata, then the statement is true technically true. I'm sure you can think of many other subtle variations of the truth where the statement is not false but still misleading.
Ballsy for LG to deny anything considering what started all this.
I don't think they're denying anything. I think they're muddying the technologies. They're saying "we don't need the screenshot to know what's displayed on your screen". With ACR, you don't need screenshots because you know what the content is. My understanding is that ACR is basically a fingerprint of the screenshot.
Am I misinterpreting their answer?
they don't collect the screenshots, they store a fingerprint of the screenshot. They are not lying. Also they do store but not collect.
Right, that hash is an entrypkint to match to a screenshot elsewhere. A perceptu hash, pseodo anonymity. A lawyers-coders lie. A polices parallel construction. LG still knows what you watch.
One aspect, perhaps worthy of some scrutiny, is how the database of hashes is produced. One presumes there's an assortment of cable boxes and/or satellite dishes feeding hundreds of channels into an ingestion mechanism that stores the fingerprints into a database. There are a lot of edge cases that are technically challenging, especially when considering the 210 or so local markets in the US. It'd be interesting to learn how that is done and whether any digital locks are circumvented in the process.
You don’t have to be perfect, just best effort. Sticking to the top dozen channels, commercials, plus the rolling list of top ten streaming movies/tv shows, probably lets you get 70%+ hit rate.
There will always be unidentifiable content (home movies, one of a trillion YouTube videos, video games, etc).
That's why I don't share my PGP public key, it's just a perceptu hash of my private key! Nice try, hackers!
You jest, but ssh/git has a similar problem. The client tries every key it can if the config is naive enough. So, the server knows which cluster of public keys identify the same person. Github is said to do this kind of fingerprinting.
I don't think you understand.
Actually keeping screenshots would be expensive. They of course don't care what the content is. You care what the PGP content is.
They care about what you're watching, so in the dystopian future, they can tell a government that your bin of hashes are 90% banned content and you should be denaturalized because you're clearly a communist cross-dressing monkey from mars.
It's bizarre you think it's equal to knowing a PGP key. It's not, the point is the database of hashes are good enough to tell them things about you. They could do a lot of different malicious things with that knowledge, primarily because it's not anonymous information. They likely have GPS, so they know where you are at the same time, even not having GPS, they include wifi, and some have cellular chips.
If you think what we're talking about equates to PGP, you are seriously confused about how privacy works.
Makes sense, in a dystopian future the dystopian government would issue 2026 era TVs to everyone but strangely ban all 2026 monitors (which aren't smart), closing the gap where the dystopian government is unable to stop people from rooting their amazon fire tv sticks (somehow).
My point is, the "slippery slope to dystopia" is full of rocks and I'd like to force you to mentally crahs into a few before anyone accepts your premise, show us you're worthy.
"ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker) to identify content and does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV. Where ACR is available and enabled, ACR-related information may be used for audience segmentation and viewing or audience trend analysis. Interest-based advertising and cross-device advertising require separate user consent through the applicable advertising-related agreements."
... and later ...
"ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology to identify content. Rather than collecting screenshots, screen recordings, or visual content from the TV screen, ACR extracts a digital fingerprint of the TV content being viewed using the TV’s internal audio processor (not a speaker). ACR does not collect or store voice recordings, other audio recordings, screenshots, screen images, or video recordings from the TV."
From here: https://www.lg.com/global/newsroom/news/statements/statement...
this. they're being very particular with their words.
Not at all. OP just selectively quoted to omit the part where they say they use audio fingerprinting instead.
Remember, "no answer" is still a data point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference
https://archive.is/jBJdd
Interesting that in the beginning it says 'We know that many TVs use automatic content recognition (ACR)' but according to answers none of those manufacturers do.
So which TVs do the ACRs, and why Verge did not send those questions to them? Hisense?
None of the manufacturers who answered that question admitted to using ACR via screenshot. LG uses audio samples, which is basically the same. Google admitted that some of their hardware OEMs may install ACR. Sony and Hisense didn't answer, but have both been reported to use ACR. The TCL TVs that come with Roku I assume do it as well.
> The TCL TVs that come with Roku I assume do it as well
They definitely do, I have a little snippet on their image recognition ACR from when I hacked my Roku TV here: https://blog.ammaraskar.com/roku-tv-philips-hues/#reverse-en...
Wait did they claim to not use screenshots during ACR generation? Or did they claim they don't _store_ screenshots.
I think they're using "collect" to mean something specific and "store" to mean something specific, neither of which fit our definition of collect and store.
Sony Bravia TVs, at least the 2015 model, bundle the tv.samba.ssm package, and the TV made periodic requests to the samba.tv domain without opting into anything. Samba TV is a spyware company in the ACR business.
Here's the APK in case you'd like to take a closer look: https://files.zajc.tel/unlist/6361bb6b86f2ed10e2e75a0deb3269...
FYI I disabled the app (alongside many other undesirable apps) on my Sony TV via adb and there's no longer network requests to samba.tv, and everything I care about is still working fine.
This would be an interesting reverse engineering exercise for Claude or GPT. Anyone interested in spending some tokens?
> which TVs do the $EvilsThingForMoney
That the Television Business transformed from a) an advertising conduit to b) a propaganda conduit to c) a live-surveillance technology tells you all you need to know.
Whether the Corporations answer your questions or not, their claims of doing The Right Thing are untrustworthy.
> but according to answers none of those manufacturers do.
Literally, LG's answer in TFA says they do, despite the mealy-mouthed-ness around not capturing screenshots.
watch videos on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Netflix, Apple TV, etc. so that the telemetry at least goes directly to the vendors and their partners in an accurate, compressed channel directly associated with your subscription account
(i am joking but the cognitive dissonance about telemetry is so stupid. you are watching TV on a subscription service, someone already knows who is watching what.)
That's a fine argument if you're watching videos on those platforms, but ACR also phones home when you're watching local content, too. Your Jellyfin server, Blurays, video games, content from your computer, it all goes back to the mothership.
your internet connected videogames on consoles report telemetry
you are running jellyfin on a device, like a NAS. it reports telemetry. docker reports telemetry. you download jellyfin, microsoft gets the telemetry. you update jellyfin, it gets the telemetry. you download radarr, docker and microsoft get the telemetry... all of this stuff reports telemetry. github, you can see your own repositories' usage and telemetry! graphs/traffic. it's all there...
