I used to work for an MSP (Managed Service Provider), can confirm. Security is something I had to redirect attention to on a day-to-day basis. Even then, the company was more concerned with appearance and audit compliance than security.

I have worked at IT companies that really did care about security, but those companies were driven by management and staff that personally cared about IT security. One of them was a certificate authority.

Here's a story about physical security from before that time.

I once had equipment in a Data Center that was embedded in the 4th floor of an office building. There was a mantrap at the entrance, designed to prevent you from walking away with the main DC door open, or letting people tailgate in to it. One of the doors of the mantrap was a sliding door, disguised as a bit of the hallway.

The sliding door was locked with a maglock on the thin end, so when it fully closed, it locked and you couldn't slide it open without a key card, from inside or out.

...unless you bumped in to it with your shoulder, which separated the lock and opened the door. Which, after it was figured out (about 1 month), happened all the time. People would get let in to the DC without a card that opened that specific door. (DC security control provisioned the main door was separate from building control, which managed the sliding door).

When they tried to get out later, they'd get stuck in the mantrap, then they'd wait for someone to let them out (pre-cellphones). That person would then show them the trick. This was so common they turned off the forced-lock alarm. This lead to the mantrap being useless, and people propping the DC door open for ease of access when moving stuff in and out.

This was put in place in 2001, and I visited the building last year in 2025, it's still in place today.

It's worth noting that this DC was shared by multiple competitive reinsurers, ISPs and financial agencies. The were no cameras outside or inside, and you could poke most server reset buttons through the rack cages with the ink cartridge of a ball point pen. Not everyone was shown that trick.

next time you are setting up your samsung phone, give the agreement a read.

That’s wild. I guess I need to do a review of my setup…

It put my TV in its own group in pi-hole, blocked everything (.*) for that group, and then whitelisted what I wanted the TV to be able to get to.

I caught an app that my daughter's school uses called ClassDojo that wouldn't work at my company for some reason. I had to reach out to our security admin and it turns out it was doing DNS lookups by bypassing my company's DNS server. I submitted a ticket to the company and they ended up either designing the app to fallback to the device's assigned DNS or either probably doing something else shady. Idk, it works now.

My point is there's more than one way to do a DNS lookup.

And if you try to overcome the anti-tampering firmware, it's a federal crime in basically every country.

Faraday cage?

You could install the TV in a block of lead. Bonus: +20 against a Burglary check.

Never let it connect to internet.

This is a temporary solution though. One day they'll just include cellular connectivity into their TVs once it gets cheap enough to do so. And this is terrifying because by then there will be no escape from their surveillance short of hacking into it or putting it in a faraday cage.

They record audio and convert it to text locally so it has virtually infinite storage of everything it hears and uses almost no bandwidth to transmit everything once Internet is reconnected.

Yes, my only hope is that it relies on a wlan connection, which I simply won’t grant it.

A new, fully open source firmware is way better than simply not hooking it to Internet, but the only real fix is to disconnect or burn the modem and microphone. Obviously, we all have different a different level of attack surface that makes us feel comfortable. I'm just giving you a heads up. You never know what's in the other chips.

Will do, thanks.