LTT: Malware on Android TV Boxes

I appreciate videos like these because they take subjects that those of us who understand things technically often have a hard time explaining to non-technical people.

"But why is tracking bad?" "What can they do besides see what shows I watch?" "Everyone is tracking, so why should I care about this?"

Sigh. Just watch this video, and perhaps it'll help.

That being said, I think it's a poignant reminder that if Amazon, Google and Cloudflare have their way, there'll be literally zero way to know anything going on between these kinds of devices and the rest of the Internet. They push for having everything in their "cloud", where there's absolutely no oversight and no accountability (see Google's current practice of allowing malicious ads as a good example).

Coupled with Cloudflare's desire to push DNS-over-https everywhere, and we could end up with zero ability to see what a device looks up and we can know absolutely nothing more than that it connects to, say, AWS, Google Cloud, Tencent, or Azure. The devices could exfiltrate all the data they want.

It's clear to those of us who examine these things that DNS-over-https is a huge boon for corporations that want to track literally everything we do, but so many people have been sold on the idea that our ISPs are the real threat, so we should give up our liberty (to know what DNS lookups are done) for alleged safety (so our ISPs won't know what DNS lookups are done).

They want us to break DNS so it can never be under our control to prevent our ISPs from abusing us. And they want us to do this by "trusting" them with all of our DNS data.

That was a bit of a tangent, but it's worth considering that we could get to a point where devices like these Android TV boxes could do literally anything they want, and we'd have no way to know at all, even if we 100% control our own networks and are highly technical.