Still is in my house. TVs are separate from streaming devices. No remote or speaker has a mic in it. Phones and laptops have mic and video permissions off if not in use.
Do I expect someone is listening? Yes but they are at the nation state level and ain’t willing to risk their tools for less than national level threats.
My smart TV is so old that LG no longer supports the software. So it’s now a dumb tv and I’m not getting a new one until I can just buy a TV that is dumb.
The danger is that these things can be done automated by now. It’s not just governments doing this. It is the private sector, and they sell all of that to the highest bidder. The only way out is either to stop them connecting to the internet or install a free software operating system you control.
And even then the firmware (or a hidden RTOS) can still be able to record and send everything.
We need to seriously fund more things like free, libre and open source (and libre and open hardware) TVs, TV-boxes, TV-sticks, phones, tablets and so on.
Still is in my house. TVs are separate from streaming devices. No remote or speaker has a mic in it. Phones and laptops have mic and video permissions off if not in use.
Do I expect someone is listening? Yes but they are at the nation state level and ain’t willing to risk their tools for less than national level threats.
My smart TV is so old that LG no longer supports the software. So it’s now a dumb tv and I’m not getting a new one until I can just buy a TV that is dumb.
The danger is that these things can be done automated by now. It’s not just governments doing this. It is the private sector, and they sell all of that to the highest bidder. The only way out is either to stop them connecting to the internet or install a free software operating system you control.
And even then the firmware (or a hidden RTOS) can still be able to record and send everything.
We need to seriously fund more things like free, libre and open source (and libre and open hardware) TVs, TV-boxes, TV-sticks, phones, tablets and so on.
If there smart TVs it’s still listening and will pick up and send using any nearby wifi with no password.
FYI for those who just bought the newest AppleTV gen4, it has 3 built-in microphones
Your router is GPS geotagged and recording/reporting all your audio/video/Facebook/Reddit/etc search activity, so good luck with that.
Even I’m not totally immune.
My router is Opnscence & pihole VMs running on a proxmox host with unbound/DHCP, VLAN segmentation and DHCP snooping on managed switches . YMMV
DNS resolution, split DHCP/DNS roles, and segmented services FTW.
Cost? 1 discarded enterprise miniPC, 1 extra NIC and a managed switch. (Cheaper than some commercial routers if you’re creative.)
Not if you turn the wifi off.
Recording all my VPN activity, maybe. But all it’s going to see is a lot of encrypted traffic to and from my VPN server.
Oh, when they install your internet router, they register your address and GPS. So go ahead and turn your WiFi off, they still know where you are.
Fun question…
What OS am I posting from?
What browser? Where from?
Not saying you can’t sort it out, perhaps you can.
Just curious…