The "they use any open wifi they can see" myth has been brought up on HN multiple times, and never did anybody provide any credible proof of this rumour (that started as a single reddit comment).
Worth noting that these articles are from 2019 and there hasn't been much talk of 5G TVs since. Aside from plain old 5G hype, SK Telecom wants 5G TVs as part of their envisioned ATSC/5G convergence that would bring more OTT services to broadcast TV (using their 5G network, naturally). This is mostly for the Korean market, since in North America broadcast TV is less popular and 5G networks have less capacity.
I would be surprised if modern TVs didn’t connect to open WiFis; there is literally no reason for TVs not to do this, and every incentive to do it. Even if we discount the ads as a motivator, it’s still a simple solution to get people’s stuff configured automatically.
Legal issues aside, there might be loss of company image and also privacy related matter (I can run an open wifi to see the data that my neighbour TV sends).
And to add to this: There has been no proof ever that modern TVs do this, and it would be quite easy for anyone/journalists/reviewers to check this (just run an open wifi and monitor it).
And I would be surprised if they did... the belief in these sorts of tech urban legends/conspiracy theories that some seemingly techie people have is cringeworthy.
And no, Facebook/Instagram aren't listening to users either, it would need too much bandwidth/server power to process all those conversations, and if you say "they can do the speech recognition on the users' phones", the majority of users use budget phones that don't have that sort of power.
This reminds me of the pre-Snowden times, where people often assumed that governments widely recorded internet traffic, since they had both the capability and the motivation, but people like you dismissed it as “urban legends/conspiracy theories” because there wasn’t any hard evidence.
How do you know what I did in regards to the Five Eyes?
I wonder what's easier to check and verify, a secret government tapping of the Internet, or if the TVs in millions of people's living rooms are trying to connect to open WiFi networks...
(I did not mention or claim anything about you personally.)
You’re right in that this should be easier to find. But I haven’t seen any concerted effort to buy N number of smart TVs and do security analysis on them in order to find something like this.
