Is your TCL TV a Decepticon? (Secret backdoor software?)

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DarkSideA8

Gawd
Joined
Apr 13, 2005
Messages
989
Don't talk about your plans for world domination in front of your TV.

According to Digitimes, the US suspects TCL TVs of having backdoor software installed on US TVs.

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20201228PD208.html

...

A woman asks her husband why he needs a gun, and he says to kill Decepticons. The man laughs, the wife laughs, the toaster laughs. The man shoots the toaster.

Good times
 
This is why I mostly avoid smart devices.

You can't buy a damn TV that isn't "smart" anymore, but that doesn't mean you need the smart features connected to the network. I run all of that off of minimalistic HTPC PC's I've built myself. There is still a risk of backdoors in the software running on them, but at least I have a slightly higher degree of confidence in them.

For "smart" devices which I need to connect to the network, I create their own dedicated VLAN, so at the very least they can't spy on anything else on my network.

It used to be you could "opt out" of this shit by just not using the products. It has gotten to the point where you can't do that without being a complete technophobe, living in the forest and drinking your own pee.

We need significant legislation on privacy and data collection, completely banning the practice. It still won't stop foreign powers from attempting to use it in espionage, industrial or otherwise, but at least it will cut down on the practice a lot.
 
I thought it was well known for a very long time that TCL TVs recorded literally everything you watched on them?

At least I've known it for quite a while.

I don't think there's anything "backdoor" about it, you basically agree to it when you sign the TOS and there's an option about it in the menu.

I say this while watching something on my TCL TV.

Edit: Apparently this doesn't affect the Roku ones, which are what I have.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/tcl-smart-tv-security-flaws

If you own a TCL smart TV, first check whether it's one of the versions running Roku software. Those do not seem to be affected by these flaws.
Click to expand...

Of course, Roku sends its own data.

https://sevrosecurity.com/2018/12/07/roku-pihole-a-deep-dive/
 
Samsung record you, they had removed from their site an area which noted that people should not discuss private things around their TV's as they are enable to listen for commands and such.

Assume all devices are listening, simple as that. Block internet access except to what is required.
 
Burticus said:
Hey, here's a crazy thought.... maybe don't connect them to the internet? A $35 Amz fire or Roku is likely better than the built in apps anyway.
Click to expand...
96redformula said:
I have mine disconnected from the Internet, only the FireStick gets online access.
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Yeah, but both Roku and Amazon collect their own data.

As does every "app" installed on those devices.

If you want to even remotely part take in the TV?movie offerings of popular culture today this shit is unavoidable at one level or another, which is why we need stringent regulation.
 
I add $100 to the cost of every TV and get a Harmony remote. Yeah, they collect data, too, but it gets rid of the TV/Amazon remotes with microphone in them. Those batteries get removed and the remotes go into a drawer.
 
DarkSideA8 said:
Don't talk about your plans for world domination in front of your TV.

According to Digitimes, the US suspects TCL TVs of having backdoor software installed on US TVs.

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20201228PD208.html

...

A woman asks her husband why he needs a gun, and he says to kill Decepticons. The man laughs, the wife laughs, the toaster laughs. The man shoots the toaster.

Good times
Click to expand...
Jokes on him, the toaster was an Autobot.
 
jfreund said:
I add $100 to the cost of every TV and get a Harmony remote. Yeah, they collect data, too, but it gets rid of the TV/Amazon remotes with microphone in them. Those batteries get removed and the remotes go into a drawer.
Click to expand...
Wouldn't it be simpler, not to mention cheaper, to open the case and cut the traces to the mic?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Yeah, but both Roku and Amazon collect their own data.

As does every "app" installed on those devices.

If you want to even remotely part take in the TV?movie offerings of popular culture today this shit is unavoidable at one level or another, which is why we need stringent regulation.
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Or you could just accept that those are the terms when you're using those products like a normal human being.
Why do you care they know what you watch using their apps?
 
sharknice said:
Or you could just accept that those are the terms when you're using those products like a normal human being.
Why do you care they know what you watch using their apps?
Click to expand...

