Comment by 8fingerlouie
7 days ago
My TVs are on the IoT network so that I can control them from Home Assistant, but they're blocked from accessing the internet.
DNS lookups are redirected or blocked (53 redirected to my local DNS resolver, 853 blocked), and DoH is blocked as best effort though it's hard to block HTTP DNS traffic, which again is why the devices are blocked in the firewall.
All streaming is done via AppleTV, which is a platform I trust infinitely more than LG/Samsung/whatever.
All of your blocking still doesn't change the fact that your LG TV is actively trying to scan your local hardware, gathering IP-addresses of devices, wi-fi names and signal strengths, creating digital finger prints of the audio and video projected on your screen, recording audio through the internal microphone, even when the TV is in standby or without an internet connection, saving the collected data locally and uploading to LG Ad Solutions as soon as the TV is connected to the internet.
Yeah which is why its imperative that you _never_ connect to the Internet.
More imperative is that you _never_ buy one.
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But it's never connected to the internet, not even for software updates. If the TV isn't connected to the internet there's no reason to update it, assuming the TV works as expected.
It's a trade off I guess. I use Home Assistant to control TVs, so kinda need the access.
Have you noticed that on many home routers there is now a default open, sometimes password protective network named AT&T or Cox Wi-Fi? That’s the backhaul. The TV will join that automatically without asking you because they have an agreement with the network provider. This is how tons of devices phone home now. You don’t ever need to add a device on your network for it to have internet. If there’s a partner Wi-Fi network anywhere, it’ll push through that.
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Again, what I mean is, even if you're able to block all these things, the company LG is still secretly and actively trying to collect and process user data, without user awareness or consent.
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What if you sell the TV? Can you clear the data with a factory reset so it's not just uploaded when a new user connects it?
LG has a cereal port on most of their televisions and monitors. There are quirks and bugs in some models but the general packet structure is simple and it's pretty straightforward to get an ESP32 with ESP home talking to the monitor.
Do transparent faraday cages exist?
WiFi / 5G faraday cages exist, but they have been downrated for affecting the signal quality somewhat...
And then your neighbor spins up an unprotected network or something like xfinity which they could have a deal with and it connects there and phones home anyways.
I hear this a lot “TVs will just connect to a nearby unprotected WiFi network!” But I ve never seen any evidence of it. It appears to just be speculation, unless you have an actual source?
Its always speculation that would be trivial to actually test.
1. Do not connect to network 2. Create unauthenticated WiFi network 3. Monitor WiFi network
Strange no one has ever done this simple af test to backup their claims
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They could also use something like Amazon Sidewalk or ATSC 3.0's dedicated return channel.
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Because they don't. It's too much guesswork, and honestly pretty complicated. From the user perspective the TV would appear to go offline every now and then, so also somewhat easily detected.
It's much easier to just throw a $10 5G modem in there, pay the $2/year subscription fee for service, and extract data that way. Assuming a 5-10 year relevant lifespan of the TV, they'd throw $20-$30 on top of the sales price for the modem and 10 years of service.
The 5G modem could run completely independent of the wifi network, be a completely different circuit, and you'd never know it was there.
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Seeing how things have recently been developing, I'd bet on it already being the case or at least in active development.
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And what exactly would they use that particular access path for ?
I could see a threat if the TV had access to the internet and could establish a TLS tunnel or similar from the mothership, and execute commands on my LAN (or IoT network as it stands), and report back. That could establish a command & control channel that could potentially orchestrate an attack on my infrastructure via the TV.
However, reporting that "network X exists and has these devices" over a different network complicates things a fair bit. In theory they could still use the TV as a command and control platform, but it would have to switch networks between my closed network and the open network in order to execute commands and report results. Not saying it's impossible, just very unlikely.
Besides, the TVs are not alone in being cut off from the internet. I have two IoT networks, one for trusted devices (AppleTVs, Sonos, and the likes), and one for untrusted devices like TVs. They run on different VLANs, and anything on the untrusted IoT network can pretty much only talk to itself (client isolation) and the gateway, and there's no internet and no open ports to any other VLAN.
