Smart TVs are spying on everyone Smart TVs are watching their viewers and harvesting their data to benefit brokers using the same ad technology that denies privacy on the internet. In a report titled "How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era," the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) outlines the expansive "commercial surveillance system …
I could tell you how to hack the fire stick so you can watch whatever you want l. But that would be illegal
So instead just go ahead, put the stick in developer mode, install downloader from the App store and then look for a guide on installing Kodi on YouTube.
>Or do the new ones automatically connect to any open network they can find?
I don't believe so (that would probably be a step too far for even Smart TV manufacturers - or am I too optimistic?) but I have heard that some models are now obscuring the screen with obnoxious "Finish setting up your TV now!" (or equivalent) pop-ups until they're connected.
>Or do the new ones automatically connect to any open network they can find?
Per an article somewhere here on The Reg several years ago, Samsung smart TVs will not only try to find an open network, they will search for other Samsung TVs (i.e. your neighbor's) that are connected to the network
I suppose I shouldn't do *pikachu shocked face* GIF, but seriously, effectively backdooring and breaking into another network for convenience is beyond the pale.
My TV is a 720p LG with no smart features. I do plan to go 4K once other life stuff is sorted, but it looks like I'm going to have to be *very* careful about which one I choose. Currently I use either a FireTV (which I'm sure is tracking me to the hilt) or a Playstation 3, a really good way to watch Blurays or work as a broadcast DVR.
The FireTV does support 4K so I'll just connect that to a new TV, and ensure there's a model where I can disable wireless or it has a network port (the latter is probably a forelorn hope).
I have an (older) Samsung. It auto-updates, which is frustrating, but I believe it's so old it can't run the latest (adware) OS. Which is good. Now that I have an Amazon stick, I may just set my router to block the Samsung from accessing the web entirely.
The next "TV" I get is going to be a display, hooked to a computer running one of the open source media player OS's. It only gets used for watching streaming stuff and local video files anyway. Haven't looked at OTA TV for ages. Not a sports fan, so that saves me a good deal of $
"Per an article somewhere here on The Reg several years ago, Samsung smart TVs will not only try to find an open network, they will search for other Samsung TVs (i.e. your neighbor's) that are connected to the network"
Rubbish.
I hate Samsung with a passion and I would be the first to give them a kicking for their anti-privacy shenanigans, but you can skip the setup and refuse the T&Cs then they just function as a dumb screen. They do prompt you to complete setup if you accidentally try to access any of the smart features e.g. pressing the Home button, but as long as you leave the Samsung remote in the box and use the remote from whatever source is attached to it (after doing initial picture/sound setup) then you're fine.
One thing worth mentioning is that you only need to connect a Samsung TV to the internet once to be thoroughly screwed. They immediately download the ad bar and a cache of suitable ads, then even if you disconnect and block it, it'll just continue to cycle through the ads it's downloaded. The only way to avoid this is to never, ever connect it to the Internet and reject the T&Cs.
[quote]Rubbish.
I hate Samsung with a passion and I would be the first to give them a kicking for their anti-privacy shenanigans, but you can skip the setup and refuse the T&Cs then they just function as a dumb screen. They do prompt you to complete setup if you accidentally try to access any of the smart features e.g. pressing the Home button, but as long as you leave the Samsung remote in the box and use the remote from whatever source is attached to it (after doing initial picture/sound setup) then you're fine.
One thing worth mentioning is that you only need to connect a Samsung TV to the internet once to be thoroughly screwed. They immediately download the ad bar and a cache of suitable ads, then even if you disconnect and block it, it'll just continue to cycle through the ads it's downloaded. The only way to avoid this is to never, ever connect it to the Internet and reject the T&Cs."/[quote]
Now try doing that with an LG. I migrated from my "old" but perfectly functional Panny VT50 plasma to an LG G2 last Jan. I couldn't complete the initial setup from power-on without accpting T&Cs and a network connection. The dealer couldnt help, and an email from LG was essentially "you must connect to the network".
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You might not be able to complete setup, but are you sure you can't watch TV or an HDMI source anyway without completing?
