A security researcher says the software on a 2025 Samsung TV collects audio, screenshots and viewing behavior to sharpen ad targeting, though the strongest claims have not been independently confirmed.
The researcher posts as log4j and works as a bounty hunter, meaning someone paid to find security flaws. They started after noticing oddly specific ads on the set. The firmware was AES-encrypted and the keys were out of reach, so they used zero-days (previously unknown flaws) to get a root shell, which is full control of the TV's Tizen operating system. Their first post on October 21 promised a write-up.
According to log4j, Tizen contains code for detailed telemetry from packet logging, audio categorization, screenshots, and an ad identifier called AID that links a user across devices. They also describe a region-specific convolutional neural network, an image-oriented AI model, that tracks which videos are watched, which ads are skipped and how far playback gets. For sets without a microphone, they say the TV looks for a connected device that has one, such as a soundbar or a Bluetooth gadget.
The microphone claim is the shakiest. Hugging Face engineer ngxson tested it with a Flipper Zero, a hardware testing gadget, and saw the mic open for five seconds, then nothing for hours. Their TV was already rooted with several settings disabled, so an unmodified set may behave differently.
The viewing-behavior tracking is the least surprising part. Ad-supported smart TVs have long made money from knowing what people watch, and LG has faced similar accusations. What would be new is audio and screenshots feeding on-device models. Log4j also suspects this processing explains why TVs feel sluggish, but owners often blame bloatware, and nothing posted so far separates the two.
Separately, OpenAI banned log4j for cyber abuse after they used its tools for the work. They say they only used them for local reverse engineering and blamed a primitive classifier. The promised write-up, which is meant to show how others can reproduce the findings, is the real test: independent results on unmodified TVs would settle what is actually being collected.