Smart TVs Are Like 'a Digital Trojan Horse' in People's Homes (arstechnica.com) 113
An anonymous reader shares a report: The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a "surveillance system" that has "long undermined privacy and consumer protection," according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers have resulted in connected TVs (CTVs) being a "privacy nightmare," according to Jeffrey Chester, report co-author and CDD executive director, resulting in calls for stronger regulation.
The 48-page report, How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era [PDF], cites Ars Technica, other news publications, trade publications, blog posts, and statements from big players in streaming -- from Amazon to NBCUniversal and Tubi, to LG, Samsung, and Vizio. It provides a detailed overview of the various ways that streaming services and streaming hardware target viewers in newfound ways that the CDD argues pose severe privacy risks. The nonprofit composed the report as part of efforts to encourage regulation. Today, the CDD sent letters to the FTC [PDF], Federal Communications Commission (FCC), California attorney general [PDF], and California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) [PDF], regarding its concerns. "Not only does CTV operate in ways that are unfair to consumers, it is also putting them and their families at risk as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race, and political interests,â Chester said in a statement.
The 48-page report, How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era [PDF], cites Ars Technica, other news publications, trade publications, blog posts, and statements from big players in streaming -- from Amazon to NBCUniversal and Tubi, to LG, Samsung, and Vizio. It provides a detailed overview of the various ways that streaming services and streaming hardware target viewers in newfound ways that the CDD argues pose severe privacy risks. The nonprofit composed the report as part of efforts to encourage regulation. Today, the CDD sent letters to the FTC [PDF], Federal Communications Commission (FCC), California attorney general [PDF], and California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) [PDF], regarding its concerns. "Not only does CTV operate in ways that are unfair to consumers, it is also putting them and their families at risk as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race, and political interests,â Chester said in a statement.
In capitalist America... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In capitalist America... (Score:4, Informative)
Oh don't kid yourself, your smart TV in Europe (and every other place) does the exact same thing.
Re:In capitalist America... (Score:5, Informative)
If you decline the data collection in the EU, they have to rely on "legitimate interest". That's the current legal battleground. LinkedIn just backed down on their "legitimate interest" claim to your data for AI training, and recent rulings say that the "pay or OK" demand doesn't meet "legitimate interests" either. In other words, they can't rely on profit as a justification.
It's an evolving area of rulings and judgements, but we are better protected both from data collection and from negative consequences if we decline to give permission.
Re:In capitalist America... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In capitalist America... (Score:4, Funny)
You got it backwards. In capitalist America TV doesn't buy you, it sells you.
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yeah. regulations are evil. you're not entitled to force manufacturers to make gasoline without lead, or paint without lead, or candy without arsenic (which was very common until it was banned late in the Victorian era), or "medical" products without radium or uranium (e.g. uranium suppositories were an actual product that was sold for many years) or fertilisers without carcinogenic chemicals or any one of the millions of other products controll
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"In capitalist America"? You prefer the surveillance inherent to any communist nation?
Yes, actually, because my government is already doing it. But now my TV is also doing it. But I don't think the solution is to outlaw surveillance. As they say "If you outlaw surveillance, only the criminals will do surveillance." Instead, I think we should adopt a legal doctrine where selling inaccurate data to a 3rd party constitutes libel, making it open to class action.
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Get down off your high horse. This has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with idiots who don't understand what is going on and/or keep buying this shit even if they do. They move the bar a little at a time so that people willingly give in to a few features that they don't like until we finally end up with this shit. Stop using windows, stop using anything that has spyware or phone home routines and keep your damn wallet in your pants if there is. Simple. The public is the cause of this, not c
Re:In capitalist America... (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop using toll roads, they scan your plates and sell the travel data to advertisers.
Stop driving at all, as all modern cars spy on you
in the future:
Stop going to stores as they sell your facial data to advertisers
Stop sending your kids to school as public schools now sell your children's data to advertisers so they can pre-emptively build a portfolio of their likes for their future of capitalist consumption.