In Europe at least, it's required by law to give the customer ample opportunity to read and understand terms and conditions of use before being committed to purchase. IIf ads are mandatory to use, they must say this at point of sale, or give the customer the opportunity to undo the purchase contract once the T&Cs have been read and understood. Meaning: if you bought a TV based on the published specs and then were forced to accept previously undisclosed T&Cs before being able to use it in any way, that is a click-wrap contract in law and you can return the product for a full refund if you do not agree.
What Samsung do is allow you to use the TV as a TV/monitor, but apply the advertising conditions to the 'Smart' component of the product. Meaning you can watch OTA channels or connect and watch a source through HDMI without accepting any T&Cs, but you do have to accept them to use the built in Smart Hub & apps.
Personally I think they're still on dodgy legal ground doing this but as all I want is a dumb TV anyway, it works for me.
Good advice but readers of el-reg are at an advantage:
• They are aware that their TV is spying on them
• They are technically capable of blocking it at their firewall
Manufacturers do not worry about losing the small numbers of technically aware users - they will make plenty of $£ from the rest of them.
It will get old...i've been clicking Exit after power-on every day for over two years...
I'm brave enough to open up the tv, but I don't know how to overwrite Tizen with generic Android.
Does anyone know of a site that specializes in modding samsung smart tvs?
I have a 'smart' TV that is constantly trying to insert itself into our home network to complete its duty to make itself the new communications hub. And I am likewise, endlessly endeavouring to prevent that from happening, It wants speech imput recognised and 'needs' my Social Media' passwords. completely ignoring the basic fact that I don't have any.
Unfortunately, during my brief absence from home, a family made the decision to indulge it and answered some of it's demands. I erased all that as soon as I got back and reset to back to dumb.
I soon knew who the guilty party was by their sudden sharp uplist in their junk mails, 'Serves them right', said me, as I congratulated myself from keeping my own credentials secret even from my own family.
It is not networked, or so I thought, as I discovered an undocumented Wi-Fi connection. Now, I know it is isolated, as it has stopped trying to override my wishes, and I am, mercifully, still relatively free from junk mails and the like.
No, they don't, but give them enough time and a customer base that firewalls the tv from the internet and they'll start installing cellular modems in the tvs so that they can collect data without 'your' internet connection...just like a new car.
I have a 50" samsung smart tv connected to my computer, and every time I power it on, it prompts me to accept the ToS...which I don't ever plan to do...because I use it as a 4k monitor and nothing else.
Also, I've had Tubi installed on my smart tv for over 8 years and I've never bought anything that was advertised at me. I also fall asleep to whatever's playing, so the fact that Tube streamed (in the past) 7 additional movies at me, with ads, I never saw them, and their analytics is polluted by whatever bullshit movies they showed.
Seems kinda silly to worry about your viewing habits being tracked in light of the tracking smart phones do while you go about your day.
But you can always buy a monitor and stick to your own content, with NO advertising or tracking. Of course if you plug a Roku or Firestick into it you've just turned it into a "smart" TV.
that some if not most smart tvs periodically demand an IP connection, to phone home for updates, etc.
The trend to watch out for is: were I a smartTV maker and looking for ways to improve my data collection, I'd be asking my dev guys if the connection couldn't be mandated as persistent. And maybe add in some voice recognition tech so as to justify a microphone. crap.
I have an ancient dvd player from LG that has been retired, so it's free and clear of such whining. But that puts you on the trailing edge of technology and products.
Maybe. Maybe not. The ones you remember from years ago are the very few memorable ones from the 100's or 1000's of others that you also saw. It's the same today. Most of the ads are highly forgettable dross with the odd amusing "gem" mixed in. The real question is, do you remember the product being advertised? I can think of a few where I remember the advert because it was funny or clever but have no clue what product it was targetting :-)
Heineken - follow the bear
Skol - stupid englishen touristen
Fairy Liquid - still the same, little boy waiting for the bottle to run out
Hamlet - Carlos Fandango extra wide wheels, Ford Anglia, or MKI Cortina??
Brew XI - Sometimes, you do, sometimes, you Brew
I wasn't old enough to drink, drive, or smoke, although the combination of all three was common at the time.
