The idea was always that Facebook or Google were listening to us and whenever we would talk about something we would shortly thereafter see an ad related to it.
Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly, its our televisions and appliances that are listening and just selling that data back to the ad-networks.
Has this not been proven by now? That smart devices are used to do this, including smartphones? Their OSes just ship with apps that that record that audio information right out of the box.
This is similar to Flock and Palantir who collect info the government is not allowed to and then sell it to the government.
In this case Meta, Google etc can honestly say they aren't surrepticiously listinging to you or collecting data not in their privacy statement. They just buy it instead.
So I need to write a chaffing agent that runs when I am not home and randomly spouts synthetic conversations through non-smart speakers about nappies (kids a re long gone), nuclear weapons development, plumbing, union membership, crochet, video games, crypto coins, and other things we don't normally do.
That's a pretty good point. We kept hearing these rumors for a while now and all the usual suspects keep saying "we don't listen to your microphone on your phone" but yeah nobody expects the TV and fridge to do it, so maybe that's how it happens and people are not crazy.
That's just weasel language. For "hey, Google" to work, the phone needs to listen. Just like it can react to "hey, Google", it can also react to any amount of other trigger words without ever actually recording your conversation.
People were up in arms (and rightly so) when the LG TVs were found out for their spying thanks to the Gamers Nexus investigation. At least LG TVs can be rooted and you can install apps like Glasshouse [0] to disable all the telemetry and add substantial new features that you can't do via the officially sanctioned Dev Mode. The vulnerability that enabled rooting was recently patched so hopefully another can be found.
Hopefully similar apps will come along for Samsung now that root on it can be achieved [1].
I was about to post "this is overkill — just don't connect it to your access point" but then realized that my neighbor has an xfinity router that advertises the public xfinity subscriber SSID. And it could be using an unadvertised SSID for which they've done a deal with the US carrier cartel members.
If this data is worth enough, they could be using IOT 4G service.
We to date have had no proof of this happening. The best I found was someone on a Samsung forum years ago claiming their TV auto-connected to a public WiFi without proof.
Not saying it isn’t happening, nor that it won’t ever happen.
I heard you can buy really expensive paint that you can use on your walls, ceiling and floor to get this effect, that you then can paint over whatever color you actually want.
So far the only benefit other than shielding you from electrosmog was to stop having to compete with your neighbors in an apartment complex for wi-fi bands.
Some version of this has been posted a dozen times now. The dog barking and baby crying detection are advertised features of this product range which is used for SmartThings integration.
Swarms of RE-hopefuls are now using tools they don't understand to work on projects they don't understand. Anyone doing RE knows step 1 is read public documentation, FCC filing, patent applications, etc. That step would tell you what the device does out of the box, no RE required to find everything the OP has actually uncovered.
Instead they busted out Claude and have been gaslit by their own AI into thinking they've discovered something. They just discovered features that Samsung has been pitching for years.
While caution is definitely warranted after LG, I am definitely getting the impression that people are far too quick to jump to conclusions because an A.I. service told them something without them factually checking it first
I was at the butcher one day and asked for "ossobuco" because I wanted some bones for my dog, then all of a sudden I got reels with ossobuco in it, recipes, sellers, nearby shops, etc and I said WTF? Who the fuck makes posts about ossobuco? Why all of a sudden after using social apps just for football and porn all I start getting is ossobuco ads everywhere? A word you will never see anywhere now popping up in all my social feeds.
Possibility of that being random? Zero, not in this probabilistic universe we live in
Yeah same experience. People working in Facebook (I had a friend there) say it is only pattern behaviour, they can predict your interests, check when you meet with your friends, share WIFIs, etc, so they can imagine things you have been talking about. I call this bullshit. I dont know if my friend working at Facebook believes this, or was just hiding it for me, but it's 0% chance of them doing that. Also because I never got any of these recommendations BEFORE I mentioned it out loud, which means their prediction engine (if it exists) also knows when I am going to talk about it!
Maybe I'm just old fashioned or out of touch, but why is it such a barrier for people to treat their smart TV as a dumb display? Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.
I understand that the tech in these things is a horrorshow, But so is the tech in every other smart device that normal ("I don't care how it works, just that it works" types) people allow into their homes every day - and these are the people who tech is built for, not "us". Of all the tech to raise red flags about, this seems the easiest to mitigate.
And to be completely fair, I haven't purchased a new TV (Projector yes, TV no) since I bought my plasma in 2014. That 2014 TV has smart features as well but has just never been hooked up to the internet. Maybe the new rigs can't be used until connected to a network but I wouldn't know. Enlighten me if this is the case.
One way that you probably are behind on the goings on in the TV market are that there are whole TV brands that require you to login just to use the television at all, like Roku.
These are usually the cheap models, the kind that are heavily subsidized by spyware, but the fact that this exists at all is seriously not cool.
I imagine that you can login to those televisions once and then take them offline, though I haven’t tried personally.
The other thing I would say is that here we are asking customers to basically buy duplicate products and that second product might still engage in spyware.
E.g., I’ve bought a $500 TV that comes with Roku or whatever. It already runs all my streaming apps. So the strategy now is to turn off internet on that TV and now I have to buy a streaming box and hope that it’s less intrusive. If we decide maybe Apple is the one with the least intrusive ads and tracking, that’s now $300, almost doubling the cost of the TV.
