{"id":106001,"date":"2019-12-11T17:19:14","date_gmt":"2019-12-11T22:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rbach.net\/index.php\/"},"modified":"2021-08-17T12:49:36","modified_gmt":"2021-08-17T16:49:36","slug":"your-smart-tv-is-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rbach.net\/index.php\/your-smart-tv-is-evil\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Smart TV is Spying On You"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Your<\/a>Many people will find a smart TV<\/strong> under their tree this year. Smart TVs are like regular televisions but with an internet connection<\/strong>. The global smart TVs market is expected<\/a> to reach 249.9M <\/strong>units by 2024. And all those smart TVs may be spying on you<\/strong>. A while ago I wrote about Vizio<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(VZIO<\/a>)\u00a0getting caught invading your privacy by collecting and selling your personal data<\/a><\/strong>. Despite the fact that Vizo had to pay a $2.2M fine, smart TV manufacturers continue to spy on their customers.<\/p>\n

\"Data<\/a>ZDNet<\/em><\/a> reports<\/a> that that smart TVs send user data<\/strong> to tech titans including Facebook<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(FB<\/a>), Google<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(GOOG<\/a>), and Netflix<\/a>. <\/strong>These devices are spying on you even when they are idle. U.S. and UK researchers say smart television sets produced by popular vendors including Samsung<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(005930<\/a>), Apple<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(AAPL<\/a>), and LG<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(LGLD<\/a>), alongside content and app streaming devices such as Amazon<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(AMZN<\/a>) FireTV<\/a>, and Roku<\/a><\/strong>, are sending out information<\/strong> potentially without the knowledge or consent of users.<\/p>\n

\"Smart<\/a>

Financial Times<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Your Smart TV is Spying On You<\/h3>\n

In a paper titled, “Information Exposure From Consumer IoT Devices<\/a>” (PDF), the team said that 34,586 controlled experiments found that 88% of devices send information<\/strong> to firms other than the device manufacturer; 56% of U.S. devices and 83.8% of UK devices send your info overseas. They also report every device they studied exposed some kind of information in\u00a0<\/strong>plain-text<\/b>.<\/p>\n

\"eavesdropping\"<\/a>The researchers from Northeastern University<\/a> and Imperial College London<\/a> found that 37% could “reliably inferred” user and device behavior<\/strong> from eavesdropping on the user’s interactions with television sets and other household IoT products.<\/p>\n

The study found that almost half of the tested devices contacted Amazon. That includes devices not manufactured by Amazon. David Choffnes, one of the authors of the paper warns that Amazon has a lot of information about what you are doing in your home.<\/p>\n

According to the paper location data and IP addresses<\/strong> were commonly sent by our IoT devices to third parties in the cloud including Netflix<\/strong>, Spotify<\/a><\/strong>, Microsoft<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(MSFT<\/a>), Akamai<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(AKAM<\/a>), and Google<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"Netflix<\/a>When it came to smart TVs, however, almost all<\/strong> of the devices included in the study would contact Netflix<\/strong> — whether or not a TV was configured with an account for the content streaming service. “This, at the very least, exposes information to Netflix about the model of [a] TV at a given location,<\/em>” the paper reads.<\/p>\n

Some of the tech titans collecting your data responded to the researchers.<\/p>\n