I'm happy to see it. They should have included Roku in that too!
> Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching.
Most likely case is that the tv is computing hash locally and sending the hash. Judging by my dnstap logs, roku TV maintains a steady ~0.1/second heartbeat to `scribe.logs.roku.com` with occasional pings to `captive.roku.com`. The rest are stragglers that are blocked by `*.roku.com` DNS blackhole. Another thing is `api.rokutime.com`, but as of writing it's a CNAME to one of `roku.com` subdomains.
The block rates seem to correlate with watch time increasing to ~1/second, so it's definitely trying to phone home with something. Too bad it can't since all its traffic going outside LAN is dropped with prejudice.
If your network allows to see stuff like that, look into what PS5 is trying to do.
If you're tracking packets can't you tell by the data size? A 4k image is a lot more data than a hash.
I do suspect you're right since they would want to reduce bandwidth, especially since residential upload speeds are slow but this is pretty close to verifiable, right?
Also just curious, what happens if you block those requests? I can say Samsung TVs really don't like it... but they will be fine if you take them fully offline.
> If you're tracking packets can't you tell by the data size? A 4k image is a lot more data than a hash.
I admit, I've not gotten around to properly dumping that traffic. For anyone wanting to do this, there's also a spike of DNS requests every hour on the hour, even if tv is off(well, asleep). Would be interesting to see those too. Might be a fun NY holiday project right there. Even without decrypting (hopefully) encrypted traffic, it should be verifiable.
> Also just curious, what happens if you block those requests?
Due to `*.roku.com` DNS black hole, roku showed no ads but things like Netflix and YouTube using standard roku apps("channels") worked fine. I now moved on to playing content using nvidia shield and blocking outside traffic completely. Only odd thing is that the TV occasionally keeps blinking and complains about lack of network if I misclick and start something except HDMI input.
Main data comes from unbound[1], I use vector[2] to ship and transform logs. Dnstap[3] log format IME works better than the standard logs, especially when it comes to more complex queries and replies. Undesired queries get 0.0.0.0 as a response which I track.
Besides what others have said, another dead simple option is to use Nextdns: https://nextdns.io
Doesn't require running anything locally and supports various block rules and lists and allows you to enable full log retention if you want. I recommend it to non-techies as the easiest way to get something like pi-hole/dnscrypt-proxy. (but of course not being self-hosted has downsides)
edit: For Roku, DNS blocking like this only works if Roku doesn't use its own resolver. If it's like some Google devices it'll use 8.8.8.8 for DNS resolution ignoring your gateway/DHCP provided DNS server.
I'm a noob at this, but can you do that when it is DoT or DoH? Like I thought the point of them is that you can't forget the DNS request. Even harder with oDoH, right? So does that really get around them?
Replace your router's DNS with something like pi-hole or a bog standard dnsmasq, turn up the logging, that's it. Ubiquiti devices I think also offer detailed DNS logging but not sure.
Hashing might not work since the stream itself would be a variable bitrate, meaning the individual pixels would differ and therefore the computed file hash
That sounds so expensive it's hard to see it making money. You'd processing a 2fps video stream for each customer. That's a huge amount of data.
And all that is for the chance to occasionally detect that someone's seen an ad in the background of a stream? Do any platforms even let a streamer broadcast an NFL game like the example given?
I used to work for an OTT DSP adtech company i.e. a company that bid on TV ad spots in real time. The bidding platform was handling millions of requests per second, and we were one of the smaller fish in the sea. This system is very real. Your tv is watching what you’re watching. I built the attribution pipeline, which is what this is. If you go buy a product from one of these ads, this is how they track (attribute) it. Not to be alarmist butttt you have zero privacy.
The perils of the capitalist system man. For what’s its worth, I left adtech many moons ago specifically because it is a horrifyingly depressing industry and very very not fun to talk about at parties.
I'm glad you got out, but given your vantage point what would you say to those who feel pressured to do these types of jobs? Would you say more "it isn't worth it" or "if you have to... but get out as fast as possible" or something else?
Forgive me, but I'd actually like to hear vrosas's response or someone else with a similar background. I appreciate you trying to answer my question and help try to make me informed, but I don't want to hear speculation, especially the rather obvious ones. That's not helping, it just adds more noise to the conversation and discourages a response by them. We all know money pays the bills, no one needs to hear that. But hey, if that's what they say, then you'll be proven right. So let's wait and find out. I really do want to understand their mentality. I hope you do too because how else do we break the cycle?