See where this thinking gets you... Abstention will accomplish nothing and market forces will always favor the companies profiting from this data and will be the default as regardless of how savvy consumers are, their intrests will be drowned out in the sea of apathetic consumers who just want X widget to do Y thing.
The correct answer is regulation. Voteing with the wallet will never work as the companies and the apethatic will always be greater!
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Nah. Voting with the wallet works 100% of the time.
Problem is your wallet is f****** tiny. You don't get nearly as many votes as the 'people' that matter.
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Nah. Voting with the wallet works 100% of the time.
Unless everybody in the market does the same. ;) And regardless of whichever solution you choose, you are still screwed. Difference is maybe about will you have to bend and open mouth or they'll do it straight :D
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It has everything to do with politics, because it boils down to economics and what people have been conditioned to accept.
People get used to invasive been government doing things like conducting 'community surveys' as part of the census. It starts there and they get used to sharing personal details, they'll share them with corporations too. Next you have a hollowed out middle class. Financially secure people value things like conceptual things like privacy, insecure people reassure themselves of their weal
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They're going to keep going this way until we stop letting ...
Letting? LOL. Letting indeed. There is nothing you can do about it. The fact that you think you can influence this in ANY way merely speaks to your naivete. You heard George Bush after he became President, the billionaires are his servants. You are NOTHING and if you make yourself something, you will be annihilated unless it serves the purpose of one the people who rule over you.
Re:In capitalist America... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'd say the way to mitigate the issue is to keep government extremely small and do as much possible to break up the powe
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Well pointing out that we live in a political duopoly designed for Divide-and-Conquer by elites isn't communist at all. It's an accurate political observation with no partisanship attached as far as I can tell. There is also a big problem: you appear to be correct on those points at least. If you are a Communist, that's unfortunate, but it doesn't mean your forgoing point was incorrect. I'd say the way to mitigate the issue is to keep government extremely small and do as much possible to break up the power of the partisan duopoly. I don't think growing government, which is causing most of these problems, is the answer. They shouldn't be allowed to fail-upward and simply ask for more resources. There are political and legal options to breaking up the duopoly. My favorite general answer is to move closer to direct democracy (think: Switzerland) than to rely on the same partisan voting scheme.
While I can absolutely agree with the points you make about where we should head, how do we accomplish that? The only people that seem to show any concern are middle class folks and down, because the upper echelons of our society adore the current system. It allows them to do pretty much whatever they want, and the worst that happens to them is they get a corporate slap on the wrist, while collecting massive bonuses on their way to their next management failure. Our governmental duopoly (actually a monopoly
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I don't have a good plan, either.
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Small enough to drown in a bathtub?
I disagree; government needs to be big enough to be able to rein in the ever-increasing size and power of corporations (but no bigger). Too small and it would have no power over any megacorp. Banning regulatory capture is also needed.
Getting rid of the duopoly would require either the cooperation of said duopoly, or a mass grassroots campaign from the citizenry. Unfortunately, the duopoly has no incentive to change things, and 2/3 of the electorate treat politics as a te
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LOL - so government created a problem and the answer is more government.
401ks good example. Lets get everyone investing in funds, so that 90% of them won't understand the making up of and won't look beyond the top line strategy of target date/growth/preservation/...
Basically the 401k system took away everyone's 'financial vote' in exchange for not having to think. If middle class people actually were in the habit of owning individual stocks or even funds that they could trade freely there would be a lot m
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There in lines the problem. Doing DD is hard, in fact as you say for the individual it is very likely impossible.
You can invest in products rather than companies, IE X-Widget is really better than all the alternatives in the market ACME makes buy ACME, but if ACME is badly miss-manged, that might not matter. Beyond that the best most folks can do is compare 10Ks with a companies peers, and we all know GAAP rules or no, the accounting staff can paint different pictures if they really want to.
