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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

> First of all, open the TV and disconnect the wireless radio from the main board

This. Never trust software switches. See my other reply for what I suggest instead of "streaming boxes" that aren't any better than the TV firmware.

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So you think that if the TV doesn't have your Wi-Fi password, it surreptititously turns on Wi-Fi and runs cracking software to obtain it anyway?

I think the more logical concern would be that it would wait until it could find any potential unsecured wifi to use. I live in an apartment building and there a few wifi access points that I can reach from my apartment with no security. Though one of them appears to be an air conditioner??

Say the TV finds such an access point and uses it. It phones home and so now the manufacturer now knows that such and such serial # TV is located in that neighborhood.

They still need to tie it to you. If you've not given it a shred of personal information, it has to be fingerprinting via surreptitious audio/video recording, or else by obtaining the purchase info from the retailer (like the name and billing address from your credit card) and matching that by serial number (which would have to be recorded during purchase).

I wouldn't be surprised if they did audio fingerprinting. But even if they don't, the third parties who are buying the data can easily re-identify the users by doing data fusion with other sources (smartphone location data from other vendors)

Did Gamers Nexus not precisely demonstrate that audio is captured by TVs?

Not that I have any evidence it's happening, but it'd be more likely for TV manufacturers to partner with ISPs that offer public WiFi using the access points they rent to their customers.

No but things like Amazon sidewalk exist

The low bandwidth always on kindle modems could also be feasibly built into TVs for telemetry, and may be cheaper than the money they could get from selling the data.

Thank you. This is exactly what I was thinking reading people who think you need to do more than simply never connect it to your wifi.

it's not just your wifi you have to worry about. neighbour can have insecure wifi. or deliberately open ones like coffee shops, free municipal hotspots, etc.

This is trivial to test yet not a single person claiming TVs will connect to open networks all on their own has ever provided a shred of evidence of it actually happening.

That sounds like a TV manufacturer is going to be having one hell of a lawsuit if they're breaking into other peoples wifi networks.

Wasn't this exactly what happened in the LG exposé that just came out? It connects to any WiFi network it can, your will be damned.

No, no it wasn't.

My xfinity modem helpfully defaults to providing an open network that others can connect to. If I didn't know to disable this, it would be the first network it could find.

There are available IoT networks it could use, though I don't think all of them run over Wifi.

Yeah and if it was using LoRa or something similar, ot could reach hundreds of meters through buildings or many kilometers in open space, with a very small antenna. If they built in a big antenna into the TV chassis itself, it cpuld get quite and insane reach but it would be more expensive.

What it would connect to ? To other TVs (comfortably connected to mains power) forming a mesh network. A bunch of Internet connected gateways planted by the manufacturers would capture the data from the network.

MeshCore and MeshTastic have demonstrated community networks like this, so I would not put it past TV manufacturers to try missuse the same idea.

Honest question. Do projectors also suffer?

The one we have is even worse. It won't really work well outside of things like airplay or chromecast, and those require wifi. It was extremely cheap though.

(It has an HDMI port, but it's clearly a second class citizen in the menus, etc. Default to HDMI on power up is intentionally broken. It's also intentionally designed to turn into a brick if we ever lose the remote. At boot, it puts a screen up saying to press a button on the remote if you want it to display anything else, and that screen never times out. If you plug in an HDMI input, it says "HDMI input detected; press OK.". There's no "OK" button on the projector itself. You have to press the OK button on the remote.)

Not from privacy issues, but all the typical ones from projectors never went anywhere: low brightness, high heat, low maximum operating lifetime, fan noise, and hard to set up (impossible in some places).

I don't think this apply to most UST projector nowadays. I mean, operating lifetime is probably still an issue, fan noise while higher than a TV (which doesn't have it) is not an issue anymore, heat.. well, come close to my (old, ok) OLED LG TV and you can still warm your hands (although not like the previous plasma one I had, that's true). For the setup I don't know exactly but there are online shops that gives you the 1st setup for free (at the cost of doing the unboxing for you). Also probably nowadays with an LLM almost anybody that care enough to research and buy a projector can do it, I guess.

Yes, I want to buy a projector this Black Friday (Hisense PX3-Pro).

Faar less. A larger fraction of projectors remain dumb HDMI to light converters. Tis been my own plan if i settle on wanting a tv.

If it has any kind of in-built smart TV style OS - then yes.

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