Reddit post claims hacker found Samsung TV logging dog barks and baby cries, then lost OpenAI account

A post on Reddit's r/antiai community claims a hacker took apart the software of his Samsung TV and found it classifies sounds it hears before reporting back to Samsung.

According to the post, the TV is a relatively new 2025 model. The user says he kept seeing oddly targeted ads. He tried to reverse engineer the firmware, meaning he tried to read and study the TV's built-in software. But it was encrypted with AES and he had no keys. He says getting them would mean physically opening the TV and using hardware debugging methods called UART and JTAG.

He then says he found a zero-day instead. A zero-day is a security flaw the maker doesn't know about yet. The post says this gave him a root shell on new Samsung TVs, which means full control over the device.

The post says the telemetry, the data the TV sends back to the company, includes sensor preferences, counters for dog-barking and baby-crying events, and how long the camera streams. The user describes this as always-on hot mic functionality. He also lists automatic content recognition, which identifies what is playing on screen, along with geo positioning, network mapping, a targeted ads service, four separate DRM services and user profile building. He says all of this is shared with Samsung and about 400 partners. He also shared a screenshot of a file called security-policy.xml.

The post also includes a screenshot of what looks like an email from OpenAI. It says the user's account can no longer be used because of a violation of its terms and usage policies, and it offers an appeal button.