Premiere spying on me?

[cormanaz]

I just installed the free trial version of Adobe Premiere Elements. I notice that to use it you have to be logged in to your Adobe account. I also notice that when I load a video there is a lot of network traffic. Is this software sending my videos or info about them to Adobe? I would ask Adobe about this, but there seems to be no way to contact support unless you've got a purchased product.

[JVRaines]

May well be. Remember that EULA that you didn't read? It's probably buried somewhere in there. You can try WireShark to see what's happening on your network interface.

[amaipaipai]

You smart tv does it, you smart phone does it, many "free" programs does it, many "free" social media does it.

Back in 2013 I had to call the police because my Sony Bravia KDL-47W802A start to access the internet while it was turned off, using Wireshark I've noticed that the TV was recording audio and sending it over some cloud service at amazon for storage. This was way before the Wikileaks Vault 7 and the Samsung smart tv "fake off" issue.
https://heavy.com/tech/2017/03/wikileaks-vault-7-samsung-smarttv-hacked-which-models-r...le-turned-off/
https://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-claims-cia-mi5-hacked-samsung-smart-tvs-micr...vault-7-2017-3

And by the way, the TV doesn't have any microphones, the TV uses the speakers as microfones, here is how they do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X1JndFSjIA

You can find the TV service manual over the internet, there is no circuit schematic on it.

So, many things can spy on you this days, at home I use 3 firewalls to handle it.

[KarMa]

Back in 2013 I had to call the police because my Sony Bravia KDL-47W802A start to access the internet while it was turned off,

Why would you call the police over the actions of a product you bought and installed. I can understand contacting maybe media or regulators or whatever. But the police?

Also with Sony's there are two off stages, one is just when the screen is off but the red light stays on and is waiting for the remote to press the power button. The other off is truely off where all power is shutoff to the TV, which only happens when clicking the power button on the TV and the red light turns off. This prevents the remote from being able to turn on the TV too.

[Cyrax9]

Adobe constantly phones home regardless of whether or not you have a trial or a paid subscription thanks to its perpetual licensing model. You can block some of its processes with a firewall, but others need to be able to phone home at least every 90 days once you have a paid subscription, and likely sooner with the week long trial. Even more nefarious, Adobe is constantly collecting "analytics" information (read: spying on you) unless you disable this "preference" both on their website and in the Creative Cloud app itself. Likewise, if you don't want everything you work on being uploaded to the cloud, you need to immediately pause and then disable file syncing as soon as Adobe CC is installed. This is a nightmare for anyone editing anything with sensitive data who forgets to do this before Adobe immediately starts scooping it up. (Imagine a major film being leaked because of something like this; the fact that Adobe defaults this feature to "on" constantly baffles me.)

I really despise Creative Cloud because of "features" like the need to constantly phone home. It's part of the reason why Adobe's software has become so sluggish, especially when exporting a finished video or working on a project with lots of After Effects files linked into Premiere and a bunch of effects on the clips.

[amaipaipai]

Why would you call the police over the actions of a product you bought and installed. I can understand contacting maybe media or regulators or whatever. But the police?

I don't know the country you live in, over here that is a necessary step to start an investigation and make the manufacturer accounted for. They took custody of the TV and ran tests on it to confirm or dismiss my complains, it was discovered that yes, the TV was spying on us and it was recording audio while it was off.

To make matters worse, if the TV was connected over the internet the TV was in a stand by mode waiting for a command.

Contacting the media or whatever has no effect, they play as "we are looking in to it" BS, LG also did the same thing:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25018225
https://gizmodo.com/lgs-tvs-could-be-collecting-your-data-even-when-you-te-1468123052
http://doctorbeet.blogspot.com/

Also with Sony's there are two off stages, one is just when the screen is off but the red light stays on and is waiting for the remote to press the power button. The other off is truely off where all power is shutoff to the TV, which only happens when clicking the power button on the TV and the red light turns off. This prevents the remote from being able to turn on the TV too.

