this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
242 points (97.3% liked)
Privacy
31833 readers
161 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
... but it isn't able to tell anyone, as it is not connected to the Internet. Poor smart TV.
If there are any unsecured networks in your vicinity it might be telling on you without you knowing.
Pull one of your old routers from the back of closet, and use it to make a completely new network just for your TV. If you don’t connect the router to the rest of the internet, your TV is happy to connect to something, and you get to keep your privacy a little bit longer.
Not everyone has an old router. I do, but not everyone.
Why do I keep an old router?
If you have a nice enough router you could connect your TV to it and block its Mac address maybe.
Or maybe configure the firewall to block/allow only very specific things. It’s a bit more technical than just plugging in an Ethernet cable though…
Cause it still works, doesn't take up much space, and doesn't really eat a whole lot just siting there.
Also, 2 is one, 1 is none. Good to have a fall back in case hardware dies
This is the way.
I'm a little surprised we haven't heard about one of these smart TV brands using something like Amazon Sidewalk yet to communicate the analyzed data:
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/
A popular brand could totally set up their own network like this and with apartments there would probably be sufficient density to ensure that there's always at least one connected device nearby to act as a bridge.
Well that's pretty terrifying.
Need to figure out how to block that now. Sigh
Faraday cage.
Open it up and desolder the wifi module/antenna
Any evidence of that or are you just speculating?
Pure speculation.
I don't think so. The first step when connecting to WiFi is to agree to the terms of service that allow the manufacturer to legallly spy on you. Without agreeing to that, they'd be breaking the law.
I'm too skeptical to default to the whole "corporations will abide by the law" thing anymore. I'm willing to accept that I might be wrong though. There have just been too many times where I've pessimistically remarked on a situation like this as a sort of half joke only to find out that I was right and it was actually worse than I initially assumed.