The banning of tobacco, and alcohol advertising, especially in sport, was a sad day.
Now it's all soy boys, and avocado on toast eating puritans, *sigh*
Yes they do. They don't get any eyeball time if you don't watch the commercials, and if you can't decide what to watch, you won't see any commercials (unless you are an idiot who doesn't click cancel when the ads play during your scroll through the available content.)
I'm not sure what info they would glean from your ad view during your content search...
Only way I could see that working is having shows on Tubi that have e.g. a TV playing an ad in the background during a quiet moment in a scene and they play a different ad depending on who is paying for it.
Though I imagine they're waiting for the day when AI could swap the water bottle a character is holding for a Coke or a Pepsi, or have them driving a Lexus or a Mercedes, by live editing of what is getting displayed to you.
> Only way I could see that working
Er, no. They will actually make program-length ads, where the whole plot is about/around specific products. Or whole series where people using a specific product are always more beautiful, successful and happy...
Well, I'll be watching my gloriously dumb Sony until it dies.
This enshitificatio of everything is seriously bloody out of control. I believe some TVs won't let you use them unless you agree to all the tracking. How's that for "informed consent"?!
Cars are out of control too, sending all sorts of telemetry to the mother ship, from where it's siphoned off to scumbag advertisers.
And the mega corps wonder why we hate them so much.
Well, according to the advertising the TV channels currently throw at us here, apparently we're incontinent pensioners requiring artificial aid to climb stairs, addicted to online gambling, and in desperate need of alcohol free beer... oh, and they'd prefer it if we did our supermarket shopping in, er, supermarkets.
My allegedly 'smart' TV is emphatically not connected to anything (and flashes its little red light in a most endearing way every now and then, when I assume it's trying to phone home) but the supplier's box obviously knows what we're watching and as it's all over IP anyway, there's not a lot we can do there. But any new TV that requires/insists on access itself will be going straight back to the shop as not fit for purpose.
Ad for the AA... It seems to be repeated almost every Ad break on some channels such as DMAX and QUEST.
Enough already. Every showing (that I fail to skip over) has made me even more determined to NEVER EVER even consider joining the AA..
The AA and their Ad agency can go suck on this [see icon]
"I see endless life insurance & funeral plan adverts...Should I be worried?"
Ignoring the excellent first response from some AC, this is because the data (eg Ofcom) is clear that people over 65 are believed to be drooling idiots who spend a staggering 6.5 hours every day in front of the TV, meaning that the post-65 group are disproportionate and undiscriminating consumers of TV. So for programme makers, why bother making anything good then the audience are codgers who'll watch anything, and for advertisers, just fill the breaks with ads for funeral plans, incontinence pads, Wind-eze, expensive cruises, and the like. And for ad-slingers, why waste time and effort on analysis and targeting when you already know who wants to place ads.
I don't know if anyone has looked for a causative link between TV watching and dementia?
it's the usual "vote with your wallet" thing.
Unfortunately not many people care/bother to return a TV if some of the 'features' are not correctly disclosed on the box.
I managed to buy one of the last spyware-free Philips for parents, when time will come to get one for myself I will have to find a tradeoff between convenience and 'not having a TV'
Yeah, I think that's pretty much it. I wonder how many people actually use, or only use, over the air broadcasts via an aerial these days? I can't even remember when my TV aerial stopped working because the co-ax snapped in the wind. I'd not had the aerial plugged for a long time before that happened and it must be a good few years since I first noticed the wire flapping in the wind. The current TV has only ever been a display device and never had any "smart" features anyway. The BluRay player has some "smart" features, but I bought that 2nd hand when it was a year or 3 old and half of them didn't work anyway so the network cable got pulled and never reconnected.
I've been running PiHole at home with considerable success, there are loads of great adlists you can find to add to the block list.
The PiHole has some good information, including the shocking stats of around 20-30% of network traffic being given over to advertising/shitslinging non content, but being blocked.
That metric of network traffic alters and goes up considerably when my kids get home and all the usual suspects on social media are being hammered!
The problem with the Pi-hole approach is that many smart TV's now have hard baked DNS settings which ignore whatever your network sets as the DNS server.
