Comment by mitxela
6 days ago
Disconnecting it from the internet isn't enough, because it will store spying data forever until it gets a connection, and it will connect to any open WiFi. You have to disconnect it from the power, and then use a sledgehammer on the remains.
>and it will connect to any open WiFi
I've seen this claim made over and over again for various smart TVs, but so far I haven't seen any concrete evidence of this, only random speculation.
I have a Samsung fridge. It’s not a smart fridge, it doesn’t have a screen, bluetooth, or any way to connect to it.
I logged into my UniFi stack to monitor devices and it showed up. It had gotten the connection details from my wife’s phone, the other Samsung device and was transmitting data back to Google and Samsung.
What model of fridge?! How did you know the random device on your network was your non-smart fridge? This is a wild story. I want to believe but if it's true I think there's no sane solution other than exploratory surgery on every appliance you buy.
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The far more likely explanation is that your unifi dashboard's device identification logic is broken and is misreporting the device. Otherwise it doesn't make sense for samsung to engage it a massive conspiracy of putting wifi hardware in non-smart devices (driving up the BOM cost), creating a massive botnet that can share credentials between devices, all so they can... maybe run a residential proxy network? Then subsequently detected by anyone who looks at their device list.
Even if you think they're running some sort of massive botnet, the fridge being part of it is still implausible. They probably have billions of phones and tablets alone, plenty enough to scrape/DDoS the entire internet several times over. There's no need to add clandestine hardware into non-smart fridges.
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I'd rather open it up and remove/destroy just the network card.
(I don't have to do so though because my tv is 20 years old.)
What if the network isn't on a separate card?
Then if you are lucky, the telescreen is in an unusual position. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, you might be able to remain outside the range of the telescreen.
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Remove the AC coupling capacitor connecting the antenna to the transceiver.
That'd be the time to grab your hammer, baseball bat, or shotgun.
If that happened would any of that data get tied back to you? If you haven't created any accounts or signed into anything.
The TV looks for nearby Bluetooth and WiFi devices to identify when you're at home and who's at home. It also runs voice recognition to record your conversations as text, and uploads them. It also uploads the ID of what you're watching and when, though not the actual pixels, as far as anyone knows.
They can use data gathered from your network. Perhaps you have some other connected device with an account they can match to. Or a phone.
Block it on your router.
Yeah, that's the only way to deal with this nonsense. Basically, block all devices that connect to your router from having outbound access and whitelist the ones you want to let through, with narrow firewall settings.