Cybersecurity researcher says Samsung TVs use AI to record audio, take screenshots and serve ads

IT House News on October 25, according to a report by technology media Tom's Hardware today, network security researcher log4j recently discovered that the advertisements pushed out by the Samsung TV in his home were "so accurate that it sends chills down the back." He later discovered that the TV’s Tizen operating system could record user telemetry information, audio, screenshots, etc. in detail, with the intention of improving targeted advertising. log4j said he reverse engineered the 2025 Samsung TV and found that the sluggishness of the system may be due to background processes processing user data, including audio, screenshots, and advertising identifier AID. In some places, there is even a convolutional neural network (IT House Note: CNN), which is an AI model that analyzes which videos users watch, which ads they skip, and the video playback speed. At the same time, even if the TV is not equipped with a microphone, the system will look for other devices to record audio. For example, it can automatically find sound bars and Bluetooth devices connected to the TV and use the microphones of these devices to record. Hugging Face engineer ngxson said that after testing with Flipper Zero, he found that Samsung TVs would indeed turn on the microphone for about 5 seconds and then stop working. Later, he tried to use AI analysis, but was banned by OpenAI after a while. At the end of this series of posts, log4j jokingly said: "We finally found a company that truly listens to its users."