Smart TVs are smart enough to track and hack

This is truly an age of smart things and when it comes to TVs markets are full of smart TVs and it will be very rare to see any dumb TV available for sale. The market research shows that half of the TVs sold in 2017 were smart. Though this is a step forward towards technology, making lives easier but what about security? Any device connected with IoT will have security concerns.

As we all know all the major brands track the usage of their customers. Top five brands in smart TVs are Samsung, LG, Sony, TCL and Vizio and they also track users viewing habits, even when they are not streaming. It can be ominous but these information can be harmless for any user. If we go one step further from here and use Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and other popular websites, then security concerns like vulnerabilities to hacking is the biggest alarming threat to any user.

Recently some reports have shown that this threat is more serious on Roku-enabled TVs. With the available open source API anyone can misuse it to make apps and use them to fully control the TVs. Can this be a big threat for users just due to basic security practices not being followed. Disabling these features can not be a solution as it will kill the purpose of a smart TV so companies need to take this issue positively to ensure security for their customers.