> you are running jellyfin on a device, like a NAS. it reports telemetry
Jellyfin Server packages are hosted on repo.jellyfin.org, so the Jellyfin organisation gets the data that you're probably still running Jellyfin and want updates, not Microsoft. I will accept that if you use the Dockerised version, Docker or GitHub will get that data instead. None of this is "telemetry", e.g. detailed usage information. It's quid-pro-quo; you want to know if there are updates, you ask the update server, it records that your IP looked for updates.
Jellyfin Server collects data and stores it locally on your device in logs and its database (e.g. viewing data, login sessions). This data doesn't leave your device.
What Jellyfin Server _will_ share a lot of, is data about your collection, to its metadata providers. You chose those when setting up your libraries. In return, they hand back nice metadata and pictures. So TheTVDB.com, OMDB, MusicBrainz and others you've configured, get queried about "Film name (year)" or "TV series S01E01" or "Band name Album name" and thus learn everything that's in your collection... but not whether or when you've watched it.
I play games, I know Sony knows about what I play. I watch netflix, I know Netflix knows what I watch.
Etc...
But there is a difference between the company whose services I use knowing about the service use, and the television mfg knowing about all of my activity.
It’s very difficult to know, in their contractual language, that the providers don’t aggregate their information in some way.
Why? Why is Microsoft and Netflix any better of a steward than LG? If you don't like LG TVs, why do you keep buying them?
As others have pointed out, Microsoft does not get to know what I'm watching, when I'm watching it, or that watching it ever occurred. They may know that an IP which is occasionally associated with other things I do pulls a number of container images from GitHub every so often, and that a small minority of those container images are for applications that can host local media content.
Conflating that with actively spying on the content of my television programming is wrong.
here are some scenarios:
you pay for a subscription, the subscription service knows what you are watching. 90% or so of people.
you download a torrent, bro, your IP address is shared in the swarm that anyone, without authorization, can see.
you are in a private tracker, every profile is open!
you visit some website for a stream. the website has tracking.
somebody, somewhere, somebody big and knowledgable and sophisticated in all the scenarios, not some little adversary but all these 1,000 or so ad-tech and analytics companies, knows what the content of you, you specifically, you are watching.
> you pay for a subscription
No, I don't.
> you download a torrent, bro, your IP address is shared in the swarm that anyone, without authorization, can see.
No, I don't, but even if I did, who torrents from a residential IP without a VPN in 2026?
> you visit some website for a stream. the website has tracking.
No, I don't, but even if I did, who browses the web in 2026 without at LEAST client-side tracker blocking, if not DNS-based?
But these are all actually kind of moot points, because again, none of these are examples of corporations spying on what I'm watching.
That's not the point. They're all terrible stewards. It's a trade off, as they each provide me services that suit me. It's also why each one only gets a limited slice of my data.
But my television - bought and paid for - doesn't provide me any service beyond displaying images. It is a commodity, and TV manufacturers are trying to get not just a slice (which would also be too much), but their own copy of the whole pie.
It's more of a statement that "Or" is better than "And" I think.
> you are running jellyfin on a device, like a NAS. it reports telemetry. docker reports telemetry. you download jellyfin, microsoft gets the telemetry. you update jellyfin, it gets the telemetry. you download radarr, docker and microsoft get the telemetry...
Not if you run one of the "good" Linux distros and FOSS tools like Podman. Then there is no telemetry at all.
The AOSP (Android core) does hardcode some Google services like a fallback DNS. I patched that out of the source for an x86 Android build that runs on my TV box. So there can be zero or very little telemetry if you actively avoid it. You mostly need to avoid Big Tech stuff.
My Jellyfin server is not allowed to contact the internet. Videos are downloaded from Usenet then rsync'd over to the Jellyfin server for viewing. I don't use Docker because it's a black box I don't understand. I don't use Microsoft. The Jellyfin server is updated from my local deb repo. I don't use Github because it's microsoft trash. I don't play games on modern consoles.
Just because you took the easy way out doesn't mean it's hopeless.
Did I consent someplace to having my TV tell its manufacturer that I am using an Amazon fire stick? No? Then it's wrong for my TV to send that info out.
We need to differentiate "actually consented" versus "clicked accept on an intentionally misleading, long EULA that popped up on the screen once".
These companies get away with these things in part because they can point to users accepting some agreement by using the service where clause 12 subsection 4 addendum C says they can do it, using some terminology nobody reads or understands.
Also, how accessible is the EULA before your purchase of a large hardware object which you are not designed to use to read an EULA? Where's my TV EULA?
My LG TV did pop up asking for EULA consent before being able to use WebOS. I did not consent to microphone terms (which has the infamous terms saying it’s your responsibility not to break eavesdropping laws). So the microphone function doesn’t work, which is fine.
The EULA terms I did agree to likely had a clause allowing for returning the TV to not be a contract of cohesion. As for why I consented to ACR, I guess I have a lot going on and privacy (for, say, location data) in a contractual way is difficult.
Supposedly the LG TV does not send ACR data out without agreeing to the EULA. It gets into non-falsifiablity to just say “duh, of course they do.” Well, it’s what they say and there’s no evidence they do if the EULA isn’t agreed.
Now the fire stick and its services have their own EULAs.
The libertarian contractual ideology obviously falls apart in real-world conditions. I had to agree to a lengthy contract to pay for parking after I had already parked. I had to rely on unconscionablity or some practicality (I.e. assuming I didn’t sign over one million dollars in the parking EULA) to get through my day.
Struggling to understand your point here. Is it if anyone knows something about you, you should accept _everyone_ knowing that about you?
yeah, if you're watching porn on your computer, the porn website already knows, so they'd might as well forward that info straight to your mother
Or they could just be lying. I honestly expect it at this point.
Have to make it regulation and law, with penalties for lying. Regime change has made this more likely, call your Congressional representative. Loop in Louis Rossmann and fulu.org if necessary.
It is fundamentally a citizen data security and data privacy issue, which only regulation and the law can solve for (i argue, based on all available evidence and information). But asking nicely or trusting corporations and management? lol, rofl even.
