So I’ve heard people around the place talking about how your smart TV spies on you and how they take precautions against that by never connecting it to their WiFi or plugging in ethernet except to do firmware upgrades when needed (if they can’t be done via USB). Talk of TV’s monitoring what you do and sending it back home to big brother or worse sending video/audio out.
So today I was going through my network logs and trying to work out what this rouge device was that was connected to my network… the router says it’s ethernet and the manufacturer is Samsung… mmmm
I do recall plugging the TV back in to see if any of the smart apps could replace any boxes sitting under the TV, the short answer is no, they are all shit (mostly compared to the ATV4). In any case, it was never used past that one day and clearly I’ve forgotten to unplug it (or plugged it back in when I cleaned up the cables at Christmas time). What is very interesting is the daily log of data over the last few months.
Sadly this diagram is “all time” so I don’t know exactly when all these things happened, but I’ve looked further back into the history and there is only data back to September 2018 with large gaps where it must have been unplugged.
Now in context, my Samsung Smart TV has its speakers disabled, only has HDMI 1 plugged with video provided through an AV Reciever which also handles the sound. So there is no TV Guide to be downloaded/displayed (hell I don’t even think it’s ever been tuned into stations or has an antenna plugged into it) or overlay of news or anything ever displayed. Even the stock menus are never accessed, literally on/off are the only commands it should ever receive.
In any case, that’s a fair amount of data for a device that isn’t doing anything besides displaying the HDMI 1 input and I’ve now blocked it at the router.
…you know, those tin foil hats are kinda stylish…