It is no secret that television sets have been around for a few decades in our homes as one of the most important household appliances.
Although it was not until very recently that we began to see the latest models appearing on the market capable of connecting to the Internet, in addition to other interesting integrated features, putting at our disposal a huge range of possibilities for entertainment.
Unfortunately, among all the advantages that may be reflected in these complex electronic devices, it also seems that there are some rather shady and certainly disconcerting things hidden inside them.
For example, they may be able to collect large amounts of information about their users and send it to someone who is very interested in getting hold of that data.
Jason Huntley's discovery:
A guy named Jason Huntley, who is said to live somewhere in the UK, and who also possesses advanced computer skills, noticed to his amazement that his TV started showing him promotional content related to the programming he and his family had been watching over the days.
This content appeared in a timely manner on the home page, which is why our friend Huntley suspected that someone else was using his personal information without his consent.
So, he set to work to try to track the information to find out exactly what kind of data was being collected. As well as where it was being sent.
To achieve his goal, Huntley set up his computer so that it could be interposed between his television set and the Internet router, so that all the information being sent could be carefully studied and monitored by him in real time.
In this way, Huntley discovered that his data was going into the hands of the TV manufacturer itself. A famous appliance company based in South Korea.
But the most curious thing was to learn that, among the data collected, an exact duplicate of all the multimedia content created by him and his family was sent, in the form of home video recordings.
Outraged by this situation, Huntley went to the TV's configuration menu and deactivated an option that allowed the exchange of data over the Internet. However, his data continued to be sent even when this feature was deactivated.
After realizing that it was virtually impossible to prevent his data from being stolen, Huntley posted a detailed account of the experience on his personal blog.
As a result, many people started talking about it, to the point where various media outlets had to cover the issue, causing a huge stir throughout the UK.
The response from the South Korean manufacturer was not long in coming.
The company, which turned out to be none other than LG, declared that it would conduct a thorough investigation into this and other similar cases, stressing its commitment to protecting the privacy of its users.
Since then, instead of reports of spying through smart TVs have been decreasing, they seem to have been increasing.
Samsung's dark secret:
In 2015 the Samsung brand was accused of covertly collecting personal information through its latest generation TVs, which record the conversations of its users and send these files to the company's servers.
The whole process is carried out constantly through the voice recognition application that Samsung TVs come with factory-installed.
Samsung confessed the veracity of such accusations, indicating that the mentioned application had this capability.
At the same time they stated that its function was not to spy on its users, but rather to serve for online translation of voice commands. This is supposed to contribute to improving device responsiveness and user experience.
Finally, they also pointed out that the data sending feature can be disabled at any time by going into the configuration settings.
But the truth is that in this case it happens exactly the same as with LG brand TVs, as they still continue to send data in the background at the hands of the manufacturer.
A latent risk:
Several experts have commented that the data collected by modern televisions can be of any kind, and that sending this data is a simple and immediate task when people connect them to the Internet.
This is very serious, as it is possible that almost anyone with advanced network knowledge can have full access to this data with little effort.
The main reason is that these electronic devices do not have antivirus, blockers, firewalls or any other type of defense against external attacks.
On the other hand, it is also possible for a malicious person to remotely activate the camera built into the latest models, recording the environment without anyone else noticing.
Another important thing to consider is that they can also transmit over the Internet copies of any files stored on pen drives, cell phones and any other device with memory that we connect to the TV.
After reading this, I am almost sure that more than one of you will run to unplug your TV, or at least disconnect it from the Internet.
Sources:
http://doctorbeet.blogspot.com/2013/11/lg-smart-tvs-logging-usb-filenames-and.html
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/lg-tvs-spy-viewers-send-2815798
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