A hacker reverse-engineered his own Samsung TV and found alarming spying activity, including code that used connected devices’ microphones to listen to users.
I blockeed my TVs from the internet, jellyfin only. My Sony hid all apps after 2 weeks offline. What an asshole move. Changed the launcher to fix that.
uXDT still works. ;)
I guess the assumption is ‘TV has internet’ and I rendered this wrong.but you might be right.
TV won’t show me any ads either way. At least.
Neither of those things matters anyway.
- uXDT was designed for cross-device tracking even before the era of smart TVs.
- Surreptitious advertising also occurs in movies, etc. so what would stop them from integrating ultrasound into movies, etc., as well?
- For cross-device tracking, it’s enough for just one device to have an internet connection, which doesn’t even have to be constant.
But there are also methods such as NILM (Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring)… where the electricity provider could track devices and their fluctuations, etc. It analyzes a household’s electricity consumption and attempts to identify individual devices based on their consumption patterns.
The OS level features on my Samsung TV from 2014 died a few years ago. From what it appears the storage is worn out or something. The OS menu and apps work, but it runs so slow. It started taking forever to add or delete an app. Eventually it got to a point where none of that works anymore, until probably some watchdog triggers a front end UI restart. Good thing the smart features aren’t critical to the basic TV being operational.
The thing is I rarely ever used the smart stuff. For the first few years I had it connected to wifi and used a few apps out of curiosity. For several years it was connected but not used. At some point I disconnected wifi, and left it that way. When I tried it again years later, I discovered the system was dead like that.
Also fuck all those tech bros who came out in the comments every time lying their ass off about how this level of spying is impossible because reasons. And calling everyone paranoid and too stupid to understand technology.