And if we buy some other streaming box like Roku or Amazon well guess what they have all the same sorts of telemetry and ads going on.
Ive been motivated recently to start making my appliances mine by using Ai to reverse engineer and replace their firmware.
So long as the appliance has been slow to update its security channels, the recent eMudrha certificate leak was the perfect opportunity to place yourself in the middle of the relationship between device and vendor. Its allowed me to make some trivial updates to my television's firmware and start to have AI build me firmware that better serves my purposes. Hoping to lobotomize it and replace everything with a simple linux system that executes a startup script to launch a Jellyfin client.
I bought it and its mine, this is the freedom we were originally robbed of.
It's not hard; but often the TV will nag and nag until it gets a wifi connection.
And with how hard these manufacturers are trying, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they start including some alternate data connection for metadata/DRM/whatever. (ie, not the primary streaming data connection)
This is what I do. I find navigating with a remote control to be infuriating, especially when you need to search for something. With an old computer and wireless mouse and keyboard, it's so much better. Some minor configuration of Firefox's homepage and it's a fine start page for watching TV, with all your stuff right there. Plus you can have extensions that save hours of your life over time. The only downside is the remote becomes the literal keyboard and mouse which might be cumbersome for some, but I don't even think about it anymore. I've been using the same 50" for ten years.
You are unlike most people. Most people just want to come home and watch TV. Historically it used to be cable, now it's YouTube or similar. What do you think is the quickest way to watch YouTube?
Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly, its our televisions and appliances that are listening and just selling that data back to the ad-networks.
In this case Meta, Google etc can honestly say they aren't surrepticiously listinging to you or collecting data not in their privacy statement. They just buy it instead.
So I need to write a chaffing agent that runs when I am not home and randomly spouts synthetic conversations through non-smart speakers about nappies (kids a re long gone), nuclear weapons development, plumbing, union membership, crochet, video games, crypto coins, and other things we don't normally do.
Hopefully similar apps will come along for Samsung now that root on it can be achieved [1].
[0] https://github.com/rorygallagher2024/glasshouse
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50218633
Samsung just needs you to buy a TV.
I guess I’m going to have to just write replacement firmware, aren’t I?
If this data is worth enough, they could be using IOT 4G service.
Not saying it isn’t happening, nor that it won’t ever happen.
Anyway - Faraday living room?
So far the only benefit other than shielding you from electrosmog was to stop having to compete with your neighbors in an apartment complex for wi-fi bands.
Swarms of RE-hopefuls are now using tools they don't understand to work on projects they don't understand. Anyone doing RE knows step 1 is read public documentation, FCC filing, patent applications, etc. That step would tell you what the device does out of the box, no RE required to find everything the OP has actually uncovered.
Instead they busted out Claude and have been gaslit by their own AI into thinking they've discovered something. They just discovered features that Samsung has been pitching for years.
While caution is definitely warranted after LG, I am definitely getting the impression that people are far too quick to jump to conclusions because an A.I. service told them something without them factually checking it first
I was at the butcher one day and asked for "ossobuco" because I wanted some bones for my dog, then all of a sudden I got reels with ossobuco in it, recipes, sellers, nearby shops, etc and I said WTF? Who the fuck makes posts about ossobuco? Why all of a sudden after using social apps just for football and porn all I start getting is ossobuco ads everywhere? A word you will never see anywhere now popping up in all my social feeds.
Possibility of that being random? Zero, not in this probabilistic universe we live in
I understand that the tech in these things is a horrorshow, But so is the tech in every other smart device that normal ("I don't care how it works, just that it works" types) people allow into their homes every day - and these are the people who tech is built for, not "us". Of all the tech to raise red flags about, this seems the easiest to mitigate.
And to be completely fair, I haven't purchased a new TV (Projector yes, TV no) since I bought my plasma in 2014. That 2014 TV has smart features as well but has just never been hooked up to the internet. Maybe the new rigs can't be used until connected to a network but I wouldn't know. Enlighten me if this is the case.
These are usually the cheap models, the kind that are heavily subsidized by spyware, but the fact that this exists at all is seriously not cool.
I imagine that you can login to those televisions once and then take them offline, though I haven’t tried personally.
The other thing I would say is that here we are asking customers to basically buy duplicate products and that second product might still engage in spyware.
E.g., I’ve bought a $500 TV that comes with Roku or whatever. It already runs all my streaming apps. So the strategy now is to turn off internet on that TV and now I have to buy a streaming box and hope that it’s less intrusive. If we decide maybe Apple is the one with the least intrusive ads and tracking, that’s now $300, almost doubling the cost of the TV.
And if we buy some other streaming box like Roku or Amazon well guess what they have all the same sorts of telemetry and ads going on.
Ive been motivated recently to start making my appliances mine by using Ai to reverse engineer and replace their firmware. So long as the appliance has been slow to update its security channels, the recent eMudrha certificate leak was the perfect opportunity to place yourself in the middle of the relationship between device and vendor. Its allowed me to make some trivial updates to my television's firmware and start to have AI build me firmware that better serves my purposes. Hoping to lobotomize it and replace everything with a simple linux system that executes a startup script to launch a Jellyfin client.
I bought it and its mine, this is the freedom we were originally robbed of.
And with how hard these manufacturers are trying, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they start including some alternate data connection for metadata/DRM/whatever. (ie, not the primary streaming data connection)
Shout "six seven" and look over the shoulder of the twelve-year-old who magically appears?