Its not impossible to get around this but requires extra steps that a none technical end user will probably find difficult. On my Firestick i had to install the Intra app and then that allowed it to intercept all the DNS queries and send them to my Adguard installation.
By default it just sets up DNS, you then have to either manually update your device settings to use the Pi-holes DNS, or update your router/modem DHCP to use the Pi-Holes IP as the DNS, assuming you can even change that setting, which often you can't if it was supplied by your ISP. (Or of course manage DHCP with something else you can change yourself).
But the Pi-hole does come with it's own DHCP service built in, so you can just enter your desired IP range, set the gateway to the routers IP, then enable DHCP in the Pi-hole and disable it in router, and now you have control.
> can't the system be set up to intercept all DNS traffic regardless of the destination IP?
I assume this would be just a Sunday morning project for professional network administrators, but for normal people this is definitely a bridge too far, and there are about a thousand normal people to each network administrator.
Amen Brother, pass me a piece of Pi!
I was absolutely SHOCKED at how much chatter was my network coming from "smart" devices. Literally over 50% of DNS lookups were coming from Roku and Apple TV devices. That was 24x7, whether they were in use or not! I pulled them off and put them in the bin as quick as I could.
For streaming.... Web browsers in Mac Mini's. The "smart TV's" rotate between HDMI 1 (Mac Mini) and HDMI 2 (Blu-ray). They are not permitted to do anything else, and they sure the hell aren't on any network.
Seriously.... If you are a techie worthy of reading The Register, you should immediately look in to deploying a PiHole. Doesn't even need to run on a current Pi model, I think mine is ~5 years old now.
Been running a pair of pi-holes for years now, they "just work". A couple of years after being bereaved it suddenly occurred to me that I had completely forgotten about them being on my network, so finally logged in and ran some updates. Rather like systems that just sit there doing what they do. The only thing that I found in the early days was that I needed a pair of them, firstly to offer the router primary and secondary DNS servers, secondly because I found that a single pi-hole would lock up about once a week. That took out my entire home internet so had to be fixed, hence running a pair. Looking at the logs shows that one pi-hole will do all the heavy lifting for a while, then things flip-flop to the other one one. No idea why.
"I've been running PiHole at home with considerable success, there are loads of great adlists you can find to add to the block list."
I'm curious about PiHole. I get the ad blocking, but is there any "fallout" with online services not working properly or being inaccessible? Eg when online shopping or banking etc? My wife is VERY non-techy and if her Amazon/EBay/Temu, etc habit was affected, I'd have to know I could easily show her how to disable/turn off/by-pass whatever is blocking her, temporarily at least.
I've never had an issue with it blocking something I needed. I have pretty much just left mine alone doing its thing for ages now, probably should log in and update it really. There are also options on the admin page to pause operations for a set time or just turn it off.
For the cost, it is worth setting one up and just moving a few devices over at a time, rather than pointing your existing router at it. For mobile devices this probably means deleting the current wifi connection and then when you reconnect it you click advanced so that you can put the PiHole as the Gateway IP.
Linus Tech Tips (LTT) did a decent intro/setup video a few years back which should still be relevant.
Or plug in a USB drive and you can pause \ rewind \ replay live TV, at least on my LG. Start watching a programme then at the first ad break hit the Pause button and wander off and do something useful for a while before coming back to finish watching while skipping the ads. That said, they don't make it easy. On the LG the best I can do is 16x FF through the ads, while my old Humax satellite box also has skip forward and back buttons. Skip forward jumps about 3 minutes a press (easy multiples of UK ad breaks) while going back is about 30 seconds, thus making it a breeze to jump past ad breaks and then hop back to the start of the next section of the programme. So useful is this functionality that I believe that certain vested interests made sure that it was removed from all later equipment across the industry, after all skipping ads is theft right? I also refer you to the fact that all satellite boxes after the Humax FoxSat now have their firmware encrypted, cutting us off from the enhanced functionality offered by modders such as Raydon.
Love my Humax box. Two long pushes and bye bye ads.
