Smart-tvs are in the same boat
Comment on In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance
dan@upvote.au 3 weeks agoI was going to say “that article seems to just debunk the ‘my phone is always listening to me’ conspiracy theory” but then I got to the part about over 50% of analyzed Android apps having permission to take screenshots :/
Akip@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
dan@upvote.au 3 weeks ago
This is why my TV is on a separate VLAN (with no internet access) and I use an Nvidia Shield for streaming. I haven’t seen any indication that the Shield does anything like this.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
Yeah, there is no reason for me to be connecting my TV to the internet. I use a HTPC which is much better for streaming than the TV’s built-in apps.
dan@upvote.au 3 weeks ago
The one time I do connect the TV to the internet is when there’s a firmware update that fixes an issue I’m encountering. That’s rare though. I still have it on my network so I can control it using Home Assistant (eg have a backlight come on and dim the main lights when the TV is turned on) but it’s on an isolated VLAN.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
this is a weird paragraph. no permission is needed for an app to take screenshots of itself. all apps can do that.
just an example: the Element matrix client has a bugreport feature that allows you to submit an automatically created screenshot of the previous menu.
it seems there are several ways to accomplish this: stackoverflow.com/…/how-to-programmatically-take-…
dan@upvote.au 3 weeks ago
Do those code snippets on the Stackoverflow post allow you to capture the entire screen regardless of which app is open, or do they only allow you to capture the app the code is running in?
Capturing the app itself makes sense (for things like bug reports) but does Android really let any app capture whatever is on the screen?
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
no, they only allow the app to capture its own screen content. to make a regular screenshot of the whole display, the app needs a permission that the user has to approve every single time, at least on most phones. that API is actually for continuous screen recording, but of course usable for this purpose too. this also means that after getting approved by the user, the app can keep its recording sessions to keep more screenshots, but that ends when the app gets killed by android. I think the system also shows a notification when an app is recording, but as anything that too could vary with phones.