Not just penalties, penalties with teeth, and an actual enforcement plan or clear liability tied to their ability to operate in a given market.
It is illegal for a publicly traded company to lie about things that their shareholders might care about.
That's because our laws are written to protect shareholders but not you
Regime change has arrived, and it is time to write better laws.
Meet the new regime, same as the old regime. Watch, they won't change anything.
Nihilism is free, you are welcome to it. They haven't even been seated yet (takes place on January 3rd, 2027), we should give it a chance, I think. The nihilism remains available if we are disappointed by giving new folks a chance. Hope is not a strategy, but we must keep some, as a treat, imho.
Right now there are essentially zero penalties for lying about this stuff. So if lying makes them money, they are going to lie.
At least we know what their (most anyway) answers are and security researcher can start verifying where they are lying. You also have to look very hard at the language used to answer many of these questions as words can often be misleading...
The problem is the regulators in the US are in bed with the companies so they can say whatever and do the complete opposite and then get fined a trivial amount of money and just keep doing it
Not only that, but most of the public is oblivious or unconcerned about this topic.
Because the news is in bed with them too.
Because most people don't give a shit until something negative happens to them from that direct source.
Yeah. This is exactly the problem. There is too much of a disconnect from the action to the impact in this case. I think if most people saw precisely what data is collected on them and how it is used (and how often it is part of data breaches from these identity resolution platforms and third parties), I think they'd care more.
But nearly everyone has more urgent and pressing concerns like making monthly rent or a medical bill or gas money. So ACR on a TV doesn't register.
> if most people saw precisely what data is collected on them and how it is used (and how often it is part of data breaches from these identity resolution platforms and third parties), I think they'd care more.
What are the chances of an individual being negatively affected in a serious way?
Intuitively, I expect it to be so negligible that it isn't worth losing sleep over.
I would say the chances of a negative impact is on par with the chances of negative impacts on most of the hottest debate topics such as guns and abortion. Identity theft, swatting/doxxing, and stalking can have serious impacts and are not that uncommon. They're just uncommon enough that most people don't care until it happens to them.
It's more profitable for LG to sell your data to advertisers than to build and sell the TV itself
The negative effect is the exact sky high prices that Americans keep complaining about. The point of all that advertising data is to nudge you towards accepting higher prices or buying things you otherwise wouldn't.
Every dollar of revenue in the advertising industry is money taken from consumers and spent on unproductive waste to get you to spend more money instead of anything like making a product better or investing in capacity or researching and developing new products.
Google makes money by making you spend more money. Facebook makes money by making you spend more money.
Still low, but people do register creepiness when they directly see the creepiness, even if nothing resulted from it yet.
This is one of those things that is hard to quantify. Although I'm sure someone has. It negatively impacts society overall, very slowly over time. It has the effect of eroding private life in subtle way that it's barely noticeable until we find ourselves in a surveillance state where corruption is everywhere. Let me know if that sounds familiar to you.
I did a presentation on surveillance capitalism awhile back[0]
[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/presentations/overcoming-survei...
> What are the chances of an individual being negatively affected in a serious way?
Perhaps if said individual is a politician and a television is compromised to record what happens in their home (or even bedroom).
Or perhaps compromise televisions in hotel rooms (politician or not).
I really don't think most people would care more when you show them examples of others. Some people would, but most would not. We see this all the time with legislation around rights in the US. Much of the voting population lack the capacity for deep critical thought and don't care to practice empathy from even a devil's advocate perspective. Stuff like tracking speech/identity online, abortion debate, gun debate, etc. Nobody cares unless they are directly affected.
Take guns for example. If you use guns, then you see a value to them and generally oppose mire restrictions. If you have been shot or robbed with a gun (or know people who have), then you dont see the value of guns and want more restrictions. If you are neither of these things then its easy to not care and say sure to more restrictions because they don't impact you and aound like they might provide some benefit, especially if just looking at the surfqce level stats. Same concept for abortion and online tracking/identity, especially once you mix in the think-of-the-children arguments in each of these.
And something negative hardly ever happens to them, or anyone, from that direct source, so why spend a brain cell on it.
Or because it's so secretive the people don't even know the source was from their device spying on them. "Oh, some hacker on the darknet stole my data" is the track that many non-tech people would see this.
The worst thing for privacy advocates is that there has yet to be a general public reckoning with the ad-economy of the last 20 years.
For all intents and purposes, the average person who has paid no mind to their privacy over that time period is really no better or worse off than the person who has devoted hours to combating all forms of invasion.
If there was a mass scale visible event of privacy loss, i.e. Meta somehow ends up in a shamelessly evil sociopaths hands who decides to start very publicly embarrassing random people with privately collected data, there would be very swift and immediate action (yes the parallels here are not lost on me, scale is the difference)
Just look at datacenters. The public didn't even know what a DC was 6 months ago, and now politicians are getting elected to ban them. What happened? AI gave the mass public a common sensation of fear. Privacy has still not had it's "AI fear" moment.
> Meta somehow ends up in a shamelessly evil sociopaths hands
It's not clear that it isn't already, but you know, lawful evil rather than chaotic evil.
You see that, Timmy? Every time someone complains about something, somenone says that it happens because no one cares. What’s the logical conclusion, then? To not care yourself. Because it would be too difficult to change anything if you’re completely alone. And so you have thousands of people each in their own bubble, each thinking that they are alone in caring about, well, anything, and that therefore nothing can be done.
they should portray the tv companies as child predators that spy and record children , cuz they are perverts and need this data feed their sick habits and csam training models. cuz atleast think of the children , while u fudge the adults.
Because they have other things to worry about. Certainly you realize how privileged a world you have to live in to be able to spend time worrying about whether your TV is spying on you, right?
Sure, but I would hope food, shelter, clothing, and not being spied on would be available to most citizens, and not just those who are privileged.
You put those things in the same sentence but they don't even remotely carry the same weight. People are sick and dying and have to weigh weather or not they want to declare bankruptcy or go to the doctor. Or buy their medication vs buying food. Their TV serving them directed ads isn't even in the same universe.
You're arguing the same thing, just from a different perspective.