The fact that it can be used to "justify" almost anything. It obviously doesn't work as a defense in the court, and neither does it work as a justification for doing legal but unethical things.
It isn't ethically unsound. It's a commons/coordination problem. What is the optimal strategy in infinite-round prisoners dilemma with randomized opponents? The randomization effectively makes it an infinite series of one-round prisoners dilemma. So the best strategy is always to defect.
The only way you can change this is very high social trust, and all of society condemning anyone who ever defects.
It is definitely ethically unsound and it is definitely a common example even related to Nazis. Similar to "just following orders". Which I'll remind everyone, will not save you in a court of law[0]...
You are abdicating your own moral responsibility on the assumption of a deterministic reality.
The literal textbook version of this ethical issue, one you'll find in literally any intro to ethics class is
If I don't do this job then somebody else will. The only difference is that I will not get paid and if I get paid I will do good with that money where as if somebody else gets paid they might not.
Sometimes a variant will be introduced with a direct acknowledgement of like donating 10% of your earnings to charity to "offset" your misgivings (ᶜᵒᵘᵍʰ ᴱᶠᶠᵉᶜᵗᶦᵛᵉ ᴬˡᵗʳᵘᶦˢᵐ ᶜᵒᵘᵍʰ).
But either way, it is you abdicating your personal responsibility and making the assumption that the job will be done regardless. But think about the logic here. If people do not think like you then the employer must then start offering higher wages in order to entice others. As there is some function describing people's individual moral lines and their desire for money. Even if the employer must pay more you are then helping deter that behavior because you are making it harder to implement. Alternatively the other person that does the job might not be as good at the job as you, making the damage done less than had you done the job. It's not hard to see that often this will result in the job not even existing as truthfully these immoral jobs are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Even if you are making the assumption that the job will be done it would be more naive to assume the job is done to the same quality. (But kudos on you for the lack of ego and thinking you aren't better than other devs)
Most of those convicted at the Nuremberg trials eventually had their sentences commuted and only served a fraction of their time. Only a few were convicted and executed. Justice rarely prevails.
You're right to push back in case I intended something different. But I'll state this clearly: those LEO, ICE agents, and judges are committing crimes.
But the fact that not all criminals are punished or prosecuted does not change the laws either.
What I'm concerned about is people becoming disenfranchised and apathetic. Dismissing the laws we have that does punish LEO, ICE agents, and judges for breaking the laws. To take a defeatist attitude. Especially in this more difficult time where that power is being abused more than ever. But a big reason it is being able to be abused is because a growing apathetic attitude by people. By people giving up.
So I don't know about you and your positions. I don't know if you're apathetic or invested. All I know is a random comment from a random person. It isn't much to go on. But I hope you aren't and I hope you don't spread apathy, intentionally or not.
If morality never factors into your own decisions, you don't get to be upset when it doesn't factor into other peoples'. In other words, society just sucks when everyone thinks this way, even if it true that resolving it is hard.
Confirming how many people actually seen the ad is worth big bucks. No one wants to pay for ads they cannot confirm and publisher can make up impressions - if you can catch publisher making up numbers you might get a huge discount or loads of money back.
I don't think they mean that kinda streamer - the idea is the roku tv can tell you're watching an ad even if it's on amazon prime, apple tv, youtube, twitch, wherever, and associate the ad watching with your roku account to potentially sell that data somehow?
That way they aren't cut out of the loop by you using a different service to watch something and still have a 'cut'.
That's the thing about scaling; you offload the work to the "client" (the TV in this case) and make it do the work, it need not send back more than a simple identifier or string in an API call (of course they'll send more), so they get to use a little bit of your electricity and your TVs processing power to collect data on you and make money, with relatively little required from them, other than some infra to handle the requests, which they would have had anyway to collect the telemetry that makes them money.
Client side processing like this is legitimate and an excellent way to scale, it just hits a little different when it's being used for something that isn't serving you, the user.
Not necessarily, it can be done on-device, the screenshot hashed, and the results deduplicated and accumulated over time, then compressed and sent off in a neat package. It'd still be a huge amount of data when you add it all up, but not too different from the volume that e.g. web analytics produces.
Then server-side the hash is matched to a program or ad and the data accumulated and reduced even further before ending up in someone's analytics dashboard.
