| ▲ | sroussey 2 hours ago |
| All smart TVs should be disconnected from the internet. Use an AppleTV or similar. |
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| ▲ | dspillett 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Some TVs will present a popover warning that they have not been able to check for updates for a while, after being disconnected for some time, and you can't close that without letting them connect (even if you are just using the screen to display content from an HDMI slot rather than using any of the other TV features). |
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| ▲ | sidewndr46 a few seconds ago | parent | next [-] | | A family has a soundbar that just turns off after a while if it isn't connected to the internet. | |
| ▲ | mszcz 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Which ones? I'd be happy to know the brands. | | |
| ▲ | bradleyankrom an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | FWIW, I've never seen that come up on the five or six TCLs that I've owned over the last decade. I have AppleTVs connected to all of them and never connect them to the internet. So far, so good. | |
| ▲ | richjdsmith an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Samsung TVs certainly do. A massive PITA. | | |
| ▲ | mszcz an hour ago | parent [-] | | Good to know. I don't buy Samsung anymore anyway. I have two CRG9s and they're already showing same problems after a couple of years. Had a midrange phone from them some years ago - started dying 6mo in (battery, restarts, slowness). |
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| ▲ | tbomb 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I wonder if this is firmware related. I've had a Samsung TV for a few years now that I've never connected to the internet, so my firmware is likely very out of date, and it has never displayed a message like that. | |
| ▲ | walrus01 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do they still do it if they've never been connected to a network? So they don't even know what date/time it is relative to their current updates/firmware? Do they display the warning based on a cumulative power-on timer only (much as good quality computer displays have somewhere in their menus buried a figure showing their total cumulative power on hours). |
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| ▲ | Cpoll 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not sufficient, given reports of TVs and other devices automatically creating mesh networks. Your disconnected TV could talk to your neighbour's connected one. If anything, I wonder why LG isn't already doing it. Edit: Getting pushback asking for evidence (fair). Most recently I read it in an HN thread a few years back. I thought it was a TCL TV, but I can't find it anymore. It wasn't Samsung's WiFi Direct, which I don't think was ever on by default. Lacking better evidence, I'll admit I'm probably wrong and no TV has been documented doing this (yet). |
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| ▲ | deadbunny 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Could you link to these reports, the ones with evidence? | | |
| ▲ | Lammy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If something is technically possible, one should act as though it is already happening and hope to be wrong rather than refusing to consider the issue until sufficient “proof” is given, by which it will be too late. Doubly so when advertisers are involved, who as a group are economically-incentivized to not care about consent. | | |
| ▲ | deadbunny 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This would be trivial to test and detect. Just like every claim that TVs will connect to open WiFi networks if you don't connect them to a network. Yet after years of these claims and being extremely trivial to test not a single shred of evidence has ever been provided. | | |
| ▲ | cassianoleal an hour ago | parent [-] | | How would you test this? | | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | deadbunny an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | If they form a mesh and route traffic via one TV that acts as an exit node you can check the packet TTLs. | | |
| ▲ | structural 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | There's no requirement that the mesh be IP-based or function as a layer-3 router... Even if it were IP-bsaed, it would be extremely straightforward for one box to send a UDP message to another, and receive and retransmit at the application layer. No TTL nonsense, No multiple IPs showing up communicating upstream. | |
| ▲ | wtallis 33 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Isn't messing with TTLs a pretty obvious thing to do when communicating covertly? And wouldn't that kind of packet inspection only catch cases of TVs literally acting as packet-level routers, but not catch application-layer shenanigans like aggregating statistics in the exit node so that all the data going over your own network appears to be originating from the same device? It's still implausible, but thoroughly verifying that your TV isn't spying on you isn't trivial. |
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| ▲ | nickff 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but there is no evidence of some super-advertiser doing. It's not even clear to me that much of the 'fingerprinting' (past basic re-targeting) actually works. | | |
| ▲ | privong 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but [...] Isn't this what people said pre-Snowden? Not that NSA spying is the same as corporate "surveillance capitalism", but if companies can make more money off it and the technology exists, it seems prudent to assume companies are trying it. | | |
| ▲ | nickff 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There was evidence of the NSA intercepting international communications before Snowden, but for some reason that didn't seem to make much of a lasting impression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A It's also significant to note that while the government is quite bad at keeping 'problematic' behavior secret, companies are much worse at it. | | |