Ads are sometimes quite creative and fun, so you lose a bit of cultural commentary by not seeing them, *occasionally*. But its having to sit through the same McDonald's ad 25 times an hour on most catchup services that *really* pisses me off. I mean, come on, put 2 and 2 together and get at least 3. The country is supposedly falling apart because of ill health and economic inactivity and no one thinks that is part of the problem?
I haven't watched broadcast (or cable, or satellite) TV in years. Not only the excessive advertising, but the content is simply garbage designed to draw in the viewer and subjugate them.
Back in the WFO days a decade ago, co-workers loved to talk about who is going to win the <currently popular reality TV show>. I would laugh because I don't know what they are talking about. I have a life, in the real world, that is not controlled by what time a TV show is on the air. It simply did not compute for them, they could not understand why I wasn't also addicted.
As for the daily news... It is all biased and manipulative. Which brand of news do you want? Trust me, if something big happens, I will hear about it without the news station telling me about it.
Seriously folks, unplug the damn box and start living life again.
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I'm half with you. I don't feel the need to consume the low grade soaps/game/reality shows. But I do like the small (getting smaller) selection of well crafted stuff that the national broadcasters make. Unfortunately the streaming services have flooded the market with so much absolute shit that all production standards are getting dragged down to their level to compete.
Remarkably, Google TV OS is the solution here.
During setup, you can select “basic TV” which turns all of so-called “smart” features off. It still asks to connect to a WiFi network, but you can skip that step as well, because no one needs “security updates” when it’s just in display monitor mode.
I thought this was too good to be true, but when my trusty 12+ year old Panasonic went pop (literally) over the weekend, I chose this option as all my content is managed by other devices over HDMI. Thankfully it does actually work.
Thanks for that - I'm due to take my parents out later on today to help them choose a replacement TV.
I want something that isn't going to be overly complex to use as they just use a PVR (and it's catchup services) to watch and stream (and a sound system for decent audio).
Unless they are using DoH to allegedly 'protect your security and privacy'.
Anyone else notice how browsers (looking at you Google) have pitched DNS over HTTPS (DoH) as protection against evil spying ISPs, when in reality they are locking the browser in to their DNS server?
It would be trivial for the SmartTV vendor to bake in some hard coded private DoH servers and avoid local DNS controls completely. Then you need to do some packet capture & analysis to figure out who they are actually talking to and specifically block those IP's. Granted, that would probably break all the SmartTV functionality....in which case, what is the point?
since were all IT literate here ......
use the smart tv as a dumb hdmi port, and ...
1) get an old pi2 and add this card to it ... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Melopero-Raspberry-DVB-TV-uHAT/dp/B07JKH36VR/
2) install tvheadend on to it, easy to configure for freeview
3) get the cheapest google tv with chromecast, put it into app mode only and install kodi and https://trackercontrol.org/
4) configure kodi with tvheadend addon and go straight to it, disabling everything else in kodi
Plus... if you install tailscale or zerotier on the tvheadend pi can watch your tv from anywhere where kodi/tailscale/zerotier is also installed
Happy days for the self informed
PS Iciing on the cake... sideload https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube for add free utube!
You overcomplicated that by about a dozen steps.
I use a Pi with DVB-T (and a USB DVB-S for FreeSat) with tvHeadend. (In fact I have two Pis with DVB-T hats, and they talk to each over via Sat>IP).
That's it. I set the recording. It records to MP4. I watch the recording at my convenience (often editing out the adverts if I think I want to keep the file).
The Pi doesn't even have a display. It doesn't need it. I have a laptop / projector / whatever.
You can also do the same with Plex - PlexTV is basically plugging in a DVB into your Pi running Plex and it'll do the full live-viewing and recording experience in one hit.
I have two. The standard HDHomeRun software is adequate, but a bit basic and fiddly. You can set up VLC to use the hardware, but without a programming guide. I went against my cheapskate principles and downloaded the Channels DVR recorder software from getchannels.com - It costs US$80 a year and I find it well worth it because of their version of comskip. Most adverts are skipped. I usually run it on a Raspberry Pi, but occasionally on an Apple iMac. The main TV has an AppleTV as the Channels client, but another (or even the same) Raspberry Pi can be connected to the TV's HDMI. If I could be bothered, it looks feasible to pay SiliconDust US$35/year for their recorder software, set up HDHomerun with ffmpeg and comskip - Probably easy if you use a Windows PC as the recorder (I'm retired and don't use Windows anymore), it looks as though comskip probably has to be downloaded and compiled from source for Linux.