This model doesn't have function you've described.

[KarMa]

I don't know the country you live in, over here that is a necessary step to start an investigation and make the manufacturer accounted for. They took custody of the TV and ran tests on it to confirm or dismiss my complains, it was discovered that yes, the TV was spying on us and it was recording audio while it was off.

I'm in the US as my profile claims, and I just can't imagine my local police knowing what to do in such a situation doubt they would pass it higher up to someone who might know something. But if it's more acceptable to do that where you are then I guess I understand. How was Sony held to account in your situation?

This model doesn't have function you've described.

Interesting, that's my experience with a 1080p Sony Bravia 2013 kdl-40r450a.

[JVRaines]

Recording a private conversation without consent, and not being a party to it, is a crime in all U.S. states. You would start with a police report.

[amaipaipai]

I'm in the US as my profile claims, and I just can't imagine my local police knowing what to do in such a situation doubt they would pass it higher up to someone who might know something. But if it's more acceptable to do that where you are then I guess I understand.

As JVRaines said, I believe any US citizen would start by doing a police report just like me. I don't understand US laws, looks like each state has different laws so if it's the case you should get a lawyer as I did because if you bump in to a police station telling that your TV is spying on you without any evidence they might think you are high or another crazy redneck, Jeff Foxworthy fan or something.

How was Sony held to account in your situation?

They told it was a malfunction of the device, (I never saw a malfunction program it self with a voice codec, send the data over to a specific account on an amazon cloud service, but hey) there's nothing to be scared about and blah, blah, blah...

We had a settlement out of court, they took my TV, gave me a brand new one, pay me some money for the inconvenience and they walk away. I really wanted a full prosecution but at the time the judge didn't want to hear it, my own lawyer didn't want to go forward with it, he insisted to accept the deal and take the money. At the time this was too crazy to be true even with hard evidence provided by the police.

All this changed after the CIA and NSA scandal:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/07/why-the-cia-is-using-your...rs-for-spying/
https://www.thelocal.de/20160223/nsa-eavesdropped-on-merkels-intimate-conversations
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/08/nsa-tapped-german-chancellery-decades-...-claims-merkel

So I let it go, who am I to go against this people.

[KarMa]

Recording a private conversation without consent, and not being a party to it, is a crime in all U.S. states. You would start with a police report.

Well if Sony truly recorded the conversation, how much you wanna bet they make the customer agree to a TOS which gives consent? Making it not a crime. Anyway, taking a TV down to your local PD and claiming it's recording your conversations isn't going to get you very far. Unless you can prove by yourself how it works and capture the audio streams that it records, and show that the TOS doesn't cover being recorded. Otherwise lawsuits would have taken Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and others down already.

they took my TV, gave me a brand new one,

I would have kept it.

[amaipaipai]

they took my TV, gave me a brand new one,

I would have kept it.

Why?
That TV close to today' Smart TV's it's a joke, they have cameras, motion controls, face recognition, voice recognition, they tell you right in your face to not talk anything important in front of it, here's a snip from Samsung Privacy Policy:

Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.

The same goes to LG and other companies:
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/02/who-s-the-third-party-that-samsung-an...with/index.htm

In today's world, people are OK with it.
I've a Samsung S7, I run this thing with a firewall because the system was "calling home" and sending over my personal data, it was receiving commands from the internet to turn on the camera and GPS without my knowledge. This is not Samsung exclusive, my previous Sony Xperia did the same, iPhone's and Apple products are the worst, they does this like crazy, there is a tool on Android called CatLog you can see what your own phone are doing. I don't see a problem when some apps call home to see if there's an update, my real problem is when it receives a command by google or whoever to turn on the gps and log my actions even if I tell it not to.

This is not a big secret either:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/13/google-location-tracking-android-iphone-mobile
https://www.wired.com/story/google-location-tracking-turn-off/
https://myactivity.google.com/

The same happens for Apple if you use YouTube, Google Maps, etc, etc.