Taking it out o
User tracking is the root of all evil (Score:5, Insightful)
As per usual now, banning tracking will fix it. Take away the profit motive and the surveillance will vanish.
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It's already illegal under stocking laws. We just need the government to enforce existing laws even when they're violated by extremely wealthy people and their pet companies.
I seem to ask this a lot in these discussions, but how do we go about doing that? Do the people have to form a separate government that's large enough to stand up to the actual government so that we can pool our resources against them? Because right now our government WORSHIPS the ultra-wealthy and their pet companies. Hell, they so much as sneeze funny and the government is running to them throwing money bags at them. Meanwhile, the people as a whole could be starving in the street and they'd just be told
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Do the people have to form a separate government that's large enough to stand up to the actual government
Yes, its called a trade union.
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Do the people have to form a separate government that's large enough to stand up to the actual government
Yes, its called a trade union.
Trade unions typically encompass one trade, correct? That's not going to even stand up to some of the minor players that are lobbying today. We need a whole coalition of "the people" which is gonna be real hard to do when some literally believe that others are possessed by Lucifer himself and anyone that disagrees with them is a pedophile that should really stop throwing around so much hateful rhetoric.
God damn, what a mess we are.
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That coalition could be called "the labour movement". They could even have a political party, or at least have a great deal of influence over the political parties.
In countries that haven't decimated their labour movement, rallies and national strikes actually have the power to change government policy.
That power doesn't exist in North America anymore. Once that power is gone, it is very hard to get it back. It is especially hard when the very people who would benefit the most from organised labour have bee
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And so will free services like Google, GPS navigation, YouTube, news sites, and everything else that's now "free" will no longer be free, or will disappear altogether.
Re:User tracking is the root of all evil (Score:5, Informative)
And so will free services like Google, GPS navigation, YouTube, news sites, and everything else that's now "free" will no longer be free, or will disappear altogether.
Consumer are adults (or many are or should be) and can decide in the free marketplace how to consider trade-offs for costs and services. The problem is that tracking is done surreptitiously, so the free marketplace is not free because the true costs are intentionally hidden. If consumers are fine with trading off privacy for free services, so let it be. However, this is not what is currently happening.
Re:User tracking is the root of all evil (Score:5, Interesting)
I couldn't agree more with your posting. The market is perfectly capable of taming this- but that DOES require clear, prominent, and full disclosure prior to purchase/enrollment/whatever. That is what is not happening. Not even close. A click-through EULA full of jargon is not going to do it. And the time to find out is not AFTER buying something.
With the TV example, I wonder how many consumers will select one that has a large mandatory warning on the box and marketing materials that says something like:
"Notice: This device can collect private information about you and transmit it to the manufacturer and third parties"
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Oh, we all know we're being tracked, and that is how Big Tech pays for the stuff they give us for "free." And we all do it anyway. The minute facebook or Google decides to start charging a subscription in exchange for not tracking you, guess what people will do...they'll go somewhere else that's free (and tracked).
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And so will free services like Google, GPS navigation, YouTube, news sites, and everything else that's now "free" will no longer be free, or will disappear altogether.
Consumer are adults (or many are or should be) and can decide in the free marketplace how to consider trade-offs for costs and services. The problem is that tracking is done surreptitiously, so the free marketplace is not free because the true costs are intentionally hidden. If consumers are fine with trading off privacy for free services, so let it be. However, this is not what is currently happening.
Well, it's not just that the costs are hidden, but the transactions themselves are hidden.
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...free services like Google, GPS navigation, YouTube, news sites...
The GPS satellite network was paid for with my tax dollars already, and my Garmin has lifetime maps paid for as part of the purchase price.
Also there's the OpenStreetMap project. Not seeing why a company deserves to spy on me and my travels 24/7 for maps they update twice a year at best.
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I've had a Garmin, and there's NO way I'm going back to it. Google Navigation is an order of magnitude better.