Ah yes, because there are people who are hungry in the world, nobody should be concerned about anything until world hunger is solved.
I just said they aren't in the same universe and it's unrealistic to think TV ads are on the radar for the average person struggling to pay bills.
Ok sure, but if you're going to play that card, then you have to also say that they can and should recognize that those "other" things are often also symptoms of the same disease.
People are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time (and they are capable of placing appropriate energy towards the walking to not trip because they were too focused on the gum chewing...)
I'n not "playing that card", i'm explaining that the "because the news is in bed with them" is not even close to a major reason why they don't care. You are correct they can walk and chew gum, but maybe not spin 1000 plates in the air at once.
When people have tons of things to deal with, this falls by the wayside, news or not.
When they don't, sure, maybe the news would matter more.
On the flipside, how fucked up the world is that TVs spying on you had become normalized.
The problem isn't with people being too busy, it shouldn't be up to the people, it should be a government regulation problem. There's a lot of 'todo' around potential breaches of PII, so why not do something about the ridiculously large and seemingly increasing trade in exactly that from almost anything you purchase nowadays, including the place you purchase it from. And they're all selling it to aggregators and advertisers and any other shady c*nt with enough cash to buy it.
... and now it's all going to be fed into AI for additional pattern matching and de-aggregation and re-identification, because that's where the return on investment is. And once it's in there, there ain't no cleaning it out again. You're in the corpus, all your personality fingerprints, forever.
Gross governmental negligence across the entire West.
And how privileged a world the _other_ people live in where someone else is worrying about it _for_ them.
The news? Or the underprivileged? The news doesn’t cater to the underprivileged in general, and might well be “in bed with” companies on this point.
It’s curious this ritual of relatively well-off individuals—and your bio supports that theory—pointing fingers at each other for having privilege. Certainly when they are talking about a topic that affects everyone with a TV, not whatever people of their means get up to that the underprivilged don’t.
People who care could do the work for all of us. It’s not like everyone needs to care about surveillance in television gadgets in order to make a difference.
Or, you know, not necessarily that focused. The comment you are replying to just said that the news are in bed with companies. That often generalizes beyond tech gadgets.
> unconcerned
One would think that should cause more people who are paranoid to reconsider their assumptions and calibrate their concern-level.
Is that really the problem?
Or is the bigger problem that there is no privacy-friendly consumer grade TV available on the market?
Did any of them confirm the myth that the TV attempts to auto connect to any public wifi it can find or comes with a built in 5G modem?
I don't really many (or any?) people suggesting that they're currently using 5G modems. Just that it is a likely next step assuming hardware costs go down to make it worth the hassle as a secondary channel.
The public wifi one is funny. It seems totally like something they'd do, but totally open wifi doesn't really exist anymore so the window for that scam is likely closed. I doubt they'll bother with it at this point.
More likely would be cutting Comcast in on things in return for using the public wifi channels they have on their customer's routers that they already use for cell service. But it might be easier/cheaper to just make not connecting to wifi more and more painful for customers instead though, you only need to trick/wear down one user of the household to win this battle so if they just slowly turn up the harassment feature they'll get 99% of people in the end.
Many ISP-provided routers also include, by default, a completely separate WiFi network (that, as far as I know, is usually separate from your plan bandwidth) for other customers of the ISP to be able to use while they're out and about. It would be trivial for TV manufacturers to enter into agreements with those ISPs authorizing them to connect to those SSIDs.
Amazon also could try connecting to their sidewalk network that many of their ring/Alexa devices use to connect to a neighbors 'internet' via LORA. so asking specifically about wifi is not broad enough of a question.
This would be trivial to test. Just drive your TV and unsecured wifi AP out to the middle of nowhere and see if it tries to connect.
Why not run hostapd in open mode with logging on and see if it bites?
Portable power sources do exist
Yeah, sure. I'll buy a powerstation while I'm at it. Why not? My TV doesn't even fit in my car, so I guess I'll have to buy a bigger car too. Just so I can figure out if the TV connects to any random open AP.
Better yet: remove the circuit board, which is much smaller than the TV itself.
RTFA
Always good advice, but to answer their question, only Samsung mentioned that their TVs do not connect to open wifi networks on their own, and the question specifically was not asked.
The article doesn't adequately address this actually.
The interviewer asked "Does disconnecting a TV from the internet prevent all these forms of data transmission?". Obviously if the TV is completely disconnected from any internet connection then it can't transmit the data, but that would require removing the wifi radio itself.
Disconnecting the TV from your home wifi still means they can try to connect to any other public wifi. Samsung were the only ones who explicitly addressed that in their answer: "Samsung TVs do not connect to open Wi-Fi networks on their own."
Or even: Paste the article in any AI and ask it
I honestly don't care enough to wade through it.
It's just usually with Smart TV articles, someone takes a break from their Black Helicopters Tracking app to show up and repeat it.
I unfortunately bought an LG tv a while back. Even if you didn't connect it to wifi, they apparently connect to Comcast/xfinity wifi, which is very common in the world.
I want to figure out how to disable the connection inside the tv, because I don't trust their software setting. Has anyone described how to do that? Is there an antenna that could be removed, is there wire that can be snipped that would block it from transmitting?
I know it's a mostly solid state connection.
I think it is better to use AI to root the devices, get them to run linux and run an open source media app. The TV manufacturer's default OS is low value.
The value is that they can display copy protected 4K content, open source media apps cannot.
In other words, they successfully implemented a vertically integrated monopoly, and you're rewarding them for it?
That won't alter behavior positively.
Exactly, if anything it motivates me to go torrenting, even though I had stopped doing that for 20 years
Why wait? Just do it. You get high-quality DRM-free files without paying a cent.
This can only be done on Goolge TVs, correct?
Has this even been done by anyone, ever?
Is there any TV I can buy that doesn't spy on me?
Every time this discussion comes up folks point out that you can dumb displays marketed for business use. But they typically cost way more.
Conventional advice is to buy a smart TV and never connect it to the internet. Just plug in [device of your choice] to HDMI.
> But they typically cost way more.
Yes, because the price is not subsidized from the selling of personal information.