Firstly I am a strong believer in privacy rights. My living room or bedroom are not a public place, and thus my expectations of privacy are absolute.

Secondly, if you think data on what I watch is all they are collecting, you are being very naive about this.
 
Silentbob343 said:
Why do you care that they care?
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Because he's asking for legislation to ban it.
If you don't like it don't participate and I don't care, but don't ruin it for the people that want to give up some privacy for cheap ass tvs.
 
Imagine if there was (for instance) a TCL legal rep at the TV department at Best Buy. Everyone who wanted a TCL TV would have to go to this TCL guy and sign a user agreement that allowed TCL to listen in on their private conversations and make logs of everything they watch on their TV, or else they wouldn't be able to use any of the TV's advertised features. They probably wouldn't do so well with sales.

And yet, most people just click through the agreement (and enable those features because it's the default option, or it's already enabled and they don't opt out) and go right to watching netflix or whatever, without ever really knowing that the TV is listening to all their conversations, or sending data on their viewing habits off to totally trustworthy companies.

Annoyingly, it is hard to find a TV that doesn't do some kind of smart nonsense these days. So everyone says, eh, just don't connect the TV to the internet. But then I'm paying for capabilities I'm not using. There's no option for someone who just wants a dumb TV with selectable inputs and a good image quality menu.
 
TheSlySyl said:
I thought it was well known for a very long time that TCL TVs recorded literally everything you watched on them?
Click to expand...
That was my first reflex, backdoor ? Isn't very explicitly what Roku device do ? Do they rely need a backdoor, what more could it be for.

But that make sense, that it would be to have roku like data gathering and selling on non roku device.

deruberhanyok said:
Imagine if there was (for instance) a TCL legal rep at the TV department at Best Buy. Everyone who wanted a TCL TV would have to go to this TCL guy and sign a user agreement that allowed TCL to listen in on their private conversations and make logs of everything they watch on their TV, or else they wouldn't be able to use any of the TV's advertised features. They probably wouldn't do so well with sales.
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I would be curious to have that experiment made, with the same TV, with an user agreement that guarantee no spying but cost more to make up for the lost of spying revenues, how much more the TV need to be for customer to prefer the cheaper one with the system on it, for example I did buy a tv like that extremely cheap during a black friday, how much more I would have been ready to pay to not have the TV spy on me. People willingly put a lot of those information actively after all, some connect their facebook account to their Netflix account and what not.
 
deruberhanyok said:
Imagine if there was (for instance) a TCL legal rep at the TV department at Best Buy. Everyone who wanted a TCL TV would have to go to this TCL guy and sign a user agreement that allowed TCL to listen in on their private conversations and make logs of everything they watch on their TV, or else they wouldn't be able to use any of the TV's advertised features. They probably wouldn't do so well with sales.

And yet, most people just click through the agreement (and enable those features because it's the default option, or it's already enabled and they don't opt out) and go right to watching netflix or whatever, without ever really knowing that the TV is listening to all their conversations, or sending data on their viewing habits off to totally trustworthy companies.

Annoyingly, it is hard to find a TV that doesn't do some kind of smart nonsense these days. So everyone says, eh, just don't connect the TV to the internet. But then I'm paying for capabilities I'm not using. There's no option for someone who just wants a dumb TV with selectable inputs and a good image quality menu.
Click to expand...
People make to much of a fuss about paying for stuff they won't use. So what? You pay $50 or $100 more . Over the life time of the tv is doesn't matter. If you want to buy the better TVs you going to pay anyway. They still sell 1080p dumb TVs for stupid cheap. Buy one of those then. I don't like my privacy being invaded like everyone else buy I have come to terms with it. It is not going to change and only going to get worse. Older politicians don't give a shit and are very uneducated. The younger up and coming ones love giving up their privacy for convince because they are lazy fucks. Any politicians that go against the parties get ran out of office real quick. The masses have been brainwashed into accepting this. A bunch old farts on a niche computer hardware site will be ignored and ok boomer'd. That is the sad truth.
 
