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.
In 1999 this had already happened, just the information about that explosion hadn't reached your part of the galaxy yet. Metaphorically.
I'm thinking about at least Russia (Putin taking power and the second Chechen War), Israel (repatriation and its political turn and its choice of allies in the changed world, Likud taking power), Armenia (Kocharyan taking power, Sargsyan and Demirchyan being assassinated) and Azerbaijan (starting to boycott negotiations and build up oil industry since that time) having made a clear direction change.
These may not be obviously connected to other things we see, but I think they are part of the same tendency. I think at the same time Microsoft got an anti-monopoly decision saying that documenting Windows interfaces its bundled applications use for independent developers is sufficient for it to not be a monopolist, and Netscape died, and dotcoms crashed, and Linux attained the love of corporations, albeit not so notable yet, while FreeBSD didn't, and Amiga started dying, and DEC, and Sun received a hit, and one can notice many other things.
By the way, it's the favorite thing to say for journalists mentioning it that The Phantom Menace was a bad movie and hated by fans, and Attack of the Clones an even worse one, and Revenge of the Sith kinda better. But these were all political statements (I'm not imagining it because Lucas said that himself many times), and when we treat them as such, they were very good as that - the predictions came out to be correct.
OK, I might just love Star Wars too much.
What an infodump.
I mean, yes, obviously I agree with Agent Smith on that part.
World should be reverted to 70s, 80s and 90s and locked in a loop of those decades forever.
That would require us to deal with both Reagan and Nixon over and over again, though.
I guess their bullshit would be reverted when each loop resets. But still.