> “The business model is shifting away from making money on TV sets and instead to making money on ads and data that is delivered by those TV sets,” said Paul Gray, Omdia’s Research Director, Consumer Electronics and Devices, at last week’s HbbTV Symposium in London.
* https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2024/11/18/tv-companies-sell...
This is just made up. Spectre sells TVs that do not have any smart features and they do not cost any more than similarly sized TVs.
Where do you buy those? Searching tells me that Sceptre has no stock.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1wbjk0o/sceptre_tv...
The Amazon and Walmart links given on Sceptre's product pages don't link to any televisions. Example: https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV/U515CV-UMRDD-50-4K-UHD-...
Ah beans, I bought mine a while back, and assumed since they were still listed on the website they were still available. Guess there is no option anymore.
> Yes, because the price is not subsidized from the selling of personal information.
No, it's because their target is businesses which aren't so sensitive to price and like the extended warranty that comes with.
They also are rated to be on 24/7 at very high brightness levels so they are visible in bright areas.
That too, although more higher-end OLEDs are equivalent. The problem is that you can't buy the commercial displays: I recently wanted to replace an old LG and tried to get the Sony FW-65BZ40L (which has amazing specs), but I couldn't find a reseller willing to sell it to me. I called a couple of them, but they were not interested in dealing with a private individual, only with companies.
Problem is that they have wifi chips that will scan and connect to cell phones. The TV manufacturers have agreements with the cell providers for open wifi services on all their phones so you can't block it unless you live in the middle of nowhere and even that may change with LEO satellite service.
I opened up my LG TV because I saw it doing aggressive wifi scanning even when the wifi was "disabled" and physically removed the antenna wire and wrapped the whole guts in RF blocking foil.
I believe you on the aggressive WiFi scanning but I’d have to see concrete proof about the phone part to believe it. Draining users phone batteries via WiFi hotspot functionality that the phone doesn’t even show to the user would be a very big deal.
I imagine if they were going to strike a deal with the phone companies they’d just embed cell chips in the TVs and connect directly.
There used to be several different things for free wifi for subscribers that also got used by national networks. Cellco, AT&Ts home boxes had open wifi that was available to any AT&T subscriber for wi-fi calling, etc.
Comcast/Xfinity does this.
I don't know if they do it either, but if they use hashes they are in no way draining the battery of someone's phone to send a few bytes every so often. That's not me saying it's okay, mind you.
I've told myself if they start putting 5G in TVs I would either glue a faraday mesh to the back or open up the TV and ground out the antenna or remove the WiFi chip if possible.
If they would keep the spying to matching my shows with programs that are being aired or on popular streaming services, sports, or whether I mute the commercials, that wouldn't bother me. Screen grabs would , especially if I use it on my computer. But history has shown this starts off benign and eventually devolve into listening to the room at all hours and keeping it forever in a Bluffdale data center because "think of the children" / "national security".
> if they use hashes they are in no way draining the battery of someone's phone to send a few bytes every so often
I was more thinking of the discoverability aspect. The phone (presumably) would have to be constantly advertising the availability of a hotspot.
But honestly the bigger thing that makes me not believe it is the scale of conspiracy required. All companies, Apple included, would have to secretly be in on it.
> The TV manufacturers have agreements with the cell providers for open wifi services on all their phones so you can't block
That's a strong statement, what's your source?
Where I work, several pieces of equipment from vendors have embedded cellular and wifi that the vendor pays to have service with ATT or Verizon.
That is very, very different to what you described.
I’m sorry what? There are phone network providers that pimp out your phone’s wifi and data connection without telling you?
I’m not sure I believe you? (Not that I can’t believe a company would do something dodgy behind your back, but I just don’t think our phones would go that far off piste - opening a wifi network has battery power implications that I think would have been discovered/widely known before)
Not only that, if you have home internet they will pimp it out to nearby cellphones because that helps patch up weak network connectivity in certain areas.
Comcast / Xfinity definitely does this. I have gotten many 'suspicious activity' CAPTCHAs on popular websites while using my home internet because of this. The routers provided by Xfinity are very locked down so you can't do anything about it.
Let's not even get into WiFi Motion which uses WiFi to track you inside the house. I'm sure it is enabled by default in most households [1]
[1] https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion
You can get a gigabit router for $100 that works on xfinity which is worth it over their gear. Which is typically sub optimal anyway.
Last I checked you can still turn this feature off.
Please elaborate on that. I want to do that. Was it obvious what to do, and did it not require destroying a bunch of stuff?
I want to do this for my lg too.
I believe they have a bluetooth antenna and a wifi. Was there just an obvious thing to cut?
Found this - looks straightforward, nothing crazy like messing with a board, just look for the wifi module circuit board inside the tv - and remove it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9WOI5fFtj0
also https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/539438/Want+to+remove+43...
Is there any source you can actually cite for the cell phone bit…?
I know the services exist for various things but specific to TVs, it was just a hardware hacking thread on Reddit and a few mentions on X. Nothing concrete.
May I ask what model of TV and if it didn't have a e-key wifi module that could be removed rather than wrapped inside? Mine is older but the service manual seems to indicate there is just a regular module in there I could pop out.
From last year. It has a board at the bottom, but I didn't want to remove it (the TV gave all kinds of warnings and took forever to turn on if it was removed).
> the TV gave all kinds of warnings and took forever to turn on if it was removed
Ugh, I was afraid of that kind of thing. The manual for my older LG indicates there's UI option to disable wifi entirely. Of course, it doesn't actually exist.
Not a shred of proof has ever been provided for something so trivial to test.
Scanning neighboring wifi networks does not mean it's connecting to them.
Yes, a common response is not to connect to WiFi, but I'm not 100% persuaded that it's a good answer. I don't connect my Kindle or some medical equipment to WiFi, but somehow they both (possibly Over The Air tech) are shared with the companies. Also, Amazon Sidewalk shares my bandwidth with others nearby against my stated wishes.
Are they shipping TVs with that capability, though? I understand a medical device needing cellular in case wifi goes down, but would they go through that effort for a TV?
They don't, this is just a persistent myth.
Oh ok. Sorta figured (and hoped the was the case). I bought a TV 4 years ago and refuse to hook connect it to the internet, but I've always wondered if newer ones are making that less effective.