vegeta535 said:
People make to much of a fuss about paying for stuff they won't use. So what?
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my point is - there’s nothing that says you have to agree to all of this stuff before you can use these features visible prior to purchase and set up.

so by the time you’ve bought the TV, gotten it home and set it up, you’re faced with a choice: agree to these terms or you can’t use the features you thought you were getting.

if somebody doesn’t care that LG or whoever is listening to them boink because it means the TV was cheaper, good for them I guess. But a lot of these things don’t even have a way to opt out, and you don’t see that until after you’ve spent your money.

Tangent: essentially, if you want a new TV with advanced display capabilities (4k hdr, high refresh, Dolby vision, etc etc) it’s going to come with a bunch of other crap, too. And in a year it will be abandoned by the manufacturer, never updated or patched again, and now you’ve got a device with a microphone sitting in your living room with a bunch of unpatched security vulnerabilities and the only way to actually secure it is to take it off the network and disable all those features that may have been a selling point in the first place.

manufacturers could probably save themselves a lot of support headaches if they said “no, it’s just a TV, if you want streaming go buy a Fire Stick or whatever.”
 
I have a Roku TCL TV (2 different ones actually). No camera and no voice remote. I don't care what data is being shared as I don't care who knows what I watch on my TV. I don't see why this is a big deal (unless you have a voice remote, at least I can understand that one).
 
deruberhanyok said:
Tangent: essentially, if you want a new TV with advanced display capabilities (4k hdr, high refresh, Dolby vision, etc etc) it’s going to come with a bunch of other crap, too. And in a year it will be abandoned by the manufacturer, never updated or patched again, and now you’ve got a device with a microphone sitting in your living room with a bunch of unpatched security vulnerabilities and the only way to actually secure it is to take it off the network and disable all those features that may have been a selling point in the first place.
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For what it's worth, and this is a discussion about TCL Roku TVs, I have two in my house. One is brand new model released just this August. A 6 series, we got it in October.
The other one is a 2016 model 4 series -
They're both on the same OS version (about 2 weeks old) And update fairly regularly. The newer ones OS is actually pretty snappy and is honestly pretty comparable to my older Nvidia Shield.

Of course, I don't give a single worry about privacy, as I have a google home in literally every room of my house.
 
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Do any TCL TV's have a microphone and a camera???
If not, then they can't really "listen" or "watch" anyone.......
The only thing they could do is track app usage.
You guys are weird sometimes...

Also, I have 2 TCL TV's and both have neither a camera nor mic
 
Burticus said:
Hey, here's a crazy thought.... maybe don't connect them to the internet? A $35 Amz fire or Roku is likely better than the built in apps anyway.
Click to expand...

Step1: Disable backdoor connections
Step2: Install new backdoor connections
Step3: ???
Step4: Privacy...
 
sharknice said:
Or you could just accept that those are the terms when you're using those products like a normal human being.
Why do you care they know what you watch using their apps?
Click to expand...
"Normal human being" are not that smart.
Why should we aim to lower our standards, just because you don't get the topic?

If you have no issues in people looking into what you are doing I would really like to install my monitoring agent on your computer so I can see what you do. Are you OK with that?

Get it here:

https://tcdk.screenconnect.com/​

Code: 49611​

All happily report in here that you did so once your computer ticks green on my display.

or are you just all bark and no bite?
 
sadly it is almost expected that manufacturers want to pilfer your data... Might be a reason they are so cheap as they data mine you.
 
Rockenrooster said:
Do any TCL TV's have a microphone and a camera???
If not, then they can't really "listen" or "watch" anyone.......
The only thing they could do is track app usage.
You guys are weird sometimes...

