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Cybersecurity bounty hunter says Samsung TVs use AI to record audio and screenshots for ads — 'Finally found a company that truly listens to its customers,' says hacker (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 151 points 2 weeks ago* (13 children)

I really hope one day people will look back at those practices the same way we look back at the normality of cigarettes being pushed on everyone back in the 50's.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Now we push vape pens. Not much has changed.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 weeks ago*

    Doctors aren't making corporate vape ads. There are no ads at the movies and on TV. People aren't openly vaping indoors and their way to the vape vending machine. Vapes are a whole different deal than old-time cigarettes. And kids sure aren't vaping with teachers in the vape hole between classes.

    Gotta admit, I got a grin thinking someone out there find the two comparable. You should have seen the 80s after smoking was "dialed down"!

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  • [–] 19 points 2 weeks ago (10 children)

    what about no. too many people are smoking today.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

    i mean, why wouldnt they?

    life sucks, society sucks, world sucks, who wouldnt want to check out faster.

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  • [–] 33 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    the same sucky life is even worse with heart disease, not that I don't sympathise with the desire to get out but that's a really dumb way to do it

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  • [–] 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    how about weaponizing your willingness to die against the world that made you want to instead of just dying peacefully

    WHY BE THE [[Little Sponge]] WHO HATES ITS [[$4.99]] LIFE WHEN YOU CAN BE A [[BIG SHOT!!!]]

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    • [–] 100 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    Find me in my living room, reading aloud SQL injection attacks and AI jailbreak promps like the newsreader from Rome

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    • [–] 61 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

    If these tvs are capturing private conversations for advertising, where’s the consent for that?

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  • [–] 57 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    EULA has T&C that the first users agree to when they fast forward with the accept accept accept accept screens

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  • [–] 29 points 2 weeks ago* (3 children)

    Those things aren't legally valid for consumer electronics or software in many countries (possibly most of the World) because they're considered an attempt at forcing a change in the terms of the sale after the sale.

    They would be totally valid if they're presented to the buyer for confirming acceptance during the purchase BEFORE they pay which, "curiously", they never are.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (1 child)

    IANAL, but EULAs are mostly enforceable in the US as they're contracts. BUT, not every provision is a slam dunk win for the company. As I understand it, much law is decided on what a "reasonable person" would act, think or find fair at the moment action was taken, such as clicking "I Agree". Would such a person expect the EULA to provide for spying on their voice and snapshotting their private viewing? Dunno, but I'd love to see a test case move forward.

    Someone should sue on behalf of a minor, who cannot agree to a contract, or another third-party in the home who did not agree. Bet there's case law on this sort of thing in other contexts.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago*

    From what I read, the point of Law in the countries were EULAs have already been deemed not enforceable by courts (such as Germany) is that one can't hold something one has sold to a customer hostage to the customer accepting a NEW contract after the sale (the sale itself is considered an implicit contract with certain rights, such as the right to freely use what was sold) before they can use it, so even if people click "I Accept" on such a thing it's does not form a legally binding contract.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    They don't need consent, none do us can afford to sue them.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 weeks ago* (3 children)

    Isn't that what class action law suits are for?

    Or better yet, consumer protection laws?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago

    Yep! If this would be a meritorious case, I'd bet lawyers would be salivating over it. There are also plenty of firms working for our collective good, pro bono. Witness Elias Law who is slam dunking voter rights cases, wins in state after state, not sure they've lost one.

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    • [–] 54 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    Samsung is the second Electronics maker I've started boycotted, after Sony.

    Sony was all the way back since the Rootkit scandal, Samsung was about a decade ago when a small tablet I bough from them have filled with unremovable applications and after a few updates became pretty much unusable because it's didn't have enough memory (clearly planned obscolecence).

    Patting myself on back (and a little gloating) aside, Samsung has been clearly abusive towards their customers for a while (it was maybe the second electronics make to enshittify, after Sony) and this is not at all surprising.

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  • [–] 76 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    People should have been imprisoned over the Sony rootkit scandal.

    For those who don't know - their music CDs had malware built in that automatically installed itself on PCs without prompting or notification that gave unsecured root access to any PC through a hidden service that couldn't be detected or disabled from within Windows. It was as bad as bad gets. There was no hidden EULA or anything. They just straight-up installed viruses on millions of PCs that opened the door for other malware to install itself at the root level where it couldn't be detected.

    Sony should have been shut down entirely over it.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    Wow. Yeah, fuck Sony. Seems they've always been in a race to the bottom. Now their insistance on a digital-only future makes so much more sense. They want to control any and all access to their products and don't want them changing hands IRL.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    It's even a little worst than parent post makes it seem, it's worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

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  • [–] 8 points 2 weeks ago

    Wow! I remember the thing but never knew all the dirty deals.

    Steve Heckler's quote on Napster sounds like Churchill after Dunkirk, "...we shall fight the users, we shall fight in the firewalls, we shall fight the cable companies and the phone companies, we shall fuck up your PC; we shall never surrender..."

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    • [–] 23 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    I just want a dumb TV at this point or an open source one that has great user control.

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    • [–] 19 points 2 weeks ago

    Drink verification can!

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    [–] 13 points 2 weeks ago

    I'm happy with my $200 non-wifiable Insignia and hope it lasts a long time.

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    [+] 13 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)
    [removed by mod]
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    • [–] 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    I don’t want a smart TV… my TV should just be a display.

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    • [–] 8 points 2 weeks ago

    This is why I have a Sony TV, it doesn't listen to me of that I can garuntee. This is a shitpost, the TV is from 98 and weighs like 70 pounds.

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    [–] 18 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

    Imagine believing that they need "AI" to record us.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

    These TVs don't incorporate enough power to do any kind of serious LLM. The "AI" they're referring to here is likely an embedded speech-to-text engine. And that probably is pretty necessary for this--it would take too much data to send actual recordings to Samsung, but text transcripts are tiny and easier to search and index. It's easy to forget, but reliable speech-to-text has been around less than 20 years, and the tiny ones that can run on embedded chips are even newer.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (4 children)

    Stm32 has made micro controllers with neural processors for years now and you don't need LLMs to do a lot of useful stuff for a spyware company. A small model can run even in really constrained hardware if you train it specifically for it. Afaik the STM32 ones are for machine vision processing on limited hardware where power is a concern. I'm sure you can do a lot more with a TV with constant power.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    That's exactly the distinction I was making. The person I was replying to said "Imagine believing that they need “AI” to record us." I was clarifying that this isn't the AI we hear so much about that requires huge datacenters; it's the kind of simple, embedded, "edge" AI that you can do with whatever microcontroller you have lying around.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 weeks ago

    They're using a classifier to capture metadata (like “does a dog live there?” or “does a baby live there”) by categorizing sounds. That's all technically legal, that's why they do it that way.

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