> ...this is just a persistent myth.
...just like "These TVs are recording what you're saying and analyzing what you're watching and sending that data back to HQ." was a persistent myth.
These companies have been demonstrated to give zero shits about your privacy and -at least in the US- won't be meaningfully punished for behaving in profoundly antisocial ways, so the smart move is to expect that they are or very soon will be making full use of the hardware that's installed in that TV that you paid to take home from the store.
The "analyzing what you're watching and sending it back to HQ" has been known about for years, certainly since shortly after the tech was rolled out widely. I don't recall anyone ever calling it a myth. So why you're comparing it to something that lots of people talk about and not a single soul has ever proven (despite it being dead easy to prove) is a mystery.
> I don't recall anyone ever calling it a myth.
I've heard so many people call it a myth. SO many. Even today, folks disbelieve it.
> ...not a single soul has ever proven...
A manufacturer that will do this [0] absolutely has the attitude required to configure their products to autonomously discover and connect to wifi or other data-transmission networks and phone home when that product hasn't been provided with an Internet connection.
To put it another way: If you see a raving guy out on the street who's very obviously crazy and is wildly brandishing a firearm, you don't wait until he squeezes off a round or three before deciding to behave as if he's capable of shooting someone.
[0] <https://x.com/log4j/status/2113762242327892456>
Except testing if a TV connects to an open WiFi network when networking has not been setup/disabled is trivial yet not a soul claiming they do this has ever provided a shred of evidence.
Is there a way to connect a TV to LAN but not WAN? Because I don't use any Internet-connected services, but I do stream media to my TV from my personal Jellyfin server through LAN.
u need a router or switch that allows you to block things with a firewall and/or vlans For example, put the tv on a vlan, that can only talk to the server. Add additional rules for other stuff
Hey thanks.
Then, someone's going to say that TVs could be automatically connecting to open Wi-Fi networks. I don't think that's a thing any more. I haven't seen any open Wi-Fi networks around me in a long time.
I'd love for a TV to include a 4G/5G connection that they pay for; it'll be hacked for free Internet before the first production run leaves the store shelves.
Open up the TV and remove the WiFi board.
Is it always a separate board? I'm not too familiar with TV boards, but most other things designed to run embeded Linux have the Wi-Fi at least soldered on to the board, and at most part of the same SoC that contains the CPU.
Perhaps not always, but in many popular models like the LG C-series, the WiFi hardware is a separate board:
https://partpricecheck.com/parts-lookup/lg-oled65c5aua-oled6...
"Your device of choice" is not a solution. Your device of choice is still "spying on you" per the definitions provided here.
They have microphones and listen to conversations while transcribing the words to listen for "wake words". THey are in fact always awake, and transcribing the words they hear.
They all send telemetry and usage data and they all scan for devices in your home and SSIDs.
The only difference is that you think you can trust these devices vs the TVs which use ACR.
I dont see much of a difference here.
AppleTVs do not use ACR. They also allow you to turn off Siri, location tracking, analytics data, voice input data, etc.
so, no they are not in fact all sending telemetry and usage data
That may be true. But remember to location track all they need is your wifis SSID and your IP. Opt out is good, most users by design have a hard time turning this stuff off. My wife has had many difficulties trying to turn off Siri and keep it off for years.
$1050:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1828914-REG/samsung_q...3 HDMI ports. Any downsides using as a TV?
Reposting from nine days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50332351
It's an edge-lit VA with no local dimming so it's not going to look great compared to most modern TVs, especially at that price point
Here are the options I have found, targeted at roughly 85" (because that is what I am looking for):
Sceptre U860CV-UMRD: 4k HDR @ 60 Hz(8 ms), 300 nits LCD(DLED), 3xHDMI 2.0 (HDCP 2.2) ACR, OS: None?
Samsung QB85C-N: 4k HDR @ 75 Hz(10 ms), 350 nits LCD(VA), 3xHDMI 2.0 (HDCP ?) 1xACR, OS: Tizen 7.0, AV1 support
LG 86UR340C9UD: 4k HDR @ 120 Hz (5 ms), 330 nits LCD(DLED), 2xHDMI ? (HDCP 2.0) 1xACR, OS: webOS 6.0
ViewSonic CDE86G3: 4k (not HDR) @ 60 Hz(?? ms), 500 nits LCD(VA), 3xHDMI 2.0 (HCDP 2.2) 1xACR, OS: None?
And, because this is HN, even though it is only 65":
Flanders Scientific: XMP651: 4k HDR @ 60 Hz (?? ms), up to 4000 nits QD-OLED, 1xHDMI ? (no HDCP) 4xSDI, OS: None?
I believe none of these have Wifi. None of them is perfect. Only the Flanders Scientific model has an OLED display, but it is roughly 10x the price of the others (this is a reference monitor, which is very much not targeted at consumers). It also only comes in sizes up to 65" and only has one HDMI port, which does not support HDCP at all. If you only need 55", they have a 2000 nit display (V550) that supports regular HDMI inputs (but is still quite expensive).
Of the remaining displays, the ViewSonic is the brightest, but does not have HDR support. The LG display supports the highest refresh rate and is probably the cheapest, but only has HDCP 2.0 (I think?), and runs webOS, which I view as the least trustworthy of the options. The Samsung display is the only one with built-in AV1 support (if that matters to you). They also have some older models (e.g., BE85FX-H), which may still be available somewhat cheaper, but I can find very little information on them. None of the displays appear to support HDMI 2.1 or 2.2, so 4k HDR is limited 4:2:0 chroma at 60 Hz. The ones labeled "OS: None?" clearly have an OS (the ViewSonic one advertises a 7 second boot time, for example, despite being labeled "OS-Free"), but it does not appear to be any of the major known-problematic ones.
I have no direct experience with any of these, so I cannot prove that they are not still spying on you.
Another dimension to consider might just be displays which are easily opened and the wireless hardware removed.
Unfortunately a lot of large displays really aren't safe to open -- you're likely to break the screen doing it. But I have seen some results on LG tvs that have the wireless hardware on a separate removable board that the TV runs fine without.
