this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Some TVs have been found to continually scan for open wifi networks to connect to in order to ship back the telemetry they gather.
Do you happen to have a source for this claim? I did some cursory searches on this just now and found nothing except for one reddit thread where one person said the same thing but again with no source.
I would also love a source. I keep seeing the claim made over and over. It's certainly plausible, and should be easily provable.
I think all it would take is an extra WiFi router with logging to see if the TVs MAC address attempts to connect. Doesn't need to have internet access, the tv won't know until it tries.
I read it originally from a poster on a privacy/security reddit who was reporting their personal experiences. It isn't the most reliable source but in this context I consider it worth accounting for anyway, as what the person described experiencing is both possible and plausible. For anyone who is serious about preventing these sort of privacy breaches, the open wifi vector should absolutely be considered and guarded against if possible (easy but less comprehensive approach would be to see if there is an airplane mode on TV, harder but more reliable is to physically disable or shield the wifi module on the TV itself).
Who has unsecured networks anymore?
Public Wi-Fi hotspots are typically unsecured, and if you happen to live in a city that has a lot of Wi-Fi hotspots, it could hop onto one of those networks.