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Comment by monkpit

1 month ago

> I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.

That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open? Amongst other various dark patterns?

Your statement here kind of characterizes it as user error, but the manufacturers are absolutely hostile actors here.

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monkpit

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JoshTriplett  1 month ago

> That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open?

Not yet. Wouldn't be surprising, but most of the time the problem is "person holding the remote wants it to work, connects it to wifi when it offers, doesn't know that they shouldn't".

Nextgrid  1 month ago

This nonsense keeps getting repeated over and over again for years now and I have yet to find a single documented case of it happening. You'd think that with all the attention, someone would've actually documented it by now.

Enough people connect their TV/smart devices willingly to the internet that there is no need for adversarial approaches like this (which are not trivial to set up - they'd need to maintain per-country partnerships with Wi-Fi hotspot providers, pay them and hope the ROI is worth it).

  • monkpit  1 month ago

    Hmm I thought I had read it on an article posted here at some point, I could be wrong.

    • Nextgrid  1 month ago

      I think it originated on Reddit and it's since been parroted here in the comments on basically every smart TV thread but I have yet to see actual evidence. It seems like a trivial theory to test - disconnect from your wifi or change its password, wait for ads to suddenly reappear on the TV (evidence it got a network connection from somewhere).

      Similar FUD is being spread around HDMI's Ethernet channel; a way to carry network data over an HDMI cable. I have basically never seen it in the wild on any consumer device, but even if it were, it would still require the other device to cooperate and act as a switch/router to share its connection to the TV. Yet despite that every time smart TVs and privacy comes up someone mentions this.