Smart TVs

Some time ago our Samsung Smart TV began showing adverts within the TV guide. That was not something I agreed to nor was it expected of a TV I had purchased. So I found out what the thing was accessing and installed pi-hole to stop it.

We now have two Samsung Smart TVs and these are the most active devices regarding DNS lookups performing many thousands of lookups each day. Almost all of these were blocked by the standard pi-hole configuration but there are now several lookups which succeed. For the main TV it made 11,300 DNS requests over two days, 7,200 of which were blocked. The other TV made 5,300 requests of which 3,800 were blocked. Of those, most were Samsung addresses while some, of course were for services we actually wanted such as Youtube, Netflix and so on.

Now today the TV alerted me to changes in the T&Cs so I had a look. Many pages of privacy notice followed by sections of terms and such each with a QR code I can scan to access it should I not wish to peer at the TV to try to read even more pages of text. Fortunately there is also a URL for each section as I have no intention of using their QR code. I had to go through the privacy centre just to be sure that none of the options had been switched on by the changes in these terms.

It’s a TV for goodness sake! I really do not expect to have to control whatever it is trying to do at the network level. But while I can, many cannot. The privacy notice is very detailed (long!!) and I suspect most people will ignore it and never change any settings. While I cannot now remember if the settings were correctly off by default I am minded to suggest that this brand of Smart TV should come with a privacy warning in very large letters! Yes I know a Smart TV is going to have some issues regarding personal data but advertising to me is very, er, Meta!