Yet another Hacker News

I asked every TV manufacturer 17 questions about how they spy on you

194 points Brajeshwar 2 hours ago 95 comments

tupac_speedrap 2 hours ago | parent

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

forinti 2 hours ago | parent

Not only that, but most of the public is oblivious or unconcerned about this topic.

noja 2 hours ago | parent

Because the news is in bed with them too.

giantg2 2 hours ago | parent

Because most people don't give a shit until something negative happens to them from that direct source.

robot_jesus 2 hours ago | parent

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.

giantg2 2 hours ago | parent

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.

andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent

> 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.

giantg2 1 hour ago | parent

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.

trinsic2 1 hour ago | parent

This is one of those things that is hard to quantify. Although I'm sure some 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...

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

Still low, but people do register creepiness when they directly see the creepiness, even if nothing resulted from it yet.

throw0101c 1 hour ago | parent

> 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).

mrguyorama 50 minutes ago | parent

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.

stronglikedan 1 hour ago | parent

And something negative hardly ever happens to them, or anyone, from that direct source, so why spend a brain cell on it.

giantg2 1 hour ago | parent

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.

WarmWash 1 hour ago | parent

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.

keybored 1 hour ago | parent

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.

DannyBee 2 hours ago | parent

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?

BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago | parent

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.

francisofascii 2 hours ago | parent

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.

esikich 1 hour ago | parent

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.

RHSeeger 1 hour ago | parent

And how privileged a world the _other_ people live in where someone else is worrying about it _for_ them.

keybored 54 minutes ago | parent

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.

andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent

> unconcerned

One would think that should cause more people who are paranoid to reconsider their assumptions and calibrate their concern-level.

ale42 2 hours ago | parent

https://archive.is/jBJdd

detourdog 2 hours ago | parent

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.

ericbarrett 2 hours ago | parent

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.

kevincox 2 hours ago | parent

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.

ricw 1 hour ago | parent

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.

SV_BubbleTime 1 hour ago | parent

And?

Asking for a journalist to please protect me from the direct truth has been a big fuck up in the last century.

pwg 1 hour ago | parent

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.

goodmythical 1 hour ago | parent

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.

detourdog 1 hour ago | parent

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.

detourdog 1 hour ago | parent

I'm fine with that. The withholding of answer is an editorial choice that reflects poorly on the reporting.

pllbnk 1 hour ago | parent

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.

detourdog 1 hour ago | parent

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?

Joel_Mckay 1 hour ago | parent

Rule #29: Information people want public usually isn't news, but rather just marketing rhetoric. =3

detourdog 1 hour ago | parent

No idea what any of this means.

Joel_Mckay 1 hour ago | parent

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

detourdog 1 hour ago | parent

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.

Oarch 2 hours ago | parent

> looks at TV, forgetting its brand.

Toshiba.

Hmm. Not in this list.

esskay 1 hour ago | parent

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.

FinnKuhn 1 hour ago | parent

Same with Philips for me. Would have been interesting to know.

lux-lux-lux 1 hour ago | parent

I’m sure this would be a lot more compelling if the site wasn’t unusable.

PinkaDunka 1 hour ago | parent

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?

eli 1 hour ago | parent

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.

ammar2 1 hour ago | parent

> 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...

CivBase 1 hour ago | parent

Or they could just be lying. I honestly expect it at this point.

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

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.

heresie-dabord 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

mzajc 1 hour ago | parent

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...

doctorpangloss 20 minutes ago | parent

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.)

MBCook 1 hour ago | parent

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.

tonytamps 51 minutes ago | parent

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"?

OroPla 1 hour ago | parent

Dell isn't in the list, so I guess we keep pretending that monitors and TVs are somehow different.

LollipopYakuza 1 hour ago | parent

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).

bita_nidir 1 hour ago | parent

Remember, "no answer" is still a data point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference

headz 1 hour ago | parent

> I put together 17 yes-or-no questions...

And they still managed to answer them in multiple sentences, and sometimes multiple paragraphs.

ourmandave 1 hour ago | parent

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?

krupan 1 hour ago | parent

RTFA

tencentshill 30 minutes ago | parent

Or even: Paste the article in any AI and ask it

tk75x 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

KoftaBob 22 minutes ago | parent

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."

ourmandave 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

throwa356262 1 hour ago | parent

    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).

The setting has the obvious name of "Live Plus".

tensegrist 1 hour ago | parent

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

GoToRO 1 hour ago | parent

they don't collect the screenshots, they store a fingerprint of the screenshot. They are not lying. Also they do store but not collect.

davsti4 21 minutes ago | parent

"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...

perching_aix 21 minutes ago | parent

this. they're being very particular with their words.

cyanydeez 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

StevenWaterman 1 hour ago | parent

I want to know what Sony said. Because apparently they responded to the request, but answered 0/17 questions

cael450 1 hour ago | parent

Is there any TV I can buy that doesn't spy on me?

throw0101c 1 hour ago | parent

"Commercial" displays/televisions perhaps:

* https://www.samsung.com/us/business/commercial-tvs/all-comme...

afavour 1 hour ago | parent

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.

throw0101c 54 minutes ago | parent

> 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...

landmass 42 minutes ago | parent

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.

mexicocitinluez 38 minutes ago | parent

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?

RiverCrochet 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

FuriouslyAdrift 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

BatchJob 17 minutes ago | parent

"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.

Barbing 59 minutes ago | parent

$1050:

  Samsung QB55C-N 55" UHD 4K HDR Commercial Monitor without Wi-Fi

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

JTbane 56 minutes ago | parent

I sure do love paying 2x the price for less hardware.

Barbing 47 minutes ago | parent

∞x less ick

Maybe gotta find one used from a business offloading their old ones.

drngdds 53 minutes ago | parent

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

subscribed 10 minutes ago | parent

Samsung? The company displaying ads on the expensive fridges?

I'm not sure they're not doing something else.

drngdds 56 minutes ago | parent

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.)

gib444 53 minutes ago | parent

Yeah but they cost ~$1000

MattSayar 29 minutes ago | parent

Connect it to your router and use NextDNS/AdGuard on your home network

krupan 55 minutes ago | parent

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?

Henchman21 23 minutes ago | parent

Almost all these TVs run Android. So where’s the GrapheneOS for TVs?

gijsbos 17 minutes ago | parent

Who watches TV anyway?

evolve2k 15 minutes ago | parent

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.