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Your reminder to remove the microphone from your TV remote today (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/privacy@programming.dev
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[–] 35 points 1 month ago (18 children)

Microphone? They put microphones in TV remotes nowadays?

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  • [–] 22 points 1 month ago (12 children)

    Yes, it's for "easy searching." I dunno about current offerings, but even Roku boxes from five-ish years ago had them; you'd hold a button and talk into the remote.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    They still have them. This was from a Roku stick but has been repurposed for Flirc. The devices it was once connected to had a productive meeting with a pipe wrench.

    The mic is right below the power button and you held down the mic button above the play/pause button to use the voice search.

    A Roku remote

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    Roku remotes are perfect for Flirc dongles. I repurposed one for Flirc as well. The Roku device it was attached to is long gone 😅

    I wonder if the microphone can be repurposed for similar shenanigans? 🤔

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (9 children)

    Why? What can I say to remote? "Switch to channel 15?" Isn't it easier to press a button?

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    It's for searching (so you don't have to type words on a virtual key pad with a remote with no alpha-numeric key pad).

    It would actually be OK, if they all had a hardware switch that cut power to the mic, but I doubt that how they work.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Having the mic on the remote always on and streaming back to the host would drain the battery in about a day.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I don't know how they work but I would assume that the mic is not always streaming, as you say it can't be due to battery.

    I do not feel comfortable to assume that there is ZERO possibility that the mic can be made to stream without the physical button pressed ...

    ... unless I did the work to understand how it's wired and controlled, something I don't care to do. So I'll just assume they are unsafe spy devices until proven otherwise.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Streaming services have a search feature, but you have to scroll through each letter of the alphabet to spell out whatever you’re looking for. The microphone does away with both this process, and privacy.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    It would be okay if it was local, and a simple voice recognition could work. Smart phones have that ability when the connection isn't present. But they're going to make it cloud driven because that's easier and opens up more "features".

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    • [–] 15 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I'd love to see a guide about how to remove the microphones from the tv. I'm not brave enough to just open up my TV hoping I can find all the bugs in it.

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    • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    is this a "the best time to plant a tree" thing or is there something particularly terrible about today and tv microphones

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago* (4 children)

    GamersNexus just dropped a pretty damning video on LG's data collection practices. Their TVs record absolutely everything from their microphones and cameras (if equipped - some are), sniff out everything using wifi and bluetooth within its vicinity, and sends it ALL back to LG. It does this even when the TV is "turned off", storing the data until it's reconnected to the internet. And yes - that includes the remote's microphone.

    My theory is that this is why modern "smart" TVs end up grinding to a halt after a short-ish period of time when not connected to a network. Data just sits and fills up the internal storage until there's no more space for other processes to function. This happened to a Vizio we bought recently - I ended up factory resetting it and suddenly it worked perfectly. Never connected to the network.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    This is a known feature that is not hidden which is not automatically turned on by default.

    You must set your TV to a different standby mode and enable LG voice control.

    When you do this, it very plainly tells you that it can listen with the screen off so you can control the TV with voice.

    Failure of User Awareness, not some nefarious spyware.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

    This is a known feature that is not hidden which is not automatically turned on by default.

    You must set your TV to a different standby mode and enable LG voice control.

    When you do this, it very plainly tells you that it can listen with the screen off so you can control the TV with voice.

    And you believe that? Don't simp for billion-dollar companies, they don't need your help.

    It's time to call it what it is. Spying.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    And you believe that?

    I don't have to, I can verify with my own hardware that the data is only sent after enabling the option in question, and stops when disabled.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    And what about when they update the TOS again and conveniently switch those back on? And maybe even move the opt-out settings to another hidden location, or remove them entirely? Because that's absolutely a thing that happens.

    I don't trust any of this shit anymore. You do you, but I refuse to allow any more companies reaching into my house to siphon whatever they can get their greedy hands on.

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    • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Putting tape over it or glue in the hole is probably far easier to manage for the average person, without destroying the remote in the process. 😅

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    • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Hey LG, if you're listening, where the hell is my remote?

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    [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    I remember Samsung did this on my TV with a talk function in the remote. This was a 2012-model. So it's technically not new that companies do this, but what LG has done here worries me.

    I've got one myself now, but I live in bumfuck nowhere, and have blocked the MAC address for the TV. Got an HTPC connected it with Jellyfin and the whole shebang.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago*

    Oh don't worry. These tech companies pretty much all do this. If the TV's aren't listening and even watching us. It are our iOS and Android based smartphones and watches. Our in home smart cloud connected "security" camera's. Our 'smart' doorbells, fridges, ovens. Our Windows/Macbook laptops. Our cars.