If Garmin or OSM is good enough for you, then you do you. Personally, I'll happily give away my so-called, non-existent privacy, in exchange for the high quality work Google has put into their GPS navigation. Nobody else even comes close.
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As per usual now, banning tracking will fix it. Take away the profit motive and the surveillance will vanish.
Just a nitpick, taking away the profit motive is the correct idea, but that requires a financial penalty and not just a nebulous banning.
Alternative, maybe tracking can be allowed, but there needs to be a requirement for a flashing red light on top of the TV, along with a $1 penalty for every tracking token saved without the red light.
Re:User tracking is the root of all evil (Score:4, Insightful)
Take away the profit motive and the surveillance will vanish.
You're saying the problem is tracking but the fix is removing profit motive. Doesn't that mean that the profit motive is the real problem?
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Perhaps, but it is easier to outlaw a specific business practice than it is to completely change the world's current economic system.
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Perhaps, but it is easier to outlaw a specific business practice than it is to completely change the world's current economic system.
It's also a different subject entirely.
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As per usual now, banning tracking will fix it. Take away the profit motive and the surveillance will vanish.
No it won't. The tracking will stay even without a profit motive. 'They' want to know everything about you so they can use against it you later. Who this mysterious 'they' is? No fucking idea, as expected and designed.
"Privacy Nightmare" (Score:2, Flamebait)
Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers have resulted in connected TVs (CTVs) being a "privacy nightmare," [...]
And the manufacturers of these "CTVs" are privacy rapists.
Metrics? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have yet to see anything to convince me that the huge value placed on invading privacy and harvesting personal data is actually backed up be increased sales. I keep seeing it as an 'emperor's new clothes' scenario wherein companies are paying lots of money to harvest the data because 'everyone else is doing it so it must be profitable'.
I could easily be wrong, and I'd love to see hard data one way or the other. In the absence of that, I'm assuming that the whole market for personal data is kind of like that for NFTs. The so-called 'value' is consensual rather than inherent - rather like the value of NFT's, Ponzi schemes, etc.
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Re:Metrics? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no idea if I buy things that are advertised to me or not, because I completely block out ads (on the rare occasions I can't fast forward through them, and I don't watch much programming that won't let me do that).
I literally have no idea.
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It's not just ads which are easily blocked though, it's stuff like paid reviews and product placement.
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Same here. I never buy things that I see ads for. Honestly, I'm more likely to actively avoid a product or service with ads that annoy me than I am to try it out.
Damn right. To this day I refuse to buy Crest (recognized by the ADA) or Colgate (daddy daddy I only had one).
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Re:Metrics? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd rather see the companies criminally prosecuted for violating wire tap laws in all-party consent states. Yeah, the person who buys the set agrees to it, but nobody else in the house does, and they all have an expectation of privacy.
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I have yet to see anything to convince me that the huge value placed on invading privacy and harvesting personal data is actually backed up be increased sales. I keep seeing it as an 'emperor's new clothes' scenario wherein companies are paying lots of money to harvest the data because 'everyone else is doing it so it must be profitable'.
I could easily be wrong, and I'd love to see hard data one way or the other. In the absence of that, I'm assuming that the whole market for personal data is kind of like that for NFTs. The so-called 'value' is consensual rather than inherent - rather like the value of NFT's, Ponzi schemes, etc.
The privacy/ad companies provide their clients the evidence that their marketing dollars lead to sales. Of course, those numbers are necessarily opaque and completely dependent on software and data controlled by the privacy/ad companies. In a strange way, many of the clients don't care about effectiveness. The client marketing dollars are controlled by the marketing folks, and if they don't spend the marketing dollars and promote their effectiveness, they'll soon be out of a job. So, there is a symbiosi
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And from the advertiser's perspective, the math is very simple: there's lots of hard data that marketing campaigns work in general, they can literally measure increase in sales in response to particular campaigns. And basic targeted advertising - which functionally relies on said data - means they can advertise only to the p
And in things we already knew! (Score:2)
I don't know I kind of like them (Score:5, Informative)
So I get super cheap TVs and none of the advertising or weird privacy issues.