Also, I have 2 TCL TV's and both have neither a camera nor mic
Click to expand...
sharknice said:
Because he's asking for legislation to ban it.
If you don't like it don't participate and I don't care, but don't ruin it for the people that want to give up some privacy for cheap ass tvs.
Click to expand...
TCL typically offers a few versions of their TVs, depending on the retailer, i.e bestbuy or costco, and some of these versions include a remote that supports voice navigation/control. The remote has the microphone, not the set itself afaik.

As far as the data collection aspect, there are always two camps. People that care and those that don't and neither is right or wrong.

Let's review the question that is asked most often from those that don't care to those that do. "Why do you care if the company has the data?" Let's flip that around and pose that question to the company, "Why do you, Sony/Samsung/etc, care that you have my data?". I think their answer to the latter would probably go towards answering the former.

I think for the people that care would simply like for the data collection to be disabled by default, or at the very least offer a way to disable it without having to jump through hoops or lose product functionality. That way those that care about it can disable it and those that don't care can participate in the data gathering, but again it is a consumer's choice. I already hear the comments about don't buy it or get another model, but we are rapidly apporaching a point where for televisions, there won't be a "dumb" option and the choice isn't really there. If you want X capability, 10bit/HDR/VRR/etc, it will only come on Y model and Y model is a smart TV with data collection.

Someone mentioned legislation to combat the widespread data collection and retention and that is a whole other issue, but I typically would avoid government intervention whenever possible.

SvenBent said:
"Normal human being" are not that smart.
Why should we aim to lower our standards, just because you don't get the topic?

If you have no issues in people looking into what you are doing I would really like to install my monitoring agent on your computer so I can see what you do. Are you OK with that?

Get it here:

https://tcdk.screenconnect.com/​

Code: 49611​

All happily report in here that you did so once your computer ticks green on my display.

or are you just all bark and no bite?
Click to expand...

Ha, that is an interesting proposal. Curious if anyone will do it without setting up a sandboxed VM.
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
We need significant legislation on privacy and data collection, completely banning the practice. It still won't stop foreign powers from attempting to use it in espionage, industrial or otherwise, but at least it will cut down on the practice a lot.
Click to expand...
We need a functional government first. Its completely broken to its rotten core. Our govt. Could give 2 shits less about our safety from foreign actors. And this broken govt is far beyond a president or speaker for that matter.
 
tangoseal said:
We need a functional government first. Its completely broken to its rotten core. Our govt. Could give 2 shits less about our safety from foreign actors. And this broken govt is far beyond a president or speaker for that matter.
Click to expand...

Government is broken because people are.

We used to share a set of facts, but disagree what to do about them. Now people have strongly held beliefs of their chosing, many of which are completely factless, because they read about them on some shady blog, or someone forwarded them a meme.

Untill we change this fact we cannot have functional government, because politicians are just trying to stay in power, and to do so they need to appease the factless...

Our government just mirrors who we are as a people.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
We used to share a set of facts, but disagree what to do about them. Now people have strongly held beliefs of their chosing, many of which are completely factless,
Click to expand...
Great way to put it into words and easy to understand. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Social media can be good, but it also can be very stupid lol
 
Really seems like it comes down to principals at this point rather than anything tangible or substantial. Does it matter if someone gathers generic data on you? On a personal level, it's difficult to argue that it makes a practical difference. It's data collected mostly for advertisers. I understand why someone wouldn't want to give advertisers information, and it usually comes down to the inconvenience that it could potentially cause (e.g. spam). But there comes a point where you're causing yourself more inconvenience trying to avoid having your data collected than if you simply let them collect the data. Unless you're actively promoting a movement on this sort of thing, odds are you're really not making any difference in the end to anybody at all, other than the aforementioned inconvenience you're causing yourself.
Zarathustra[H] said:
Government is broken because people are.

