Holy shit, Samsung Smart TVs straight up send "snippets" of things that you watch back home to "to provide you with customized Smart TV experiences".
https://www.samsung.com/us/account/privacy-policy/
Search that page for the text: "Your Smart TV transfers video snippets or TV tuner information in order to determine the programs watched."
i wonder if that includes stuff you watch from an attached USB drive?
> cues up 24/7 DBZ Abridged marathon
@mike Buying a smart TV is a really dumb idea. But it seems the industry won't let us be smarter than their TVs.
It seems the next best option is to never connect your television to a network, though I wonder how long it will be until tv manufacturers force you to connect it at least once on initial setup before letting you use it.
In any case I have resolved to never buy another "television", and search for a truly " dumb" large format monitor or panel display.
@mike you can disable a good bit of the telemetry from the developer/debug menu. Different Samsung smart TVs have different methods of accessing that menu, but this helped me:
https://hardmasterreset.com/how-to-factory-reset-your-samsung-smart-tv/
This will also allow you to reenable Bluetooth, since Samsung oh-so-kindly disabled it with a recent update.
Fair warning - you could brick your TV doing this (something that I never thought I'd say)
The below procedure will give you a guideline on how you ca reset your Samsung Smart TV. The procedure is not really hard and you don’t require any expert knowledge to be able to effect it. It is a really simple procedure and you will have your TV factory reset in no time. It requires …
@mike @vfrmedia @Calcifer @msh @mbybee
It starts to be well studied by the academic community, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.03447
And these 3 papers presented by A. Narayanan (Princeton) @random_walker
When we watch TV, our TVs watch us back and track our habits. This practice has exploded recently since it hasn’t faced much public scrutiny...
🐦🔗: https://nitter.net/random_walker/status/1177570679232876544#m
For the general public to understand it and feel concerned, it will take some time 😕
Motivated by the growing popularity of smart TVs, we present a large-scale measurement study of smart TVs by collecting and analyzing their network traffic from two different vantage points. First, we analyze aggregate network traffic of smart TVs in-the-wild, collected from residential gateways of tens of homes and several different smart TV platforms, including Apple, Samsung, Roku, and Chromecast. In addition to accessing video streaming and cloud services, we find that smart TVs frequently connect to well-known as well as platform-specific advertising and tracking services (ATS). Second, we instrument Roku and Amazon Fire TV, two popular smart TV platforms, by setting up a controlled testbed to systematically exercise the top-1000 apps on each platform, and analyze their network traffic at the granularity of the individual apps. We again find that smart TV apps connect to a wide range of ATS, and that the key players of the ATS ecosystems of the two platforms are different from each other and from that of the mobile platform. Third, we evaluate the (in)effectiveness of state-of-the-art DNS-based blocklists in filtering advertising and tracking traffic for smart TVs. We find that personally identifiable information (PII) is exfiltrated to platform-related Internet endpoints and third parties, and that blocklists are generally better at preventing exposure of PII to third parties than to platform-related endpoints. Our work demonstrates the segmentation of the smart TV ATS ecosystem across platforms and its differences from the mobile ATS ecosystem, thus motivating the need for designing privacy-enhancing tools specifically for each smart TV platform.
Sarkaaridoc 
Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL]
Rev.Dr. Nikolai Kingsley
TinyCalcifer
Azure Blue
berkes 🐝 🚐 🏄 🌱
DEFUND.
Mark Shane Hayden
Luna
mmu_man
zoomology
Privacy & infosec news
hurt138
Dread Pirate Synfinner
seven 
Hyde 📷 🖋 