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Same. It's somewhat satisfying that every time I turn on my samsung a registration/whatever screen pops up for a few seconds because the thing has never been connected to a network and has never leaked a byte of data to anyone, anywhere. It cries to phone home and tag everything I ever do on behalf of whomever samsung collects kickbacks from, and their little scheme has somehow failed. Aww.
I will admit having a boot up sequence (Score:2)
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Amazing that still works. How much longer will it last?
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We can have both cheap TVs (yep, even smart TVs if you want), and our privacy, they're not mutually exclusive. And we should be fighting for exactly that; if not by voting with our wallets (because let's face it, when have boycotts
Non-Smart TVs? (Score:3)
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Here I can find a few models non-smart from white labels, sold below 150 €. I have one, currently sold new 85 €. Someone on slashdot once mentioned that for that price the image quality is not good. I never noticed, but I don't watch movies and for news/talk shows it does the job.
Re:Non-Smart TVs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why get a TV at all? You actually want to watch broadcast channels? Get an oversized video monitor that just displays HDMI input. Those aren't so hard to find. You can then hook in video sources that are much easier to control. Problem solved.
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"Personally I have never seen a 75" computer monitor. "
I'm not looking for anything nearly that huge. I wouldn't have any place to put it, anyways.
"Then you still need to pay for some sort of streaming box and/or digital tuner, if you want to actually use it to consume media"
No, you don'r. There are *lots* of other ways to consume media. Doing it through your home computer is probably the best way to keep control of it.
Personally, I still have my old Sony dumb Trinitron flatscreen TV; it's served me for
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>"Are there any TV's currently manufactured that are not "Smart"
Does it matter? Just don't connect it to the Internet and use it as a display, like I do. You might want to connect it once, via wire, just to set up and install new firmware then disconnect it. But the firmware updates are usually just 99.9% about the streaming crap, so it isn't like it will matter.
Then connect the content devices you choose and want to use to display content- things that are mostly or totally under your control. Even s
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They could start putting cell and/or satellite comms in them like the car manufacturers. Then the only option would be putting a Faraday cage around your living room. Or physically removing the networking component, but I imagine they'd design it in such a way that it bricks the device.
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People told me YouTube couldn't ever circumvent adblockers. Until suddenly, years later, they did.
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Are there any TV's currently manufactured that are not "Smart"
Yes [amazon.com]
Don't buy a "TV" (Score:2)
Get a "digital signage display".
Yes, you'll probably pay a bit more.
Yes (Score:2)
Are there any TV's currently manufactured that are not "Smart".
I've mentioned this brand here before, but Sceptre offers "dumb" TV devices. I have absolutely no affiliation with the company, but I'm happy with the one I purchased relatively recently, which works exactly as expected.
Re:Non-Smart TVs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Are there any TV's currently manufactured that are not "Smart". My 10 year old Sharp has some "smart" features, like color balancing but nothing that needs an internet connection, although it has the ability to connect to the WiFi if you want to check for firmware updates, but I only connected once when first setting up the TV and downloaded the newest firmware, then disconnected it. Since it still works, I'm loath to upgrade to a better one (OLED) after reading all the recent articles about the new TVs.
On my LGs, I never accepted their privacy policy so they're "punishing me" by not offering me any smart services. That's okay, my non-roofieing (hello Louis Rossman) Apple TV does all that for me.
Kind of like computers and cellphones (Score:2)
And pretty much every other kind of electronic device these days, which is just about everything.
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We need some good solid class action lawsuits to spank ordinary consumer product companies into Chapter 11 to send a message.
One shouldn't need a computer science degree to use a fridge, toaster, or wall TV out of the box. Nor should it require an internet connection to do its advertised job. And features that do need internet should require a big swollen asterisk. (I like big asterisks and I cannot lie.)
