Free apps on your smart TV are quietly using your home internet to scrape the web for AI companies

A security researcher reverse-engineered the Bright Data SDK that ships inside free apps on Samsung and LG smart TVs and showed that, once opened, the TV turns into a "residential proxy," fetching pages from across the web on behalf of AI companies, all routed through your home Wi-Fi and your IP address. The story broke June 5 and is bouncing across TechSpot, GBHackers, and privacy Twitter this week. One app's fine print allows up to 200 GB of scraping traffic per month coming out of an always-on TV in the living room.