If the alternative is a commercial signboard display or a reference monitor though one might be better off buying N consumer TVs and accidentally destroying a couple. ... and the question of giving money to companies bundling spyware might be better addressed by spending the price difference funding efforts to stop the practice via other means (e.g. outlawing it... to the extent that its not already unlawful, lobbying state AGs to take action to the extent that it is...).
Just buy a consumer TV and don't connect it to the internet. Remove the WiFi board or desolder the chip if you must. It's better than paying five times as much for a worse display.
I have a Sceptre display, they no longer make or sell TVs.
I bought an LG commercial display at the exorbitant $1k price point a few years ago and every single time I walk past it I feel good about the money I spent. Does it look worse? Probably? Did I plug in a FireTV stick that is also spying on me? Yes. But I still consider it to have been preferable to just have a (relatively) dumb display that does not know when I play a dvd or blu ray and can’t tattle on me if I connect the TV to my Game console and play something embarrassing like Train Simulator 17 Nerd Edition.
Didn’t expect the fire stick
(Wish Apple had an incredible response to every single question, but while I’m still a fan, not going to use this comment as a plug… A little disappointed)
> Nerd Edition
Ooooh the expansion dropped!!
Samsung? The company displaying ads on the expensive fridges?
I'm not sure they're not doing something else.
Edit: watch the video "Reverse Engineering Proves What We Suspected All Along" on the Low Level YouTube channel for the example.
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I sure do love paying 2x the price for less hardware.
∞x less ick
Maybe gotta find one used from a business offloading their old ones.
Practically speaking I would just buy whatever and then not connect it to the internet. (Theoretically if there's an unsecured wifi network with no login requirement in the vicinity the TV could still connect to it and send your data, but no one has demonstrated any TVs actually doing that.)
Surprised this comment was so far down the page, exactly this. Just don't connect to the internet.
This is my plan when my beloved dumb TV dies. I'll statically add bunk ip configs tho and let it stew.
"Commercial" displays/televisions perhaps:
* https://www.samsung.com/us/business/commercial-tvs/all-comme...
You can pay a significant premium for a "business" TV but the cost effective option is to get a consumer grade television and never allow it to connect to the internet.
Spectre still sells dumb TVs. The panels are fine, though they don't have any OLED options. Sound quality is...Well, most people don't use TV audio anyway.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1914223-REG/viewsonic...
65" VA (not edge-lit, DLED) without any OS (doubt), $1000
Connect it to your router and use NextDNS/AdGuard on your home network
Monitors. Though it's a "for now", some of this has been sneaking in there.
Yeah but they cost ~$1000
Apple did/does not want to take the Sony/Samsung product diversification path, but it is a shame for them not to branch out more. An actual Apple branded TV under Tim Cook probably would have honestly respected our privacy. I blocked my LG TV's MAC address from accessing our wifi.
Misleading article. The most promising- Sony didn't participate. Should have named "we asked some of manufacturers ...".
I was impressed LG answered every question and quite directly, assuming they’re telling the truth.
I was quite disappointed in Apple for dodging so many of them and giving non-answers. They need to tone down the corporate speak and take a lesson from LG.
When asked if a user can erase everything the correct answer is not a thesis on privacy, it’s saying “Choosing Erase all settings and data will remove everything on the device back to factory fresh state”. They already have the perfect answer.
Apple has good answers for many of the questions they skipped too. But they look bad by not even trying to answer.
What makes you defend Apple when they won't defend themselves? If they have good answers why did they evade the question? Is it possible your basis for your belief they have good answers has changed and those answers will no longer be "good"?
I’m not defending them here. I was calling out the contrast between that and how their messaging looks terrible.
I know they do have good answers as I use the Apple TV and know what it does. They may not satisfy super hard-core privacy people, but if you’re willing to opt into the Apple ecosystem then within those constraints I think they’re very good.
But thank you for accusing me of being a fanboy. That was very productive.
My questions are genuine. Reading any intonation from the test is from your own mind.
Here is the first accusation at you in this thread: you read like an apple apologist
My biggest problem with Apple not answering so many of the questions is they heavily market themselves as being privacy first. This seemed like the perfect way to show their advantage in that regard but their choice to skip so many questions I think justifies more skepticism. Additionally basically every response from every company sounded very weaselly.
For instance in the microphone part, Apple says that it only listens to the wake word and you can disable that. But they don’t say that you can disable the far-field microphones entirely. Why not? If it was really good for privacy, couldn’t they have said you can configure it such that the only time any microphone is active is when you’re holding the microphone button? Wouldn’t that be the stronger claim? Why are all these claims so weak?
Disabling using the wake word would disable it entirely. That’s the only time it ever listens. The button thing is because there is a microphone directly on the remote so if you are using the button, there is no point in using the microphones on the Apple TV itself. There’s already one in a better position.
Anyway, I agree with you. If you want to be the “privacy“ company, then choosing not to answer when some of the worst companies in terms of privacy answered lots of stuff is a very bad look. It doesn’t make any sense other than if you’re trying to be ultra careful about not saying the wrong thing, which doesn’t improve my view of you.
When I got to the first question, where Apple didn’t answer, I was like “OK, whatever, you can skip one“. And then they answered like one more in the entire thing and skipped the rest.
Maybe I’m overly skeptical, but my read is that the microphones and a special processor only do one thing and that can be disabled. However they don’t say that the microphones are disabled. They don’t rule out the microphones being used in another way, with a different processor. Or am I wrong? A AND B does this. What about A and C? “No comment”.
I trust it because this is the same thing they’ve been doing on every product since you started being able to say “Hey Siri”.
People have always worried they’re doing more, but Apple has repeatedly put out descriptions of exactly how it works because they don’t want people to think the devices are spying on them. I don’t see why it would change for this one product. They already have to fight that rumor that comes up every couple years that phones are listening to people to show them advertisements.
The answer also seemed exactly the same to me as Google and Samsung’s answers about how they listen for wake words.
Almost all these TVs run Android. So where’s the GrapheneOS for TVs?
That would be a lot of work(as cellphones and their boot/ecosystem are vastly different) but hopefully we will see something similar someday.
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"Do your TVs transmit any information that could identify the location of their owner, including their public IP address, Wi-Fi network SSID, GPS coordinates, and/or actual street address?"
