Researcher says Samsung 2025 TV collects ad telemetry on-device, then says OpenAI banned his account

A security researcher and bug bounty hunter who posts as @log4j says he gained root shell access to his own newer 2025 Samsung smart TV and found what he described as a set of privacy-related anomalies tied to on-device AI processing. In a series of posts, he claimed the television handled telemetry covering audio, screen captures, and a cross-device advertising identifier, or AID, and that it could classify events such as dog barking and baby crying. He also said app-level behavior, including what a user watches on YouTube, which ads are skipped, and playback progress, could be tracked through models running locally on the TV rather than in the cloud. The full technical write-up has not been published. Tom’s Hardware later summarized the posts, while Hugging Face engineer ngxson said a Flipper Zero test showed a microphone active for about five seconds before stopping, though that test involved a rooted device with several settings disabled. In a separate post, @log4j said OpenAI suspended his account for “cyber abuse,” costing him about $500 and banked resets. Samsung and OpenAI had not publicly commented on the case by press time.