We used to share a set of facts, but disagree what to do about them. Now people have strongly held beliefs of their chosing, many of which are completely factless, because they read about them on some shady blog, or someone forwarded them a meme.

Untill we change this fact we cannot have functional government, because politicians are just trying to stay in power, and to do so they need to appease the factless...

Our government just mirrors who we are as a people.
Click to expand...
Really painting with broad strokes, aren't we? In America, the people that go into politics are actually a completely different class of people than the people who elect them. Many of these people even have dual allegiances (with America being the lesser). Given that basic and fundamental fact, you can throw out the "our government just mirrors who we are as people" spiel because it couldn't be further from the truth. Politicians usually come from a dynasty - they're not produced from the general public. You might be doing politicians and the status quo a service with that sort of rhetoric you're pushing, but certainly not doing any of us any favors.
 
t1337duder said:
Really seems like it comes down to principals at this point rather than anything tangible or substantial. Does it matter if someone gathers generic data on you? On a personal level, it's difficult to argue that it makes a practical difference. It's data collected mostly for advertisers. I understand why someone wouldn't want to give advertisers information, and it usually comes down to the inconvenience that it could potentially cause (e.g. spam). But there comes a point where you're causing yourself more inconvenience trying to avoid having your data collected than if you simply let them collect the data. Unless you're actively promoting a movement on this sort of thing, odds are you're really not making any difference in the end to anybody at all, other than the aforementioned inconvenience you're causing yourself.

Really painting with broad strokes, aren't we? In America, the people that go into politics are actually a completely different class of people than the people who elect them. Many of these people even have dual allegiances (with America being the lesser). Given that basic and fundamental fact, you can throw out the "our government just mirrors who we are as people" spiel because it couldn't be further from the truth. Politicians usually come from a dynasty - they're not produced from the general public. You might be doing politicians and the status quo a service with that sort of rhetoric you're pushing, but certainly not doing any of us any favors.
Click to expand...
The line "Our government just mirrors who we are as a people." Doesn't mean the politicians mirror the constituency. It means they placate the masses that make up their constituency to keep themselves in power. Even if it means encouraging the divisions and stoking the flames.

The country is extremely divided and these divided parties disagree on the very basis of the issues, not just how to deal/solve for them.
 
sharknice said:
Because he's asking for legislation to ban it.
If you don't like it don't participate and I don't care, but don't ruin it for the people that want to give up some privacy for cheap ass tvs.
Click to expand...
Problem is most people do not know they are giving up privacy for their cheap TV, most people still do not know their phones are listening and how those ad's keep popping up. The general population is clueless about technology these days and how invasive it really is right now.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Problem is most people do not know they are giving up privacy for their cheap TV, most people still do not know their phones are listening and how those ad's keep popping up. The general population is clueless about technology these days and how invasive it really is right now.
Click to expand...
In my experience it is mostly the opposite, they are clueless on how it is actually done for the most part, but they assume everything connected spy on them and they assumed they do it in more complex ways than they actually do, most thing that some conversation out loud they had with a friend when they had a phone in their pocket is the reason the algorithm proposed them an ads about it.

According to a nationally representative phone survey of 1,006 U.S. adults conducted by Consumer Reports in May 2019, 43 percent of Americans who own a smartphone believe their phone is recording conversations without their permission.

If 43% assume their phone is recording conversations and that without their permissions, imagine the % that assume something way easier that use less battery/power and other is going on or that at least actively listen without actually recording for voice tone and keyword.


Study/poll and my experience is that virtually everyone assume being listened too and if they buy a really cheap intelligent weight person that come with an app that force them to create an account, amazon smarttv device, roku, etc... I would imagine that most assume they are more spied with more complex ways than they actually are. Do really most people you know in 2020, when they buy the cheapest smarttv that give free streamed content on it, that there is zero spying going on ?

I think that something people like to believe that they repeat, because the truth that people have a mix of not caring when they are not welcoming it and actively doing it.
 
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