They forgot to ask about the MAC address. That was the first thing that popped into my mind.
This video hows how to remove the WiFi module from a TV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbky8aQS8G0
This is what you need to make the TV dumb and ensure it does not connect to open networks.
> 14. Does disconnecting a TV from the internet prevent all these forms of data transmission?
I wonder what other possibilities there would be here e.g. via radio or via Bluetooth to your mobile so that such a device can transmit? That would have been an interesting read
I could easily see a Sony tv or Roku communicating to a corresponding app on the lan, which relays to the relevant server. It was Meta that would have a native app open a localhost port and then websites in the native browser would use js to call out the tracking information to the installed app. That's how they got around Safari privacy protections
This is part of the plot of 1984, where people willing put these things in their homes.
Cherish your old TVs from the pre-IoT era, things are enshittifying faster than ever before in history.
I want to know what Sony said. Because apparently they responded to the request, but answered 0/17 questions
It sounds like the best option is to get a TV, never connect it to the Internet, and use a separate Roku device.
Or go a step further and build your own Linux HTPC.
Of course if you are already sharing everything about yourself with Google/Amazon/OpenAI/Anthropic then who cares?
Who cares? People who aren’t aware but do care.
Roku? That device tracking everything you watch, not just with ACR? :)
No screen doesn't imply no surveillance -- https://www.engadget.com/2227777/roku-how-to-stop-tracking-e...
Well well well, we know now which cat has had their face in the cream (aka who is clearly visible most guilty).. that would be Hisense, who got caught today and had nothing to say.
For all the company’s who had reponses along the lines of “we don’t do thing X that some others are doing”.. full bets it’s Hisense doing each of these things.
> I put together 17 yes-or-no questions...
And they still managed to answer them in multiple sentences, and sometimes multiple paragraphs.
Dell isn't in the list, so I guess we keep pretending that monitors and TVs are somehow different.
Does Dell manufacture monitors with Internet connection and/or microphones? Worst they could do would be through an automatically installed driver (on Windows, like LG did).
Monitors like the P2726DEB have Ethernet, a built in webcam and a built in microphone.
Mine only has the Ethernet port, since it has a built in docking station, but they still could take snapshots of what is on my screen. For now, I am trusting DELL a lot more, though. Part of that is having paid about three grand for my U5226KW. At that price they better don't need to spy on me to make money.
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Funny how the Verge itself is asking for money if you don't let them spy on you.
> looks at TV, forgetting its brand.
Toshiba.
Hmm. Not in this list.
Toshiba don't make TV's anymore, haven't for a long time (around a decade). Unless it's very old your TV is some other brand rebadged as Toshiba.
If you're in the US it was almost certainly made by Hisense. If you're in Europe it'll be Vestel.
It's 10-11 years old. I must have bagged the last one!
Same with Philips for me. Would have been interesting to know.
Philips TVs are LGs nowadays afaik.
There's Samsung, LG, Sony designs TVs but has them made elsewhere, and Vestel. All of the cheaper brands are made by Vestel.
I was disappointed that the article described Apple's answers to some questions as not direct. They should have published the indirect answer. Let the reader judge the answers.
Disagree - when a company responds with mealy-mouthed corporate gruel, designed in bad faith to obfuscate and distract, there should be no obligation on the part of the investigator to propagate it.
Why not both? Have the reporter editorialize in the article itself but link to sources and references including the full response as a way of showing their work and letting readers validate.
I'd argue that this just descends into sophistry. If the journalist isn't as convincing as the corporate speak, the company could potentially pull the wool over a reader's eyes.
I think "chose not to provide a direct answer" is pretty clearly "technically they responded, but they waffled about in such a way as to have provided no meaningful information".
The article isn't sponsored and so is under no obligation to reproduce what likely amounts to ad copy.
That is called gate keeping or hoarding information. I read other answers that were full of weasel words and yet still published. Censoring is not the same as quoting.
Because companies like Apple pay spin doctors to wordsmith it so that it sounds harmless to the lay person when in fact it may be the total opposite.
And?
Asking for a journalist to please protect me from the direct truth has been a big fuck up in the last century.
I'm fine with that. The withholding of answer is an editorial choice that reflects poorly on the reporting.
Because the traditional press believes their readers are idiots that cannot think for themselves and so they require "the reporter" to interpret for them and tell them what to think about whatever topic the article concerns. This is also a big reason why traditional press outlets never link to original sources on their websites when such sources actually exist (despite the entire point of "the web" being to link together disparate sources)[1]. Doing so would mean their readers are not dependent upon them, the priests in the high castle, for learning what the priests want them to learn.
[1] The other part of the reason, and the one they will admit to publicly if pressed, is to maintain their ad revenue by not providing exit paths for their readers.
Ironic how two opinions can be completely opposite, yet both valid and well-founded, and unverifiable at the same time.
I personally believe that journalists should do their job and decide what gets written and how, and save readers from drowning in information we have too much of anyway.
The premise of the article was we asked 11 companies 17 questions about their "TV" product.
The article singled out only 1 company to not publish non-responsive answers. That only does one thing how bad an answer could it be to not be publishable?
Rule #29: Information people want public usually isn't news, but rather just marketing rhetoric. =3
No idea what any of this means.
Asking boards to volunteer information that harms their business revenue model is a suckers bet. Journalists have a tough job wading through the nonsense. =3
They just had to write the answer to the question. Like the premise of the article states. They didn't have to digest or understand anything.
Any information volunteered by a company, through its PR department, is to be considered marketing material and completely unreliable.
Lying sacks of shit
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> I asked every TV manufacturer 17 questions about how they spy on you
OK, but why? Just so you can write an article? All those answers are useless. Even if they were true, a company's policy can change over night. It even says so in the legalese.
I’m sure this would be a lot more compelling if the site wasn’t unusable.
Who watches TV anyway?
The TV is watching you either you watch it or not.
I don't have a TV in the house. Just a laptop (works for 95%) and a projector (in the 1* per week case we watch a movie) Really don't see the use of a specific device, especially if it is spying on you.
Probably a Soviet invention
I use a bigass display panel in my living room to display content sometimes. Same for my home gym. It's a TV.
I've heard other people do this sometimes, too.
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