Is Your Smart TV Spying on You?

New York State Senator Chuck Schumer recently issued a warning to all smart TV owners:  If your TV is equipped with a camera and can connect to the Internet, it could be used to spy on you.  Yes, your smart TV is capable of allowing a hacker to steal your credit card information, or worse, your identity.  Not only that, but a hacker can remote-access your TV’s camera and watch everything you do in the room that the smart TV is in.  To make matters worse, these TVs don’t have much in the way of security settings. 

Researchers Aaron Grattafiori and Josh Yavor were at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada recently and showed how a smart TV can be hacked.  During the demonstration, they were able to control social media and any other application installed on the TV, they accessed files and even turned on the camera.  If they were able to do this, anyone else can do it too.  It’s like giving up your remote control to a hacker.

Mr. Grattafiori spoke with Mashable regarding this issue (Your Smart TV Can Be Hacked to Spy on You).  He said, “Because the TV only has a single user, any type of compromise into an application or into Smart Hub, which is the operating system – the smarts of the TV – has the same permission as every user, which is, you can do everything and anything.”

Grattafiori and Yavor, who work for iSEC Partners, a security firm, began looking into the issues with smart TVs in December of 2012.  They notified Samsung about this security breach in January 2013.  Samsung issued a statement to CNN shortly after claiming that “patches” have been issued to plug up the holes in security (Your TV Might be Watching You), which now makes it difficult for hackers to break into your smart TV.

Who is Following You When You Shop?

By now, we all know that when we shop over the Internet, we’re being tracked.  But, did you know that when you shop in the stores, you’re also being tracked?  Each time we enter a store, whether it’s a department store or a grocery store, we see security cameras positioned in just about every aisle.  These cameras, however, are not doing the tracking.  Customers are being tracked through their cell phones. 

According to the New York Times, last fall, Nordstrom began using Wi-Fi signals from customers’ cell phones to track their movements (Attention Shoppers:  Stores are Tracking Your Cell).  A sign was posted advising customers of the tracking and many shoppers were not happy about it.  Tara Darrow, a Nordstrom spokesperson said, “We did hear some complaints” and because of this, the tracking was stopped in May 2013.  Other stores testing this type of tracking include Family Dollar, Cabela’s and Mothercare. 

 

This tracking can tell a lot about a customer.  The cell phone signals used with the security cameras will tell the retailer exactly who is shopping.  They know how long each shopper spends in any aisle, how long they look at something before they actually purchase it and even the gender of the shopper.  Somehow, many shoppers find this tracking much more invasive than being tracked on-line with cookies.  They consider this more of an invasion of privacy because with on-line tracking, you are still fairly anonymous in the sense that cookies can’t see you.