News + Trends
Apple suspends its Siri request grading programme
by Luca Fontana
Smart TVs send private data to Netflix and Facebook
19.9.2019
Translation: machine translated
According to American and British researchers, smart TVs are likely to transmit sensitive user data to third parties such as Netflix, Google and Facebook. Even if users do not have a user account with the services in question.
Researchers at Northeastern University, a public school in Boston, Massachusetts, have found that smart TVs from many major manufacturers - including Samsung and LG - share sensitive data with third-party services such as Netflix, Google and Facebook. Streaming dongles such as Amazon Fire or Roku are also affected, according to researchers at Imperial College, a top technical school in London.
This is reported exclusively by the Financial Times, a London-based business newspaper that cannot be described as a purely financial paper due to its many political articles.
Transmission of data to third parties, even without an account
In the age of streaming and the constant exchange of metadata between users and service providers, this report is hardly surprising. Especially as manufacturers such as Samsung or LG already openly admit that they exchange image data between TVs and servers in South Korea for better and more efficient scaling - especially for 8K TVs. However, both manufacturers point out that image data exchange can be manually disabled in the device settings.
The next passage in the Financial Times article contains more polemical elements: data would be sent regardless of whether viewers have an account with the relevant service provider.
Another argument for those who protect their privacy on the Internet. Especially as more and more home automation devices exchange metadata galore for networking. Some of them even listen to you constantly to wait for activation keywords unless you manually turn them off.
According to the article, the main content of this sensitive data should be the location, IP address and time of interaction with the TV sets. But the researchers can't say for sure: they admit that the data is "surprisingly well encrypted."
What are Samsung and LG saying?
What are the manufacturers' views on these claims? Upon request, I received the following statement from Samsung Switzerland:
Samsung takes the protection of its customers' privacy very seriously. Our TV sets are designed with data protection in mind. We use industry standard security precautions and practices, including data encryption, to keep our customers' data safe. Before activating a function, we inform customers of the data that will be used and ask for their consent. Customers may change their privacy settings at any time to disable or enable certain features or services at their sole discretion.
I have not yet received a response from LG. Should this change, I will update the article.
Luca Fontana
Senior Editor
Luca.Fontana@digitecgalaxus.chI'm an outdoorsy guy and enjoy sports that push me to the limit – now that’s what I call comfort zone! But I'm also about curling up in an armchair with books about ugly intrigue and sinister kingkillers. Being an avid cinema-goer, I’ve been known to rave about film scores for hours on end. I’ve always wanted to say: «I am Groot.»
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