Hacker reverse engineers his Samsung TV and finds on-device AI listening for your dog and baby, watching what you watch, and borrowing your soundbar’s mic if the TV doesn’t have one. Then OpenAI banned him for reverse-engineering it.
Source:
Yup, Smart TV’s of any brand (at least in the US) are essentially spyware. I made a video about it recently.
The upside is that if you don’t connect your TV to the Internet, all that data just sits in its internal memory and doesn’t go anywhere. So don’t connect it.
The weirdest thing in all this is that it’s Texas, of all places, leading the charge to hold these TV manufacturers accountable. (And Ken Paxton, the most cartoonishly corrupt politician in recent memory at that.)
“Shifted it to the consumer”
• The “Guest Consent” Clause: For example, Section 6(d) of LG’s updated terms of service states that it is the owner’s sole responsibility to obtain consent from household members and guests whose voices might be captured by the TV’s artificial intelligence and voice recognition features.
• The Legal Trap: By agreeing to these terms, you contractually accept the responsibility to warn anyone sitting in your living room that the TV is listening. If a guest sues over an illegal recording under state wiretap laws, the manufacturer will use the EULA to argue that you breached the contract by failing to get that guest’s consent. That’s assuming someone actually reads the EULA
Especially in
• California • Delaware • Florida • Illinois • Maryland • Massachusetts • Montana • Nevada • New Hampshire • Pennsylvania • Washington
because they have all-party consent laws : In these states, recording an oral conversation requires the consent of everyone involved. Because a house guest has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a private home, a smart TV capturing their background audio without their explicit knowledge constitutes a violation of state wiretapping laws, regardless of what the TV’s EULA say
So, you have to have everyone in your household agree to the EULA not just yourself if you use a smart tv in those 11 states to not violate wiretapping laws.
6 mos into owning a Samsung TV, I started getting ads.
So I put a pihole on my network which fixed it but I also started seeing the ENORMOUS amount of times ALL my samsung devices were being blocked. I’m talking THOUSANDS per day per device. Like the TV would be blocked 1,200 times in one day, my samsung smartphone would also be blocked 1,000+ times per day while my wife’s iphone that she uses for every and all social media was being blocked maybe 100 times.
Since then I’ve never bought another Samsung device and hooked an apple tv up to my Samsung TV while disconnecting the tv from the internet. It’s fucking disgusting how you buy their product and still get milked for data/money.
This is why I don’t connect my tv to the internet. My wife was super Luke warm about this when I told her about it, and we have a new Samsung TV, with their stupid AI in it…sigh.
That’s why I have a Steam Deck connected to mine.
I own a new 2026 OLED LG tv and these privacy implications is why I never connected it to the internet. Laptop + Apple TV is more than enough.
One of the things that AI is actually useful for. Banned!
Hey guys, I am starting to think AI isn’t actually for us.
Kimi K3.1 incoming 👾 Fuck this shit restricting REA / reverse engineering anything “DRM / encrypted” etc.
Time to put the Samsung tv on my router again I guess and block anything and everything Samsung.
Fucking hell.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t use American AI chatbots.
I don’t get it, aren’t these messages Twitter or something? It’s not ChatGPT prompts and clearly he’s not going to put all this into it. What the hell does this have to do with Open AI?
LoL
This “advanced tech” that’s based on stolen IP won’t even give you the lyrics to Happy Birthday to You.
Wild, maybe they should ban all those “rogue” AI bots we keep hearing about too
You are only allowed to use ai for evil
In case anyone was ever curious if AI could be used against our corporate masters, here’s your answer.
I suspect that if the AI industry ever gets any sort of regulation, it will be to wrench any kind of power that end users have that may threaten the capitalistic hegemony away from them. Can’t have people reverse engineering their tech to figure out how they are using it to spy on you, cuz THAT’S CYBER ABUSE! :/
wrench any kind of power that end users have that may threaten the capitalistic hegemony
Frog boiling.
That already happened when mobiles began to replace desktops.
that is why anthropoic got scared, afraid of deepseek and other free models.
Too little, too late. People like myaelf are already using DeepSeek among other open models & they’re widespread.
probably why they are scared.
That, and the price fixing.
… on whose part?
Don’t worry. We’ll be able to run larger models locally soon and this kind of stuff will be need to be blocked on the device side, not the model side.
Just use a different website
