FYI: Any speaker can and will be used as a microphone.
We’re really fucked aren’t we.
So just remove my sim card and unplug my firewall? Got it.
Thanks for the tip. But what about microphones in tv’s, in I presume microwaves, washing machines, and everything else.
We need a way to jam up their ability to transmit the information back to Bezos’ house or whatever.
Ethernet cables. Toss the wiSpy. Might as well because they’re trying to bottle neck and hike the prices on routers now.
Faraday cage your home and send everything over wire with absolute control over what can leave your local network
It has no way of sending any recordings if you don’t connect it to the Internet.
I have heard that some vendors support joining adhoc networks with others of the same brand. So if you have an LG TV (as an example) that you dont connect to the internet, but your neighbor has one that is connected, they could theoretically link up and bridge the unconnected one.
To be fair, this would have to be functionality included in the factory, and may not actually be a thing. But I remember reading something about it with LGs a few years ago, and it stuck with me.
Even if that wasn’t a thing yet, WiFi chips can be bought for less than $1 each in bulk now, and companies can put a monetary value on one person’s private data in the range of $1000 and up, so schemes like that are inevitabilities.
I used to look forward to global Internet coverage. While I still think it’s overall a good thing, I fear the day it’s ubiquitous and reliable enough that electronics are widely built to connect to it automatically without fallbacks or user input and make it nigh impossible to disable while keeping the device functional. We seem to be getting there sooner rather than later. I definitely feel less guilty about hoarding older hardware now.
I’m fairly sure that is a thing.
What about LTE. I didn’t connect my new car to the internet. They did. 🙃
Those are LEDs.
I wish my smart TV remote had a mic, it’s so much easier to say what I want to search for than using the remote to type on the onscreen keyboard.
“Hey wiretap, play me pornhub”
Oh, wrong community.
Remember ye old life-hack that you can use earbuds as a microphone in a pinch?
Speakers and microphones are conceptually the same technology. If your tv can play sound then in theory it can be used by a malicious hacker or company to record sound.
True…so… subtitles it is then.
Only the cone-magnet-coil-wires part is the same. All the electrical parts are different. There’s no way.
SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit
Seems to have some caveats but I’m not an expert.
Edit: fixed link
Link 404s
there is not “no way” when the plcs that read / send to the coils are basically software controlled actuators.
I have accidentally done this on my laptop when it thought my microphone was a speaker and played audio out of it.
As far as i could research it is technically feasible though very impractical and low quality, way easier to sell people voice command features instead.
As i understand it also depends on whether its a “active” speaker or not, has an amplifier behind it.
Tvs usually use a speaker array, a bad actor company could design it in a way that one or two of those can be used to record sound in case the microphone is no longer detected.
An ad collector wouldn’t go that far on purpose, a state intelligence operator who is covertly part of the company might.
Just encase your TV room in lead so it can’t get a signal out. Ezpz.
In seriousness completely eliminating the possibility of surveillance is impossible, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it as hard as you’re willing to give up convenience for.
probably some mossad-level shit, not for the regular everyday leftist “domestic terrorist” eh ?
I hope not.
I think i can still trust my devices to not be actively listening trough every hole. I can, right?
trust you devices’ holes, my friend
This should be a web site or YT channel. How to remove such bits without bricking the item.
To be fair, OP didn’t claim that the remote wasn’t bricked…
It works! I was fully prepared for it to not work and explain to my wife why we need to order a new one, but no issue at all lmao
Could probably have measured its resistance, then put a plain resistor in its place.
Probably, but the nuclear option is always more fun
With these people (advertisers), the nuclear option is sometimes the only real option.
Looking up which part to nuke took an hour, but anything to calm down my paranoid ass haha
“Oh good, he fell for the decoy”
oh no
Could you share your knowledge here? I clicked this thread expecting to find instructions to help us follow your advice.
My magic trick: Le Firewall.
You have not been paying attention.
Ah, tell me again how the data gets transferred with a bit of the magic Le Firewall
I think ill just jeep using my LCD from 2007
Yeah, that’s probably the smart move
No, it’s not smart, that’s the point! ;)
Nice one lmao
Just curious, what kind of batteries are powering the remote and if rechargeable, how often does it need charging? Not saying they wouldn’t do such things, still a good preventative measure, but I’d be surprised if it could sustain telemetry with only the power of AAA batteries in a typical remote.
Two AAA batteries and they weren’t changed in a year so yeah, ouch.
Smart enough to be able to remove the mic from the remote, not smart enough to figure out that its not constantly recording for a year on 2 AAA batteries.
Dude of course it’s not constantly recording, but the fact that it can record on two AAA batteries even every now and then for over a year is ridiculous
Yea that’s true. Does it have a microphone button your remote at least? Also, my original comment was in jest, if it didn’t come across that way.
How did you find out there was a microphone? And how did you figure out which chip?
There will almost always be a hole above it in the plastic remote housing.
MEMs microphones are a silver or black rectangle and it has to have a small hole in the top of the package https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/mems-microphones.html
Generally you can also just put a dab of hot glue over the top of the hole and it won’t be able to hear shit, you don’t necessarily have to desolder it, but it is the most effective.
The TV advetises voice recognition in both the TV itself and the remote.