I personally use Adguard within OPNsense on an old Dell mini PC as my router/firewall and the amount of data I stopped calling home is staggering.
Not when 'smart' TVs are doing stuff like this-
The following year, the agency settled with CTV maker Vizio for $2.2 million over allegations that its smart TVs "capture second-by-second information".
Unless they're doing some local processing, that's going to generate a lot of data. Especially if the 'smart' TV also includes a camera and mic to make video calling or voice activation 'more convenient'. And then-
.. AI-based ad targeting that "analyzes a scene's text, images, and sentiment, determines an emotional score, and then places ads with a similar emotional score."
Where 'scene' = your living room, bedroom and it can capture 'suprised pikachu face' so the AI ad-slingers can try and sell you lube, recommend divorce lawyers etc. And this is getting ever harder to avoid when PC monitors also include those 'features', and it's getting ever harder to find dumb monitors that don't include all that carp. Ironically some of the safest are probably the monitors used to display ads in stores, shopping malls etc.
If the above comments are true regarding amazon Ring -style mesh networking to use your neighbour's connected connected-TV to piggyback on their Internet if yours isn't connected, then firewalling it or even unplugging it and/or changing your WiFi PSK isn't going to work. You need a screwdriver and a keen eye for PCB antennas. But don't trip the tamper alarm or else the battery backed up wifi chip will dob you in to big brother for interfering with your telescreen
Our TV has each and every tracker company's permissions set separately- some with more than one switch. There are pages and pages of these. It'd take hours to turn them all off.
There's no "select all" or "reject all" button. But there's a button you could easily click on by accident that turns them all on again.
Bastards.
(I think it's a Samsung but I'm sure they're all at it).
If you want to watch the latest USA "series" it's going to be on one of the internet connected channels. Can't stick 'em myself. Just the way they all speak in 3 and 4 word phrases with weird stresses in a kind of artificial breathy voice just irritates me too much. But I'm outvoted on this one
Or "mumble-fest"+, as I call it. You can tell it's bad when you have to use the subtitles to follow the dialog and/or stop your ears being blown off when the "background sound"* picks up.
+ Makes it more dramatic, I'm told.
* I always thought the dialog was supposed to be louder, but that's often not the case.
I wish they could broadcast the dialogue on a separate sub-channel, so that it could be turned up easily by the viewer (with a default level set by the TV producer) with others for SFX, Music etc. They already broadcast in 12.1 channel audio or whatever, they have plenty of bandwidth to do it.
I have one Samsung TV. It was the first I purchased when doing the fun/party room. It wants me to agree to Terms & Conditions immediately on power-up. I refuse to do so, and the screen goes away after a few seconds. Stays on HDMI1 after that.
Pissed me off so much, the remaining four TVs are all LG. They do not prompt for a T&C just to display input on HDMI1. No more money for Samsung!
For years I insisted on a dumb TV.
Now I wouldn't use anything else.
In fact, I scrapped my TV and I use a dumb projector for movies, and my laptop (with a sizeable screen) for anything else.
As far as I'm concerned a TV should be a monitor and nothing more. I'll pull content from whatever I like, I don't need it built into the TV and don't want it - it means that the TV has an obsoletion date attached to it and.... well... it's a display screen. Why should it?
The trend towards Sky Glass / Amazon Fire TV (as in the physical TV they sell) isn't for me. I'm not interested in branding my display screen, nor locking myself into content, no removing the ability to show whatever I want on the thing without question.
Increasingly, I believe that if I do ever want a TV, I'll just buy one of the digital-signage screens or even interactive whiteboards to do so (but even the latter are creeping into full-on giant Android devices).
I do not want a branded, cloud-managed, subscription-based, locked-in faux TV that'll be abandoned in a few years.
I just want a display with an HDMI lead. Nothing more. If I can't get that, then I won't.
