[ornornor]

> Because end user questions disrupt developer discussion this thread will be removed soon.

Lol. I’ve worked for Samsung’s TV (and ad business, I’m ashamed to say) and this doesn’t surprise me one bit. The culture was actively user hostile and gave zero fucks about security or quality. All that mattered was how much data we could suck out of the users home. That included automated content recognition so we’d know what you were watching at all time including porn even if it was streamed via your laptop, or reporting all the IDs of all hdmi devices connected to the tv, or scanning your internal network to find out what devices are there to then sell this info to advertisers and have you switch from Nintendo to Xbox for example.

Fwiw this was the first and last time I’ve ever worked in adtech, I’ve sworn to never ever enable this industry ever again.

[bspammer]

The automated content recognition thing is surprising, at least to me. That’s so invasive I’d assume it was illegal, but I guess I’m too optimistic about privacy laws.

[ElFitz]

It’s been documented

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/smarter-living/how-to-sto...

They also unilaterally decided to add a new "ad" feature to existing TVs

https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/samsung-ads-debuts-thre...

[ornornor]

It’s to sell analytics that are “better than Nielsen”, real-time, across devices, and for ad (re)targeting. There were also plans to detect commercial breaks on broadcast tv and dynamically replace them with whatever ads samsung wanted to show you instead but I think this was scrapped after all.