alt Hacker NewsXfinity runs an open WiFi for its customers. If you instead their gateway and don’t change anything (which is 99% of users) any Xfinity customer can get online. Several of my neighbors have them, and you can’t walk around in my commercial district without seeing the “Xfinity WiFi” SSID. It would be smart for TV mfrs to do a deal with Xfinity and their equivalents world wide in order to sell viewer data to advertisers and receive “fresh” ads, even if the TVs are excluded from the residential network.
Replies
So your TV just connects to random wifi networks? That sounds a bit insane.
>It would be smart for TV mfrs to do a deal with Xfinity and their equivalents world wide in order to sell viewer data to advertisers and receive “fresh” ads, even if the TVs are excluded from the residential network.
Doesn't exactly sound like a thing to be that concerned about if you never plug in your TV. If you buy a TV right now and never plug it in, how would it know about any future deal with Xfinity to connect to its open networks? And if it had a feature to connect to random open Wi-Fi networks right now, that wouldn't be hard to prove. My LG has never shown up in my Wi-Fi client list despite my open guest Wi-Fi. You can even test it by naming your guest network "Xfinity WiFi".
Taking apart your TV and pulling out the wireless radio sounds like absolute overkill to me. Feel free to do it if it makes you feel better. It will definitely not allow it to send data (over Wi-Fi) under any circumstance. I'm just not convinced that the alternative is that much riskier.
This is actually so very doable in US, cutting deal with those like XFinity.
But if the TV manufacturer is smart in their spying game, they could also be probing for any public SSIDs to connect to when no local internet access is setup.