Make sure you do not give it any network access, even for "updates". The SmartTV's generate significant outbound network traffic even when simply displaying HDMI port 1. My guess is they are capturing screen shots so the TV vendor can build a viewer profile against current broadcast content or known movie libraries.
"My guess is they are capturing screen shots"
They may well be sending viewing telemetry, but there's no logic behind sending screenshots. Aside from the horrific privacy implications, it would add little value above the TMDS data and would be hugely data-intensive. In Europe at least, they can't send telemetry without explicit user consent; so reject the T&Cs and nothing should get sent.
Assuming they're complying with the law, which admittedly is an assumption but if they're full-on breaking the law then that's another kettle of Koreans.
I wouldn't be whatsoever surprised if they were sending not only screenshots (at least when the "content classifier" says "unknown/suspect"), but also the image from the camera embedded in most "Smart TVs" (What do you mean, you don't use your TV for video calls or switch channels by gesture control??) along with facial expression / attention / voice analysis from whatever programme (Gogglebox, was it?), advert, or home-VHS tape connected via SCART cable that you are watching..
In any case, if you think LG/Samsung are dodgy, try a Hisense or Xiaomi TV.. Another 壶鱼 indeed
"...camera embedded in most "Smart TVs""
Such as?
Not a single smart TV in the local bigbox electronics store here has a camera built in (although a couple have the option to connect one by USB).
Besides, they're not sharing screenshots of HDMI data streams. It would violate a large number of some of the strictest laws we have governing privacy; people could be connecting up home security cameras, watching private holiday footage, videos of their children... if a company were caught screenshotting and sending this back to the mothership, they would not only be fined (as in - a "put you out of business" fine) but banned from selling their products in the geographies where this is illegal. They would quite simply go out of business.
Let's agree to stop spreading FUD; smart TVs are bad enough without it.
> Such as?
Such as Samsung?
https://www.samsung.com/in/support/tv-audio-video/using-the-built-in-camera-in-samsung-f-series-smart-tv/
> if a company were caught screenshotting and sending this back to the mothership, they would not only be fined ...
Are you so sure that they couldn't get away with it? Certain jurisdictions are practically *mandating* it. Australia, for example, wants on-device scanning for illegal content. That would include your TV. China? Par for the course..
Microsoft are busy screenshotting everything on your latest Win11 boxes and making statistical models out of it ... All for your own titillation of course, completely secure.. yeah right
So you don't have locks on your doors, curtains or shades on your windows, a cover or tape on your webcam, password on your PC and cell phone, take no precautions in protecting your banking or financial information, have no interest in protecting your medical records, let anyone read your diary, make all your travels and activities public on social media....etc. We all have something to hide!
"And that collected all your details but they only go as anonymous data to whoever collects viewing figures."
Well, until the collected details get hacked. My TV doesn't need to know a ****ing thing about me - any content platform I use would, but the TV itself, nope.
As for viewing figures, the platforms know exactly who's watching what and when, viewing figures refers to the fast-declining world of broadcast content. And in any event, they can do whaat they've always done, make the figures up. If the numbers look vaguely plausible then they'll do.
I mostly switched off years ago. I had a small manufacturing company and the last thing I had time for was TV. I have one in my bedroom, but it's fed from a DVD and a media player. I watch movies on DVD and things I've downloaded (edutainment stuff) and not much of that. I get better movies in my head listening to audiobooks these days over the tripe that's going out.
I replaced the TV with a fish tank which sits on the TV stand now. I boxed up the large one I bought my wife so she could game properly and put it in her car when we parted. Our kids have grown and flown no sign of grandkids.
I did not replace it largely for Scottish Political reasons. I decline to be taxed so the BBC can lie to the nation(s).
I recently reconfirmed to the licensing that I do not require a license. Their system cunningly swaps the last two questions to try and catch you out. So beware.
I honestly do not miss it. I tried Netflix on this laptop but wasn’t very impressed and got bored. That happened twice. There are so many books to read and the net. Twitter is the thief of time too.
I have no intention of going back.
CA aside, which kinda leads the entire nation in privacy protection, stuff at the Federal level isn't going to get implemented as long as Republicans are in power in any branch of government. They only care about businesses making money, regardless of how people get sold down the river to make it.
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