IT Home On October 25, according to tech media Tom’s Hardware, cybersecurity researcher log4j recently found that the advertisement pushed by the Samsung TV in his own home was “so precise it chills you”. Later, he discovered that the Tizen operating system of this TV can record detailed user telemetry data, audio, and screen captures, with the intention of improving targeted advertising.
According to log4j, when he reversed engineered this 2025 Samsung TV, it was found that the slow performance of its system might be due to background programs processing a large amount of user data, including audio, screen snapshots, and advertising identifiers AID. In some areas, convolutional neural networks (as noted by IT Home: CNN) were also present, which are AI models that analyze which videos the user has watched, which ads were skipped, and the playback speed of the videos.
At the same time, even if the TV does not have a microphone, the system will look for other devices to record audio. For example, it can automatically find bar speakers or Bluetooth devices connected to the TV and use the microphones on those devices to record sound.
Hugging Face engineer ngxson said that after testing with the Flipper Zero, he found that the Samsung TV actually turns on the microphone for about 5 seconds and then stops working. Later, he tried to use AI analysis, but was banned by OpenAI shortly thereafter.
At the end of this series of posts, log4j joked: “We finally found a company that really listens to users.”