The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy - Include Security Research Blog

In this post we look under the hood of BrightData's SDK and how it turns ordinary consumer TVs into exit nodes of an enormous commercial, residential proxy network leveraged by the AI industry to scrape web data and train language learning models.

Include Security Research Blog
The good side of this is that there's a hijack-able data stream that anyone can use to poison LLM training sets, and they can't do shit because it's on *your* network.

@Hex Personally, I'd just flatout refuse to use/buy a "Smart TV"…

I have a stupid panel and it works fine!

https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116706856726937559

hex (@[email protected])

But if *I* hijack *their* devices it's a "felony." https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/

kolektiva.social
@kkarhan @Hex good luck finding one in 2026

@silberfuchs @Hex what?
- You gonna tell me there isn't a single TV that one can just plug in and feed images via HDMI like a normal person?
- I mean, worst-case I'll get a digital signage screen from illyama.

But so far my cheapo 40" 1080p IPS-LCD-TV refuses to die, so I see no reason to even consider replacing it.

@kkarhan @silberfuchs @Hex yea, just don't connect them to internet and most work fine. annoyingly slower than the previous year's model, every year, due to the bloat still running... but it's nerfed. and they sold it to you at a loss.

and return the ones that don't work fine, obviously. let them eat the fees.

@groxx @silberfuchs @Hex I mean, my 10 yr old stupid TV still works fine.

- No reason to replace anything!

@kkarhan @groxx @silberfuchs @Hex i never understood the appeal of a "smart tv".
Just let me watch my normal stuff from my laptop. I already know my laptop and all my browser plugins are there etc.
@saxnot @kkarhan @groxx @silberfuchs I would literally pay more for a TV that isn't smart. Unfortunately, that's almost impossible to find because vendors figured out they could make more money selling surveillance than hardware.

@Hex @saxnot @groxx @silberfuchs Consider buying a "Monitor" or "Digital Signage Display" instead?

- Those are just Stupid TVs these days…