By Jeremy Hsu on September 24, 2024
Popular smart TV models made by Samsung and LG can take multiple snapshots of what you are watching every second – even when they are being used as external displays for your laptop or video game console.
Smart TV manufacturers use these frequent screenshots, as well as audio recordings, in their automatic content recognition systems, which track viewing habits in order to target people with specific advertising. But researchers showed this tracking by some of the world’s most popular smart TV brands – Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG TVs every 10 milliseconds – can occur when people least expect it.
“When a user connects their laptop via HDMI just to browse stuff on their laptop on a bigger screen by using the TV as a ‘dumb’ display, they are unsuspecting of their activity being screenshotted,” says Yash Vekaria at the University of California, Davis. Samsung and LG did not respond to a request for comment.
Vekaria and his colleagues connected smart TVs from Samsung and LG to their own computer server. Their server, which was equipped with software for analysing network traffic, acted as a middleman to see what visual snapshots or audio data the TVs were uploading.
They found the smart TVs did not appear to upload any screenshots or audio data when streaming from Netflix or other third-party apps, mirroring YouTube content streamed on a separate phone or laptop or when sitting idle. But the smart TVs did upload snapshots when showing broadcasts from the TV antenna or content from an HDMI-connected device.
The researchers also discovered country-specific differences when users streamed the free ad-supported TV channel provided by Samsung or LG platforms. Such user activities were uploaded when the TV was operating in the US but not in the UK.
By recording user activity even when it’s coming from connected laptops, smart TVs might capture sensitive data, says Vekaria. For example, it might record if people are browsing for baby products or other personal items.
Customers can opt out of such tracking for Samsung and LG TVs. But the process requires customers to either enable or disable between six and 11 different options in the TV settings.
“This is the sort of privacy-intrusive technology that should require people to opt into sharing their data with clear language explaining exactly what they’re agreeing to, not baked into initial setup agreements that people tend to speed through,” says Thorin Klosowski at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy non-profit based in California.
Friendly reminder that gaming console monitors, computer monitors, projectors, dumb TVs, and commercial displays exist.
Yes, I could hack a smart TV to disable its networking capabilities. (Merely withholding my wifi password is not reliable.) But that would still be showing the manufacturers that I find spyware TVs acceptable, and supporting the production of those models.
Also, this would be a good time to pressure our legislators into criminalizing this nonsense.
Not putting your WiFi password in would absolutely be reliable. I’d love to hear your ideas on how they’d remotely break into your WiFi Network
No, it would not.
They wouldn't, of course, nor did I say they would.
(But since you brought it up, we have already seen internet providers quietly using their CPE to create special-purpose wireless networks surrounding customers' homes. These could obviously be made available to any company that paid the ISP for access, just as cellular networks have been made available to companies like OnStar. So a TV could do this with a business deal rather than breaking in to your normal WiFi.)
However, your network is not the only network in the world, and WiFi is not the only kind of link. Neighbors exist. Open guest networks exist. Drive-by and fly-by networks exist. Mesh networks exist (and are already created by devices like Amazon Echo). Power line networking exists. Bluetooth, LoRa, cellular, etc. etc. etc. Maybe you live on an isolated mountain top where these things are unlikely to reach you (at least until satellite links become a little smaller and cheaper) but even that is not absolute, and most of us don't.
Unless you disassemble your TV and examine all the components within, and know what they do, it could have any number of these capabilities.
Also, partly due to how prevalent multi-network support is becoming in electronics integration, it is not unusual for related functionality to be dormant at first yet possible to activate later.
I'd love for you not to be adversarial, and to learn more about a topic before making bold claims about it in absolute terms.
To add to this, often, even if you turn off Bluetooth, your devices can still communicate via Bluetooth Low Energy, something that's separate from classic Bluetooth and typically (to my knowledge) cannot be turned off. As an example, I've heard that Google uses it to send ad targeting info between devices.