Wow. This combined with the fact that economic espionage has been receiving state sponsorship for a long time now is kind of unsettling. Cell phones are bad enough, but TVs...and really anything else that can use voice control (alarm clocks are my personal favorite) could be huge for spies.
Also imagine how many companies are going to eventually purchase these for their conference rooms. I imagine some already have. In pen tests my team always considers how to hide bugs, mostly wireless keyboard sniffers & network taps these days. These TVs offer the ability to hide in plain sight and with no out of pocket expense beyond paying Amazon for a cloud service to run a proxy.
It depends. If the target is a high security facility that happens to have periodic bug & unauthorized WiFi sweeps this could be a great side-channel vector which could go unnoticed. Of course I'd hope the management of such a facility would know better than to put a smart TV in a conference room, let alone hook it up to the network but honestly nothing surprises me anymore. I've seen older smart TVs in secure areas not connected to the network, but within a hands reach of a network port.
That seems like a rather specialized worry since your average hotel isn't going to do any of this? It seems like you might as well go for a walk in a park to have any real conversation.