> And what exactly would they use that particular access path for ?
Uploading the weeks, months, or years of locally-stored activity [0] data? Text compresses really well and local storage used to be very cheap.
[0] ...mic voice transcription, how often you use the thing, for how long, and a best guess (because of lack of time sync) at when, "automated content detection" logs [1], names of files you've fed to the thing, -if equipped with a camera- number of people in the room and interesting information about them, etc, etc, etc...
[1] ...assuming that that can be done with data loaded from the factory, which I kinda doubt...
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Congratulations but I also dislike this type of comment because that is not a solution, a workaround that doesn't happen for 99% of the population.
Soon you won't be able to IoT network or block these devices as they begin to partner with Amazon and the likes that sell Internet for near-by IoT devices. Then your only option then is physically removing / de soldering radios from the board.
Laws needed, like yesterday.
For now, setting up an IoT network is pretty much best practice, and I'd wager the average Hacker News reader both has the necessary equipment and skills to do it. That may not always be the case.
Assuming they install some 5G modem in the device, which is pretty much dirt cheap these days (our local water utility uses 5G for meter readings, and the cost per meter is something like $1/year), there's literally nothing short of a faraday cage you can do.
The can report on what you watch freely, and only consumer laws can stop them. However, without a wifi connection they can't snoop on your local network, and they probably can't connect the data to you, assuming you don't register the TV for those 3 months of added warranty or whatever they try to get you to register.
I tend to avoid devices that are built to snoop on you, so no Amazon Alexa, no Google Home, no Apple HomePod. Everything I have utilizes local control via Home Assistant, and most of it is actively blocked in the firewall from accessing the internet. It's not hard to implement, and doesn't require a master of IT, but it does remove a lot of the convenience, which I guess is the reason people don't do it.
That's great that you know how to do that, but LG and others know that also. They don't care that a miniscule amount of ppl can do it, they care about the 99.9999% that don't. Thid should be dealt with legislation and very high fees, sufficient to discourage anyone to do it.
That's great, good for you that you can do that.
Unfortunately, from LG's surveillance capitalism point of view, the 0.001% of LG owners that can even think about doing that isn't even a drop in the bucket. They don't care about any one individual, and the vast majority of individuals don't care or understand what LG is doing as long as they can watch TV.
It's only a matter of time before another Cambridge Analytica situation pops up, except with better tools and vastly more data. Or maybe something we can't even imagine yet enabled by simply re-purposing ad-tech into something political and malevolent? Some people will be wise to it, of course, but if enough are caught up in it, it won't matter, we all lose as a whole.
If you're streaming via AppleTV, why do you need to give the TV itself access to the network?
I use Home Assistant to turn on/off the TV via automations, sensors, etc.
I could possibly do it via HDMI CEC, but I have a couple of Sony Bravia TVs that more often than not completely ignores that, so I prefer having control over assuming it happens.
You can do on/off using an IR blaster (broadlink integration with discrete on/off codes). It’s when you want to read volume etc things get trickier
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Put the tv on a zigbee/matter plug and connect that for the power. (Just be mindful that some TVs need to condition their screens and they will do that when turned “off”, typically during the night. So it you do a hard power off you will need to perform it manually. LG calls it OLED Care iirc.)
Yeah CEC is a bit tricky sometimes. How about auto-off from the TV itself and then a timer for a HA controlled outlet to turn off power after that using automation (i.e., when the streaming device is off for a x minutes)
There is sadly no hdmi CEC support on Most GPUs for pcs. So when you want your tv to turn on and off with your pc it is only possible with the tv being reachable from your pc via ip.
I believe LG doesn’t advertise such an api via Bluetooth
You can get USB controlled CEC injectors for HDMI.
https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter
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HDMI breakout and a esp32 module flashed with esphome is another option. The tv most likely doesn’t care that the port that sent on/off command is not the same port the video signal is coming from..
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Blocking DNS doesn't do much if the device isn't resolving hostnames and just pushes data to a bunch of preconfigured IPs tho...