Talk about a grotesque invasion of privacy:
"Smart TVs from Samsung and LG take screenshots of what you are watching even when you are using them to display images from a connected laptop or video game console"
How can this possibly be legal?
Here's why: Congress isn't just indifferent to your privacy. It is actively complicit with big corporations -- and law enforcement -- in embedding surveillance into everything we do.
@deewani @ai6yr @dangillmor Article is paywalled for me but going by the article headline the answer to your question is Yes.
If anyone has a list of affected TV models please post.
All the more reason to seek out dumb tv's. I wonder if projectors are also affected.
@frigidcode Whle I am not @dangillmor and don't have a "smart" LG TV, I do have "smart" Vizio TV, several Rokus, and a Pi-hole using the Smart-TV Blocklist[1] with RegEx extension[2] in addition to the Firebog Ticked lists[3] and block cloudservices.roku.com to return my Roku home screen to that of a streaming media player rather than an advertising screen.
I don't use the TV for streaming, but have it configured to do so and leave it connected by Ethernet so that I can control it from an app, cast to it, receive updates, and be ready to stream if ever I so wish. Despite this and the fact that I have it configured for as much privacy as permitted, the TV is constantly trying to connect to many external services. The Pi-hole blocks many of the connections.
While I do not know if the end points for LG's spyware are blocked by the aforementioned lists or if LG tries to circumvent local network policy by silently using its own name service or other measures, I would expect DNS filtering with suitable blocklists to be mostly - if not completely - effective against the spying... for now. The significant majority of the audience will simply connect this (and every other "smart" device) to their only wireless network and click through the initial setup process as quickly and carelessly as needed to get to the streaming.
See also Sharon Harding's recent article, "Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And itās only getting worse"[4].
[1] https://perflyst.github.io/PiHoleBlocklist/SmartTV.txt
[2] https://perflyst.github.io/PiHoleBlocklist/regex.list
[3] https://v.firebog.net/hosts/lists.php?type=tick
[4] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/tv-industrys-ads-tracking-obsession-is-turning-your-living-room-into-a-store/
Last July the FCC announced it was moving forward with plans that should make unlocking your mobile phone easier than ever. According to the FCC announcement, the agency, with broad and bipartisan ā¦
Our new Samsung would stay on in stealth mode after we turned it off, and scan the network it was on every few seconds.
We discovered this because it would occasionally screw up and switch itself fully on in the middle night. It's now plugged into a wall switch which is turned off every night. And sequestered on a network where it won't see anything interesting š¬
Is anyone else thinking about how 1984 begins?
@dangillmor They give you free TV channels...for free!
Don't ask questions just consume product.
We have been a "self surveilling society" for some time now, it's crazy we spend all this money on security so we can spy on each other better, and do the cops job for them.
Gotta be kiddingā¦
@melroy @dangillmor
I'm amused by the one comment:
@ferricoxide @dangillmor @melroy
Better to buy a computer monitor, small form factor computer, and run Linux.
Replace the steaming services with piracy. If you want to watch broadcast TV, there are tuner cards you can buy (just research local DRM on digital TV broadcasts first).
This approach is more work to set up, but will save you money in the long term. You can replace individual components when they fail, not just landfill the whole TV. Less electronic waste.
@robloblaw @ferricoxide @dangillmor that is what I have. I connected my own htpc to my Samsung tv. And now these researchers are saying Samsung is taking screenshot every 500ms? Crazy!
There are no 55 inch monitors. Are there? Anyhow, screenshotting should be forbidden. It's a very privacy invasive method.
@melroy @robloblaw @dangillmor
There are no 55 inch monitors. Are there? Anyhow, screenshotting should be forbidden. It's a very privacy invasive method.That's basically the problem I was having, when I replaced my TV. I was buying a TV so that I'd actually be able to read the text portion of Zoom (et. al.) presentations. That meant needing a 65" OLED (since where I was sitting was 15' from the TV). While you could go to a specialty-shop and get a "kiosk" panel in that price range, they were from the same sellers (LG and Sony) and were running basically the same software (and would presumably have had the same spying capability). While I'd initially run my TV with no internet-connection ā sending content to it from an external, HDMI-connected streaming-box ā the picture-quality from that streaming-box never matched using the TV's native streaming options. So, gave in for the sake of better picture-quality (in particular, casting from my laptop to the streaming-box seemed to suffer much more than directly casting to the TV).Who would pay for Samsung's 'snapshot' collection?š
@dangillmor ā¦and thatās why I still have a regular-old TVānot that I use it very much.
Itās my father who has a smart TV. āSmartā my assāI donāt even know how to turn it on. Remember when televisions used to have actual, physical buttons for turning it on/off, changing the channel, and raising/lowering the volume?
@dangillmor One does not need to snap the entire screen to get a very accurate fingerprint of what is on the screen at any given instant (at least for broadcast/streaming material).
Back in 2017 the FTC fined Vizeo for capturing tiny samples from a corner of the screen and sending them to Vizeo so they could build profiles of who was watching what.
That was in 2017.
VIZIO, one of the worldās largest manufacturers and sellers of internet-connected āsmartā televisions, has agreed to settle charges that it installed software on its TVs to collect viewing data on consumer TVs without consumersā knowledge or consent.
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