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