Your Smart TV Could Be An Enslaved AI Web Scraping Bot
That free game installed on you living room TV might be doing more than keeping the family entertained. According to new report, some free smart TV apps may be quietly recruiting connected televisions into a massive commercial web-scraping network that feeds data directly to AI companies, using your home broadband internet connection to do it.
The subject at the center of this report, published by security firm Include Security and independent researcher "buchodi," is a software development kit built by Bright Data, formerly known as Luminati Networks. Bright Data sells access to what it claims is a network of more than 400 million residential IP addresses, reportedly to AI companies trying to scrape public web data for model training.
The clever (or shady, depending on you perspective) part is how those addresses were sourced. App developers embed Bright Data's SDK into their free applications, earning money per download. When a...
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