Ask HN: Am I being too paranoid?

[kbns]

Since most companies are being unreasonable, I'm paranoid because monitor manufacturers might have backdoors to record screens and store the data in their memory, or transmit it to the company in the case of smart monitors.

[uberman]

"Smart" today is basically code for "spies on you". In that respect these devices that allow the manufacturer to sell what has historically been private information is "smart" at least from their perspective.

When your doorbell, vacuum, fridge, tv, mouse, computer, security system, nanny cam, all collect and sell data about you why would you not assume that your monitor (likely now connected by a shared data channel like usb3) is doing the same.

Hell, MS went as far as to say capturing regular screenshots of your activity was a feature. It won't be long before most people agree with them.

When I was young, people feared that the powers that be might be listening in on their phone calls or watching them through their TVs. Today unfortunately, most people consider these to be product features.

[samsung_sucks]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-wat...

[fuzzfactor]

It's not technically paranoia if overwhelming forces actually are hell-bent on compromising your privacy from all possible directions in yet unrecognized ways.

[gRoberts84]

For the most part, yes.

You can easily verify by simply logging all data in/out of your network that the monitor is connected to and seeing if there is any unexpected traffic etc.

Some manufacturers are known to have added backdoors or methods to access data on remote devices but the internet community love tearing things apart, dumping firmware etc to see how things work and someone ends finding it in the end.

Not that it's the correct way of thinking, but if you have anything actually worth capturing in that respect and you believe you're being watched, you'd need to findn alternative ways to access it.

[hnthrow93013]

It depends. Greed and misuse/abuse of power/trust is a common human tendency. There's no denying that. It depends on how feasible these operations are at scale and what value they gain from this - some companies might have such metrics to determine your worth. (and of course what are the risks involved in doing this - risk/reward ratio per person??) I don't know how it works. Backdoors might not just be for the company alone.

[setnone]

If you could come up with a way to make sure any given device is not recording and sending anything, and productize this I might become your customer :)

[vimax]

Watch your network logs, block any domains you see the monitor transmitting to.

[OccamsMirror]

Which raises the question, why would you connect your monitor to the network?

[h2odragon]

some "smart TV" things are said to have their own cell modems so they need not use your network, and are much harder to detect leaking.

Its difficult to escape, tho. Everything that receives RF, also transmits.

If you air gap everything and live in a Faraday cage, they'll know for sure that you have something to hide.

[OccamsMirror]

> some "smart TV" things are said to have their own cell modems so they need not use your network, and are much harder to detect leaking.

If that proved to be true then OP isn't being paranoid, they're being prudent.

I'd hope that it's not true.

[nosrepa]

Who is saying this other than you? I did a cursory search and found nothing.