GreenCrunch

There was an article here about one of the companies doing this, basically one of the methods is having apps on people’s smart TVs or phones that scrape the web in the background and upload to a control server. So it’s a person’s genuine device in a genuine residence in some cases.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/06/free-apps-are-quietly-turning-smart-tvs.html

Yeah this seems like a very stupid unforced error. The devs didn’t provide this, they internally were like “don’t send that to Germany, yikes!”, and then went ahead anyway?

Even if they’d been like “Oh, you’re right that looks a bit too Nazi, let’s just put one of them so it doesn’t” then this would be another boring marketing email.