Hacker reverse engineers his Samsung TV and finds on-device AI listening for your dog and baby, watching what you watch, and borrowing your soundbar's mic if the TV doesn't have one. Then OpenAI banned him for reverse-engineering it.
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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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That’s for lg. lg does similar data collection and telemetry but it’s more clearly known as webos has been rooted for years with a pretty active homebrew community
https://repo.webosbrew.org/apps/ooo.lew.lifesgoodwithoutspying/
To disable most known lg telemetry bullshit, though it helps to block the servers in your router/dns server too though
Samsung uses tizen, which has been rooted before and there is a homebrew store (tizenbrew) but the amount of apps is pretty sparse
As always though the best solution is to never connect your tv to the internet
It is technically feasible that any networked Samsung device with wireless connectivity (so, for example, any Samsung smartphone or tablet) have code to allow other Samsung devices to use it as a bridge to reach the Internet, for example by having an unlisted WiFi access point or some kind of backdoor access (for example, using "knocking" to open a supposedly password protected WiFi access point), when they can't directly reach it.
That doesn't just mean stuff you own, it means your neighbour's Samsung devices or the Samsung devices of anybody passing by outside on the street - basically as long as they're in radio range of your own Samsung devices they can silently communicate.
Now, I don't know if this is indeed the case. It's certainly technically feasible (not even hard if all they do is have their WiFi supporting devices have an unlisted WiFi access point), Samsung sells so many devices which qualify that coverage would be pretty good, they very explicitly encrypt their code (so are explicitly hidding whatever is in their code) and given the price and features of most Samsung devices the additional hardware cost to add such a feature would be miniscule (if any cost at all since for sufficiently powerfull wireless networking hardware it's just software that needs changing).
This is without going into more complex stuff such as mesh networking or post-and-forward messaging chaining Samsung devices until one connected to the Internet is found to exfiltrate data and receive remote commands.
Frankly, the one thing I can think of that makes this less likely is that the vast majority of people connect their Samsung stuff to the Internet directly and let Samsung watch them as much as they want, so it's probably not worth the trouble for Samsung to have this kind of thing implemented (though the unlisted WiFi access point thing is stupidly simple) for the handful of people who actually worry enough about privacy and are technically aware enough not to connecte their smart devices to the Internet.
The mesh network of TVs to circumvent one not having internet is definitely possible and an accusation thrown around a lot but afaik it’s never been shown to be true. This thing with Samsung searching for usable mics is the closest thing I’ve seen to something like that
That said I would not even be a little surprised if it turned out to be happening
Frankly, with Samsung I would be more worried about Samsung phones covertly acting as hidden WiFi access points for other Samsung devices.
Given the way such device get updates nowadays, even if that's not hapenning we're literally 1 Samsung automatic Android update away from it being all over the place if they so wish.
or.... we could make like a rooted homebrew app that completely like turns off all telemetry...... we could make it so that they're not able to update the firmware and force a mismatch so that they still update netflix and all the commercial apps through like a generic webos update..... there's ways around it I think no on eis willing to go the extra mile to get in trouble with the fcc to reverse engineer a tv and then put all the data out there.
To be honest though, it should be against FCC regulations to wiretap tv's and all these companies are circumventing wiretapping laws by calling it data collection and forcing users into agreeing into a TOS OR THEY'RE UNABLE TO USE THE DEVICE RATHER THAN BEING ABLE TO USE THE SCREEN WITH NO INTERNET OR ANYTHING CONNECTED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Edit: more repositories that don't come from them or putting a version of Linux on there. Maybe like a version of mint that works well.