If you look at it, it’s likely going to be a 2x4mm silver rectangle with a small hole in it. Not always, but they mostly look like that.
Or just don’t connect your TV?
To the WiFi?
You are often forced to in order to set it up at all, the damage is already done if you disconnect it or VLAN quarantine it after that.
It doesn’t stop the TV from spying on you. GN just proved that it runs STT and records your conversations in plaintext and has the memory to store them for eternity. It also gets your location from scanning WiFi, Bluetooth, and any other devices in the band and geolocating based off of their data.
Then if you ever sell the TV, it will dump the data if they connect it, or somebody with the same brand smart TV moved in next door, it will use that TV’s hidden SSID hotspot to jump the airgap and dump all if its (likely time and position stamped) transcribed spying data to the servers.
Hardware fix is literally the only fix.
Can you help me understand why i got downvotes for posting the following comment in this very same community 2 days ago?
I am not saying the following happens, i think there is no proof it happens, but its technically doable.
They are capable of scanning for local networks and bluetooth devices which can be used to identify a location. (This part they definitely do)
If your neighbour has an lg tv, or the presence of the tv is extracted through your phone. Then they know where it is and they also know of any open/public wifi networks around.
The researchers from gamers nexus can connect to 2 (ssid) networks at once for some reason.
In theory a neighbours lg tv could
broadcast their wifi credentials to your tv toconnect to upload the data.There was a study just recently about exactly this, smart devices creating a rogue mesh and routing traffic across neighbors’ devices until they could phone home with all your data anyway
Could you link to it?
No you are not required to connect to WiFi to set it up.
Damn I was not aware of that.
And hope no open networks are in range, ever. Or it will exfiltrate collected data.
Or another TV of the same manufacturer that has Internet access.
Keep hearing these claims got any proof about them?
I personally haven’t seen any proof that they are actively doing this, but I’ve seen enough about Amazon Sidewalk and from the Gamer’s Nexus video to be certain that they are capable of these methods, and if they aren’t doing it now they’ll probably do it soon.
In most cases by the time the evidence breaks, it’s years after the fact, and so better to be on the precautionary side.
I haven’t watched it all yet, but most of it is demonstrated on the latest Gamer Nexus video “216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem”. In case you haven’t seen it yet:
Non YT link
Interesting timestamps:
00:16:33 - Intercepting LG’s Data Transfer
00:22:04 - Dark Patterns
00:46:19 - Plain Text Transcript and Ambient Conversation
Why not both?
Because one is unnecessary of you do the other?
Out of fucking principle, yes it’s not connected, but I won’t tolerate a mic in my remote. Besides, you have heard of them being able to use your neighbour’s unsafe WIFI if you have to act so smart, right?
What year is this that there is Open WiFi all over the place. Everything is encrypted now by default.
If I don’t want to take the remote apart I guess covering the mic opening with tape would be the next best thing? (Apart from never connecting it to WiFi, which I’ve never done anyway.)
This remote didn’t even have an opening so I can only imagine how little covering it with a tape would do. I mean tape your phone’s mic and you will sound like shit, but you can still be understood. So yeah, never connect it in the first place but I chose to nuke the mics out of spite.
Don’t buy these kinds of TVs in the first place?
Sure thing, please look up what a 50 inch 4K dumb screen costs and report back to me.
I know you’re being sarcastic but I don’t know what you’re getting out.
Do dumb screens exist ? If they’re 4x the price, surely my browsing preferences can’t be worth 3x the price ?
LG makes more money selling the data then they do the TV. The problem is this is not an LG issue they all do it.
That’s the thing, the average person’s value is waaay more than the discount you are getting. Imagine the screens without any smart bs built into them as being the real cost. Now you ADD the hardware and suddenly they cost 25-50%? If it wasn’t worth at least that (your data is worth more), the companies wouldn’t subsidize that much.
Do those screens exist though?
Its hard to believe a persons data is worth that much.
It’s not one person’s data, that’s functionally worthless. It’s the aggregate data of a majority of the population that they’re selling.
Think of it like this, a survey answered by a single person doesn’t tell you anything. A server answered by 100 people is considered good data in research. LG claims over 240 million people own smart TVs or monitors globally, that’s nearly the entire population of Pakistan or the combined population of Texas, California, New York, and Florida, a survey of that many people is unheard of in standard research methods.
But it isn’t just one survey. Every ad you skip is a survey answer. Average viewing time, media genre or categories, preferred platforms, veiwer retention, time of day, number of ads you will tolerate, preferred volume, preferred content, preferred aspect ratio, preferred color tone, and on and on, and exactly accurate instead of the feeble self assessment of such. That’s not even including the verifiably proven things they pretend they aren’t tracking like every conversion you have in range of the remote.
Your specific data is relatively worthless, but as a datapoint in a chart of 72% of the population of the United States, that data can be used to change the information landscape of the world.
My data must be less worthful to them as I use ublock origin on firefox and I see almost zero ads.
A trillion dollar industry believes so.
Just about 4x the price of a similar TV. Although, said monitor also has a higher refresh rate.
Oh wait! There’s one under 2x the price :
“LG 50UL3J-M 50” UHD 4K Commercial Monitor"
Ok sorry that one is “smart” too.
