Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When a Best Buy store in South Carolina this week found itself dealing with the fallout from showing pornographic images on its large-screen TVs three times in 24 hours—one time the images were displayed to children in the store for a full 30 minutes—it forced the chain to wrestle with issues of Wi-Fi security, the problematic nature of wirelessly accessible smart TVs and how to control what images customers choose to use to test the TVs. And ever-changing explanations of the incident didn’t help.

On February 11-12, customers at the Greenville location were shown pictures of two adults engaging in intercourse on one of the store’s large-screen smart TVs, reportedly three times. Those images were placed there by at least two customers. That much is clear. How the images came to be placed there is unclear, as Best Buy itself has gone out of its way to be vague.

When the incident was first reported over the weekend, Best Buy issued a statement saying that “two individuals accessed our store’s wireless signal to broadcast inappropriate content on a smart television display.” A few days later, the statement Best Buy was sending to reporters was identically phrased, except that “accessed our store’s wireless signal” changed to “accessed a product display wireless signal.” Such a change could indicate shifting the fault from the store’s public Wi-Fi or the store’s LAN to the smart TV set itself, which does have the ability to receive images and other content directly from a consumer’s mobile phone. So was that what happened?

Not necessarily. The Best Buy spokesperson who handled both statements, Kelly Groehler, said the first statement had been somewhat rushed. “The first statement was written quickly and in response to a television inquiry where we had minutes to respond, and I addressed wireless in our stores generically,” Groehler wrote in an E-mail. “I have had the chance today to clarify, in order to be more technically accurate: One of the signals in our store wireless system, specifically the one for product displays, was accessed.”

That suggests the access was inappropriate. But that may not have been the case. One customer who complained said he was told by Best Buy corporate that surveillance footage shows two individuals suspected in the incident. The customers were in the computer area of the store, in a specific area where the store encourages customers to post personal images to the large-screen displays to demo the sets’ crisp screen resolution. “It was to connect customers’ personal devices” to the network to be displayed on the screens, said Best Buy customer Miguel Berg, who witnessed the images in the store and discussed his conversations with Robert Feivor, identified as a Best Buy senior executive resolution specialist. (Berg shared E-mails between himself and Feivor with StorefrontBacktalk.) “They were inviting people to come in and select whatever they wanted on their device and show it on the big screen,” Berg said.

Technically, that explanation is consistent with Groehler’s description; the phrase “was accessed” doesn’t necessarily mean the access was done without authorization.

This situation raises quite a few IT security issues. If the smart TVs were connecting directly with the consumers’ mobile phones—which does not seem to be the case this time, given the Best Buy reference to “our store wireless system, specifically the one for product displays”—the issue would involve whether the store had changed the default password for the televisions. But that would have been academic, given that the store would have to post the password so customers could transmit images to the TV for the demo.

There does not appear to have been a breach of the store’s wireless LAN.