318
Cox deletes ‘Active Listening’ ad pitch after boasting that it eavesdrops though our phones
(www.fastcompany.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
318 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
59589 readers
2891 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’m confident this is built in to many smart TVs these days.
If it were, it would be pretty common knowledge and there would be several news cycles about it. I don't doubt that they could bury it in the terms of service, but we have wiretap laws in enough places that are two-party consent that it would have had to come out by now. Not to mention nerds like me running pi-hole and monitoring their traffic, repair people who could easily regonize a mic in the device, etc.
The privacy agreement in them covers it, just like Alexa.
Check yours, if you don't agree to the privacy agreement, things like cable and broadcast channel recognition don't work.
It also breaks Automatic Content Recognition, which enables the manufacturer to monitor what you're watching.
Granted that's not the same as listening, but it's close enough. And we know Google employees have been caught listening/watching people. There was another article just the other day of another company caught doing the same.
Just because something's illegal doesn't stop people from doing it.
As for catching it with monitoring... We know Microsoft has hard coded domain names into certain DLL's since XP, so you can't block the domains with a hosts file. There's some talk in the Pihole community about smart tv's being able to bypass your DNS with hard-coded IP destinations - they only need one to be able to then deliver their own DNS.
Some smart TV's will connect to others via wifi if they don't have connectivity, yet another way to bypass our efforts to block their connections.
That manufacturers are so blatantly adversarial makes it pretty clear they'll try to get away with anything they can. And anything I can think of, surely their dedicated teams of engineers thought of it long before me.
Edit: then there's apps like Netflix, Prime, Peacock, Hulu, YouTube, etc, that make encrypted connections to home. It would be trivial to permit those apps to deliver alternative name resolution for the entire OS on TV's since we don't control the OS.