    We're already long passed the dystopian threshold.

    The worst part is, the vast majority of people chose for this and socially shunned people that never opted in for this 1984 bullshit.

    LG is nothing, last year Apple settled for spying on their users. Nobody cared. Facebook has been charged for this, multiple times, nobody cares considering the popularity of Whatsapp and Instagram to this day. Everybody goes wild about the new iPhone, haha, it's an absolute privacy nightmare that's spying 24/7.

    LG is just a popular target now because they're Asian.

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    • [+] -6 points 1 month ago (11 children)

    Guys c'mon

    There are microphones in YOUR POCKET. They track your location and likely have access to all your communications literally in person and online. We're going after remotes though? Okay. Sure. Whatever.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Bizarre take. Most of us are perfectly capable of being aware of more than one issue at a time. One doesn't cancel out the other.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    It isn't different issues though. It is the same issue. But removing the microphone from your TV remote is literally nothing if you live in a world with cellphones or have a cellphone or even just use the internet. Your router can see your house these days.

    It's goofy.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    This defeatist mentality is exactly what those spying want you to think. Why bother trying to be more private at all right? Might as well give up entirely

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago

    It's literally not defeatist. I'm saying there is an army coming and you are painting your nails to get ready for war.

    It might look cool, might even help you have confidence to fight better. But it's worthless entirely especially if you live in a house or go to a workplace with people that have phones, own one yourself, have a wifi network or your neighbor has wifi.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Have you considered the possibility that many of the people you are talking to have things like degoogled phones with custom ROMs, while the remote is running a closed-source firmware that most definitely is spying on you all the time?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    If you think degoogling your phone is going to make it not spy on you, then it makes sense you would target your remote.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    It definitely makes it a lot less likely, since you need to have hardware exploits (or some Android zero-days), which are rare, valuable, non-trivial to exploit, and only accessible to a very limited group of actors (CIA, very proficient hacker groups), so these will not be wasted on just stealing your data...

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    That's whataboutism. The simple fact is, the vast majority of people don't want or need microphone capabilities in their tv/remote (unlike a smartphone). But it's there and can be exploited. Add in the fact that TVs are opaque privacy nightmares. Do most people know what they're doing at any given moment? Not a chance.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago

    It can't be a whataboutism. It's the same topic. I might've not made it clear but if you live in a house with wifi, your neighbor has wifi, your family or coworkers own phones, you go out in public really at all. This isn't going to be the one that's gonna move any needle, it is at best a feel good thing to do.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Nobody here saw anything of Apple's keynote a few days ago.

    Several times my privacy-WTF sense went tingling off the radar. Those devices are the absolute pinnacle of privacy invasion.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Phones? Yeah 100%. And everyone has one so even if you try to deal with your own, others do not and there goes all your effort out the window. Pair it with even the most basic video surveillance and it literally has everything about you. Your habits, your locations, your contacts, all communications, hell it probably can even tell how fast you run, what you eat and what your preferred shows are. It even has a nice little camera to look at your face each time you check your phone.

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    • [+] -8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

    Does your cellphone have a hardware cutoff on it?

    Edit: I can see that privacy larpers, like fantasy latpers, hate when you break their immersion.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    yes, basic Grapheneos feature.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Graphene OS is great. I'm glad to hear that you have it. However, that is not a hardware cutoff, and graphene OS does not rewrite the firmware on chips that are deeply embedded into the physical hardware networks of the mic and GPS. Only a physical cutoff to these two systems can hope to stop illicit telemetry and recording.

    I'm not trying to poopoo everyone robbing Google and MS and Apple and LG and Roku and every corp of their revenue streams. Fuck the corps!

    The vibe of posts like these though is usually one of removing tracking and spying, not revenue streams. So I think it's important to remind everyone how deep they will have to go to genuinely limit their attack surface.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Honestly these days, I don't think it's crazy to see data collection for advertising as spying. The same system that identifies your advertising demographic can also likely identify political enemies.

    And in this timeline? I don't like those odds.

    I know my efforts can never be perfect, but I don't think it's crazy to pursue as much as one can

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    Advertisement has been datamining ever since Google and Facebook figured out how to monetize their markets and is at this point, old enough to drink in the US. Absolutely not something recent.

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