This one was a decade ago; but I’m fond of it for the mixture of incompetence and audacity.
LG decided that just scraping all the file names off removable drives connected to the TV, as well as logging all channel changes, and sending them back to HQ over cleartext HTTP would be a good plan.
If you located the “collection of watching info” setting and toggled it to “off”; they would graciously change a flag from 1 to 0 to indicate that you’d opted out; and continue to upload exactly the same reports as before, just with the opt-out flag set.
There’s also the more sophisticated ‘automatic content recognition’ that works directly against the video and so doesn’t rely on file or channel data for identification. Vizio/Inscape is delighted to describe the virtues of “glass-level ACR data” for nailing down pesky uncertainty about consumer behavior. Slightly less delighted to mention it on the product pages for the TVs it’s baked into; but I’m sure that’s just because it’s uninteresting…
And then you’ve got the TVs that have one or more of the voice ‘assistants’ baked in, so a mic is hot and pointed toward Amazon or Google at all times.
In it, he demonstrated how that once he had hacked into the smart TV he was able to control the power indicator light, hiding the fact that he’d remotely turned it on and was using the microphone and camera, or doing whatever else he wanted. He noted that Smart TVs are easier to hack surreptitiously than phones, because when you hack a phone you drain the battery faster than normal, which might make a user suspicious. But for a TV plugged into a wall, you would never notice it’s drawing a few extra watts of power while the hacker is accessing it.
So I won’t go so far as to say that MT-G isn’t batshit crazy, because that would be untrue. However, in suspecting someone might be trying to hack her TV, she might not be wrong. She’s certainly shat upon enough people with the technical skills required to do so.
Not vaccinated? Well there’s the problem right there. It’s a well known fact that the chips included in the Covid 19 vaccines facilitate smooth, seamless connection of ALL your wireless devices. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
the high of crack cocaine doesn’t last very long… less than 15 minutes. you’d have to be smoking pretty frequently to stay in a paranoid state. meth on the other hand…
I’m not trying to argue that MTG isn’t nuts or at least incompetent, but in the “a stopped clock is right twice a day” category, yeah, smartTVs offer a network service to connect and “do stuff”, some of those connections will alert whoever is watching the TV, like “NAME OF LAPTOP is trying to connect to this TV, type FOUR-DIGIT-CODE on it to connect” which I think Apple AirPlay compatible devices will show when you connect to them (until that MAC address has gotten the right code and that gets recorded…and maybe that entry expires in N months). I think AirPlay is required to listen to any ad-hoc networks in its area so you can connect to them without knowing what WiFi the TV is nominally on. They show up in Mac/iPhone UI as “name of TV” and a TV icon. People frequently name TVs things like “Living Room TV”,or “TV”. They rarely name them “Marjorie’s TV, don’t use!”. So if you happen to be close enough to someone’s AirPlay capable TV they will show up on your phone/laptop. You may even not know who’s it is (I expect MTG is in a large single family house with a big yard, so I expect whoever connected to the TV knows it was in the house…but if this was at a small congressional apartment in DC it is entirely possible it was someone on another nearby apartment maybe another floor that actually thought it was their “Living Room TV”.
Also as others have said, yes Smart TVs spy on you. At a minimum they like to phone home with info about what is actually being watched (a sticking point of having Apple TV+ content – Apple makes SmartTV makers agree to not spy on the content of Apple TV+ while it is on, same for AirPlay content), sometimes they like to send back other info from anything else they can “see” on the network, maybe hear with a mic. I don’t specifically know of any with cameras, but I would expect some to have them. Honestly if you can get an advertiser to pay you for the info, or pay you more for the info smartTVs want it.
It is why a X inch SmartTV costs less than an X inch not-SmartTV. I prefer to let SmartTVs onto my network so I can find out their addresses, and then assign them to addresses I can firewall to death. Like “no connection to the outside world”, and then if I think I might like to let them upgrade firmware I’ll turn that off, let them spy on me for long enough to find the new firmware and download it. Of corse that means I can’t actually use the “smart stuff” like streaming, so I have an external streaming box on the living room TV. The Game Room TV which is mostly used to watch board game “how to play videos” has AirPlay on, and everything else is blocked, which is easy because AirPlay cheats and uses another WiFi network and I think another IP address on that network, not that that network is subject to my firewall because it doesn’t route out of the house.
This would be extremely on-brand for MTG: take something belonging to someone else (possibly just out of pure incompetence) and then complain about the consequences, while turning it into a conspiracy theory.
Changes to the Timeline:
Using the advice from Rufus, Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil renew their patents for frequency hopping. Hedy quits acting and forms a tech company, making her worth over US$30 billion.