| ▲ | structural 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The way this is typically handled is through compartmentalization, where no one working has enough of a global view to be able to claim that the behaviour is problematic. There's a lot that's problematic that we suspect that is going on but don't have firm proof, because the organization actually is pretty good at keeping it secret enough. There's some exceptions where things do get leaked/revealed, but how would you know if this was 99% of wrongdoing, or 0.99% of it? | |
| ▲ | privong an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Analogously, there's evidence that companies will make extensive use of available techniques (browser fingerprinting, cookies, etc.) to track and surveil users without their knowledge and often against their will. The exposure of that arguably also hasn't triggered an effective backlash against those companies. So, as with the pre-Snowden evidence for domestic communication interception by the NSA, I think there's ample evidence of the willingness of companies to exploit whatever technologies they can in order to surveil users. |
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| ▲ | Arainach 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659191/amazon-sidewalk-... | | |
| ▲ | azernik 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That is an article saying that mesh networking frameworks exist. It does not support the GP claim of smart TVs creating mesh networks across different owners. |
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| ▲ | coldpie 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Unless you have evidence, please stop spreading this rumor. | | | |
| ▲ | tshaddox 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’ve heard rumors of that, and also of TVs shipping with cellular modems with which to phone home. I don’t know if either have been confirmed, but it would be ridiculous for such a thing to be legal. | | |
| ▲ | coldpie 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's a longstanding, and obviously false, rumor. It would be trivial to prove that these things connect to open wifi networks to phone home, but no one has ever proved that they do that, because they don't actually do that. It would be a little harder, but still very easy, to prove that they connect to cell networks, but no one has proved that they do that either, because they don't actually do that either. Keeping them disconnected from wifi is sufficient. | |
| ▲ | semiquaver an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s perfectly legal to put a cellular modem in a TV, but not without disclosing that to the FCC and on product labels. This and the mesh network thing for TVs are (currently) a conspiracy theory, which sucks because it muddies the waters in advance of it inevitably happening in reality. | |
| ▲ | nickff 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Cellular modems seem unlikely, because both they and the service plan they'd need are too expensive to be justified by any benefit to the manufacturer. | | |
| ▲ | bluGill 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Cell plans are very cheap when you are a company looking for low bandwidth off-peak service for a lot of devices. As individuals you can't get those deals, but companies can. I don't know if TVs have a cell modem, but it isn't unreasonable to say they could. As a different poster mentioned, the FCC needs to know about this though and so it will be documented. | |
| ▲ | TheJCDenton an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not so far fetched when your advertising revenue is in the tens of millions of dollars. They just need this revenue by tv to be higher than the price of the mobile plan per tv. For a few Gb per month it may be relevant in the not so distant future. | |
| ▲ | AlexandrB an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes. Considering 90%+ of users will just connect their TV to their WiFi, shipping a cell modem with every TV to catch that last 10% seems like bad ROI. I could however see this happening in the future in response to regulation. For example some "think of the children" rule that makes TV makers responsible for blocking mature content. |
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| ▲ | nullfield an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | See: Amazon Sidewalk | |
| ▲ | Jonnax 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which manufacturers and which TVs? Otherwise it's just some 10+ year old rumour |
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| ▲ | indymike an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Just disable wifi. Occasionally factory reset, hook up to wifi for firmware update, then disable again. |
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| ▲ | krtkush 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have connected it to my network and then blocked it off the internet via Pi-hole. That way, I hope, it'll not try to scan for other open networks. |
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| ▲ | dogcow 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's not really sufficient. It could still phone home if it falls back to IP addresses. You should be blocking it at the firewall level, not just with DNS. But me personally, I wouldn't ever connect any of these devices to my network. | | |
| ▲ | krtkush 43 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The only reason it is on my network is that I need it for home automation (via home bridge). I'll have to see what else I can do. |
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| ▲ | orev 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s still scanning (or at least listening to) all the other devices on your local network, like your phones, PCs, etc. It collects an inventory and if it ever happens to get Internet access, uploads that data. |
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| ▲ | ihsw 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| All smart TVs should not come with WiFi or Ethernet controllers. |
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| ▲ | samus an hour ago | parent [-] | | Then they are not smart TVs anymore. More precisely, they couldn't offer the features one expected from such. Think about a smartphone without internet connection. |
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