By Jeremy Hsu on September 24, 2024
Popular smart TV models made by Samsung and LG can take multiple snapshots of what you are watching every second – even when they are being used as external displays for your laptop or video game console.
Smart TV manufacturers use these frequent screenshots, as well as audio recordings, in their automatic content recognition systems, which track viewing habits in order to target people with specific advertising. But researchers showed this tracking by some of the world’s most popular smart TV brands – Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG TVs every 10 milliseconds – can occur when people least expect it.
“When a user connects their laptop via HDMI just to browse stuff on their laptop on a bigger screen by using the TV as a ‘dumb’ display, they are unsuspecting of their activity being screenshotted,” says Yash Vekaria at the University of California, Davis. Samsung and LG did not respond to a request for comment.
Vekaria and his colleagues connected smart TVs from Samsung and LG to their own computer server. Their server, which was equipped with software for analysing network traffic, acted as a middleman to see what visual snapshots or audio data the TVs were uploading.
They found the smart TVs did not appear to upload any screenshots or audio data when streaming from Netflix or other third-party apps, mirroring YouTube content streamed on a separate phone or laptop or when sitting idle. But the smart TVs did upload snapshots when showing broadcasts from the TV antenna or content from an HDMI-connected device.
The researchers also discovered country-specific differences when users streamed the free ad-supported TV channel provided by Samsung or LG platforms. Such user activities were uploaded when the TV was operating in the US but not in the UK.
By recording user activity even when it’s coming from connected laptops, smart TVs might capture sensitive data, says Vekaria. For example, it might record if people are browsing for baby products or other personal items.
Customers can opt out of such tracking for Samsung and LG TVs. But the process requires customers to either enable or disable between six and 11 different options in the TV settings.
“This is the sort of privacy-intrusive technology that should require people to opt into sharing their data with clear language explaining exactly what they’re agreeing to, not baked into initial setup agreements that people tend to speed through,” says Thorin Klosowski at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy non-profit based in California.
We’re talking about fingerprinting stuff coming in via HDMI, not stuff being played by the “smart” part of the TV itself from some source.
You would probably not need to actually sample images if it’s the TV’s processor that’s playing something from a source, because there are probably smarter approaches for most sources (for example, for a TV channel you probably just need to know the setting of the tuner, location and the local time and then get the data from available Program Guide info (called EPG, if I remember it correctly).
The problem is that anything might be coming over HDMI and it’s not compressed, so if they want to figure out what that is, it’s a much bigger problem.
Your approach does sound like it would work if the Smart TV was playing some compressed video file, though.
Mind you, I too am just “thinking out loud” rather that actually knowing what they do (or what I’m talking about ;))
I assumed HDMI had some form of encoding, thanks for the correction. Looks like v 2.1 does.
I think the syncing idea between the spy device and db is still useful. The video itself has stuff to use for reducing the search space by making sure they puck the same instants to fingerprint and exfiltrate.