Static Newsabout
squiffsquiff | 15 comments

shiroiushi|next|

Someone needs to put a network sniffer on a bunch of different TVs and see exactly what traffic they're generating and how much. Sending 120 4k images per minute (or worse, 6000 for the LG) on a residential WiFi connection should be pretty obvious, and it should be fairly easy to block too.

rightbyte|parent|next|

They could be looking for watermarks or match some 'frame hash' versus a database. The spyware traffic could be measured in single digit bytes.

kamikazechaser|prev|next|

Alphonso inc. develops the tech https://lgads.tv/site-privacy-policy/. Looked into the LinkedIn of some of the employees and it looks like a huge operation.

patwoz|prev|next|

Just never connect them to the internet. I just use them as a display for my apple tv.

amelius|prev|next|

Most of these are still dumb:

https://www.panelook.com/


citboin|prev|next|

Best Buy sells the "DuraPro - Partial Sun Series 43" Class LED Outdoor Partial Sun 4K UHD TV (2023)" which is supposedly a "non-smart" TV. I just ran a search and don't know anything about it, personally. They could still be screenshotting AFAIK.

rlv-dan|prev|next|

> [...] in their automatic content recognition systems [...] Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG TVs every 10 milliseconds

I wonder how much energy it take to analyze 4k images 10 times a second?


rightbyte|parent|next|

10ms is 100Hz not 10Hz.

A conservative assumption would be that they use all spare cpu time for spyware? Maybe 1-10W extra if small arm processors?


kombookcha|parent|prev|next|

I have to think that whatever they're using this for, it could be done at a much lower data resolution.

tecleandor|root|parent|next|

They do this to match what you're watching to a database. Think Shazam but with video.

They find what movie, show or whatever you're watching and send it to advertisers with all your metadata, so they can match and track you from an ad impression to you visiting their site to get information and buy.

There's a lot of metadata there to match. If you access their site, for example with your phone, from the same internet connection, they can probably match the information from the TV with one of the tracking cookies on your phone, and then keep tracking you in all the commercial "journey".

This has been already discussed around here because this is one of the reasons smart tvs are so cheap right now, because they're being subsidized by advertisers. Some of the advertisers had in their sites information about their tracking capabilities. I'll try to find that link.


izacus|prev|next|

Is there a list of those models somewhere? The article is partially paywalled and hard to say which ones.

0xEF|parent|next|

I think, at this point, we can assume if it has a camera, microphone in the controller, connects to wifi, etc, it will be spying on you in some way. No list needed, just look for displays without those features.

I get around it by using PC displays as televisions, usually hooked up to a thinclient or SBC that I've purpose for media delivery. So, when I shop for a display, any feature beyond an HDMI port becomes wholly unnecessary to me.


squiffsquiff|prev|

> 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

By Jeremy Hsu

Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a non-paywalled link myself. This _appears_ to reproduce the article text: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/480211


tecleandor|parent|

About that, some previous information from a year or two ago shown that they took screenshots even when playing video files from a usb drive.