Samsung Bans Smart TV Apps That Secretly Share Home Internet
We warned back in May that your smart TV is already spying on you, and LG recently wound up in the hot seat for some rather egregious Terms of Service updates surrounding that behavior. With that in mind, it's probably a good thing that Samsung quickly stompped out this behavior once it was made aware of it, though more thorough screening of featured Tizen apps should have revealed it before Mnemonic had to.
To those who may feel betrayed by Pac-Man publisher Namco Bandai, don't be. While this is a licensed port, it was also handled by development studio Play.Works, who simply pay larger publishers for the license to port games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders to smart TV platforms like Samsung's Tizen OS.
When investigating, Mnemonic realized that Play.Works games use the Bright Data SDK, and Bright Data openly operates as a data collection company with a massive residential proxy network. After gaining root (admin) access on their Samsung Smart TV, a process which involved desoldering the TV's flash chip to read the firmware directly, the researchers were able to analyze network traffic from the TV and the Tizen-compatible apps installed on it.
This is how Mnemonic discovered the Bright Data SDK hidden within an Editor's Choice Pac-Man port, and "uncomfortably" noted that the distance between it and an exit node in your living room "is one server-side configuration change and one button press from whoever happens to be holding the remote."
To Bright Data's credit, the dormant proxy functionality would need user consent to activate. But it's clearly still a questionable thing for a Pac-Man game to contain if Samsung's immediate response to Engadget was to ban it outright and change its platform-wide policies to ban the Bright Data SDK.
Image Credit: Mnemonic (screenshot)