[KarMa]

Why?
That TV close to today' Smart TV's it's a joke, they have cameras, motion controls, face recognition, voice recognition, they tell you right in your face to not talk anything important in front of it, here's a snip from Samsung Privacy Policy:

Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.

If I had a TV that I could prove was spying on me without consent, then I'm not going to give that TV back to the creators to destroy the evidence. I would not even tell them directly but would go to a tech news media outlet or I myself wrote/vlogged about it. I would not give them the time to shut down their data harvesting servers until all evidence was collected. Why are you bringing Samsung into this when your lawsuit or whatever would have been against Sony. Did they break their TOS with you?

If you did have a TV from Sony (KDL-47W802A) that you felt was spying on you, and you got a monetary compensation from Sony for this. Then I guess Sony has done a good job keeping this under the radar as Googling KDL-47W802A gives me no hint that this model has ease dropping charges against it. There are other TV models from many brands that have had this allegation leveled against them but not this model. Which is a shame if these allegations are true. Did they make you sign a "do not disclose agreement"?

[mike20021969]

This model doesn't have function you've described.

How strange. Even in standby 24/7 is not very eco-friendly! What's the make and model?
Anyway, try flicking the wall socket switch!

[KarMa]

this model doesn't have function you've described.

how strange. Even in standby 24/7 is not very eco-friendly! What's the make and model?
Anyway, try flicking the wall socket switch!

kdl-47w802a

[amaipaipai]

If I had a TV that I could prove was spying on me without consent, then I'm not going to give that TV back to the creators to destroy the evidence.

This was part of the agreement, but it didn't change anything since the TV they gave me did the exact same thing.

I would not even tell them directly but would go to a tech news media outlet or I myself wrote/vlogged about it. I would not give them the time to shut down their data harvesting servers until all evidence was collected.

I've tried to contact everyone in the media, I've lost my account on reddit.
I've accumulated a huge amount of negative karma, my post was deleted soon after I was expelled from the community.

You don't understand, this was in a time period this "spy" thing didn't existed, nobody believe me until valt 7 came along years latter.

Why are you bringing Samsung into this when your lawsuit or whatever would have been against Sony. Did they break their TOS with you?

Because you read in the news that Samsung spy on you, when this is not true since all other TV brands does the exact same.

If you did have a TV from Sony (KDL-47W802A) that you felt was spying on you, and you got a monetary compensation from Sony for this. Then I guess Sony has done a good job keeping this under the radar as Googling KDL-47W802A gives me no hint that this model has ease dropping charges against it. There are other TV models from many brands that have had this allegation leveled against them but not this model.

This is why is bad to be the first to bring the bad news, this people have good lawyers, they know how to handle it and you won't bee see this anywhere.
Have you ever hear about coca-cola and "merchandise 5 or #5"?
To this day coca-cola uses "coca leaf extract" and label it as "vegetable extract", do you see any big media running this?
You won't see it because coca-cola is a very big advertiser.
https://bgr.com/2015/08/24/coca-cola-recipe-cocaine-leaves/
https://personalliberty.com/merchandise-no-5/

There's a lot of things google will not show you.

Which is a shame if these allegations are true.

It is, they pay me to keep it under wraps didn't they?
To confirm my allegations all you have to is to have a Sony TV from 2012, get yourself a router with openwrt, install tcpdump and sniff your own network. For obvious reasons I can't share any details but I still have the tcpdump capture:


In general the TV start a connection with a remote host, they shake on it, the TV broadcast this info and then a real time stream starts. Not in this case because the TV was inside a virtual network and I remove all RTP/RTCP protocols from the kernel so it result in this "malformed packets".

Again, no need to trust me, sniff your own network and see what you TV does at night by it self.

Did they make you sign a "do not disclose agreement"?

Of course they did!