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Many of us just don't care as much as you seem to. We accept advertising as a fact of life. This trend started with "free" newspapers and radio programming, then TV, then everything. We learn how to block marketers by not answering our phones, using ad blockers, and just putting up with it. It's annoying, but (for many of us) doesn't rise to the level of a crime.
As for the required internet connections, this is a problem for the free market to solve. My refrigerator and toaster don't have an internet connec
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Thanks to oligopolies, most don't have a practical choice. There may be only 3 viable companies in any category, and they ALL snoop. If you want a product in that category, your choice is Snooper 1, Snooper 2, or Snooper 3.
My fridge does NOT need fucking ads.
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Snooping and tracking started a LONG time before your oligopolies. They were doing it back in the 1970s when I was a kid.
My fridge doesn't have ads. Does yours?
Your computer, cellphone, and TV, on the other hand do. TV has had ads since it was invented. They've got to make money somehow.
I'm as annoyed as anyone by the ads, but I've learned how to ignore them. You might be a lot less stressed if you did the same.
Raspberry Pi as my smart TV (Score:5, Informative)
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I have the PI 3, but found its 1GB of RAM insufficient to run a desktop. I opted instead for a used HP thin client for ~$100, e.g., Core i5 16GB RAM, Win10.
Either way, there's no reason to run the TV's OS when you can easily run your own and do exactly the same thing.
Seriously (Score:1)
Like that Samsung tv I bought (Score:4, Informative)
No ads when I bought it, but to continue to receive security updates and streaming service app updates a year later, I had to agree to Samsung putting ads in the main UI.
Re:Like that Samsung tv I bought (Score:4, Insightful)
You hooked it up to the internet? On purpose?
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You hooked it up to the internet? On purpose?
The problem there is that smart TVs have been caught before connecting to any open WiFi to upload to the mothership and download ads. So even if you deliberately not connect it to the internet, it might just try to connect itself.
Also I've heard reports of some TVs refusing to work until they're connected.
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There's no open WiFi anywhere near me. If there were, war drivers would undoubtedly drag it out behind the barn and sodomize it to death in short order.
And I'm certainly not giving a TV my password.
Also I've heard reports of some TVs refusing to work until they're connected.
If the sales droid lies to me about that, I'll return the TV, and dispute the charge if they refuse to refund it.
ATSC 3.0 (Score:1)
Re: ATSC 3.0 (Score:2)
Then can we finally call them Telescreens?
Re: ATSC 3.0 (Score:2)
If they record audio/video of what happens in your house and send it to the Big Brother, then yes, you can, citizen.
Your next TV will probably qualify as a full-fledged telescreen. You don't commit crimethink at home, do you?
Not really... (Score:2)
They'll have to find a better metaphor to really convince the FTC. For now, it looks like the spy-TV companies are safe from the FTC.
Semi-Old Saying (Score:2)
"Anything 'Smart x' will leave you, your x, and your ex smarting."
Not built for networking (Score:2)
I was surprised when Samsung (and other brands) began including a Netflix button. A quick use of a modern tv. causes a perplexing conclusion. They are really slow and not built for networking. I didn't think about that until recently.
Netflix compatibility wasn't a selling-point and only a minor revenue stream. The addition of a microphone and internet-enabled voice-recognition is more than a futuristic upgrade. Its purpose is encouraging people to connect their tv. to the internet and allowing the m
tv stalking you (Score:2)
"I have nothing to hide" (Score:2)
Why should I worry about this? I have nothing to hide.
This is what I get when talking to friends about this.
Nobody - except us Slashdotters - seems to care.
It's very frustrating.
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That argument, as moronic as you say it is, is actually evil. It is on par with "those who aren't with us are against us".
It's like people being okay with their phones spying on them, they take it for granted and they can't live without a phone so they have to eat shit.
Or like surveillance in general, saying that we* have to and we* should have the right to spy on your private phone calls because you know, they can be used to commit crimes... It's not that far from saying that everyone must have a recording