Are there video "thumbprints" like exists for audio (used by soundhound/etc) - IE a compressed set of features that can reliably be linked in unique content? I would expect that is possible and a lot faster lookup for 2 frames a second. If this is the case, the "your device is taking a snapshot every 30 seconds" sounds a lot worse (not defending it - it's still something I hope can be legislated away - something can be bad and still exaggerated by media)
Given that the TV is trying to match one digital frame against another digital frame, you could probably get decent results even with something super naive like downsampling to a very low resolution, quantizing the color palette, then looking for a pixel for pixel match.
All this could be done long before any sort of TV-specific image processing, so the only source of "noise" I can think of would be from the various encodings offered by the streaming service (e.g. different resolutions and bitrates). With the right choice of downsample resolution and color quantization I have to imagine you could get acceptable results.
I've been led to believe those video thumbprints exist, but I know the hash of the perceived audio is often all that is needed for a match of what is currently being presented (movie, commercial advert, music-as-music-not-background, ...).
This is why a lot of series uploaded to YouTube will be sped up, slowed down, or have their audio’s pitch changed; if the uploader doesn’t do this, it gets recognized by YouTube as infringing content.
You only need to grab a few pixels or regions of the screen to fingerprint it. They know what the stream is and can process it once centrally if needed.
The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity.
Not super tough to pull off. I was experimenting with FAISS a while back and indexed screenshots of the entire Seinfeld series. I was able take an input screenshot (or Seinfeld meme, etc) and pinpoint the specific episode and approx timestamp it was from.
> The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity.
this is most likely the case, although there's nothing stopping them from uploading the original 4K screengrab in cases where there's no match to something in their database which would allow them to manually ID the content and add a hash or just scrape it for whatever info they can add to your dossier.
It’s far less important for ad-free content. They mainly want to connect your ad watching behaviour to an email and then have loyalty program data connected to the same email so that they can identify which ads convert vs not.
This is especially annoying and just incredibly creepy -- I was watching a clip of Smiling Friends on YouTube (via my Apple TV), and I suddenly got a banner telling me to watch this on HBO Max.
The problem with 'well just don't buy it' is that in many product categories, enshittification has become so entrenched that there are no longer options to avoid it. The availablity of product features is driven by market forces, if it's no longer profitable to sell a TV that doesn't require online connectivity for the purposes of ads, then such TVs will no longer be sold.
Alternatives like using monitors designed for digital signage come with drawbacks. Expense, they don't have desirable features like VRR, HDR or high refresh rates, since they aren't needed for those use cases. Older TV models will break and supply will dry up.
In the long term, this problem, not just TVs but the commercial exploitation of user data across virtually all electronic devices sold, isn't something that can be solved with a boycott, or by consumers buying more selectively. The practice needs to be killed with legislation.
Source? This sort of conspiracy started with "smart tvs will connect to open wifi networks", then evolved to "it uses amazon sidewalk", and apparently now morphed into "tvs have 5g modems". Given how poorly supported the prior claims were, that does not bode well for the 5G claim.
Isn't that one of the marketed advantages of 5G. Lot of smart IoT devices including TVs being able to connect independently.
What we are lacking is implementation but the tech and probably the intent was always there. If HDMI ethernet connectivity(HEC) had gained traction, we would have seen a fire stick, apple tv or roku providing internet to your tv without asking for explicit consent.
I agree that I misquoted you, but that's a distinction without a difference in this context. "SIM card and baseband radio inside" means 5G, 4G, 3G, whatever. I still demand that you produce proof that there are TVs with "SIM card and baseband radio inside".
I was curious so I did some research. These devices do seem to be being produced, currently mostly overseas. The inclusion of 5G support does not seem to be hidden or nefarious. They provide a SIM card slot just like your phone would. Some models are incorporating a built-in router to provide connectivity to other devices. It seems like the cellular companies are promoting these TV's too, with built in service.
My opinion is this is just a consolidation of devices. I have many friends who live off their phone data plan giving hotspot to the TV and other devices. Now being moved into a common device format, the TV. I don't think they can spy any more effectively this way. Eexcept via the router integration that gives them way more access, but I'm sure this exists already as a wifi feature on tvs. Just technology trudging along. Perhaps they have a secret sim card or esim embedded, that might be a risk as the hardware is already there for a valid reason.
There's probably compact signatures extracted from the screenshots (color profiles, OCR, etc) which are then uploaded later in bulk. You don't need the full original image to be able to reliably uniquely identify the content if you have an index of it already.
I'm wondering if there is some sort of steganographic watermark that broadcasters are including in media, to enable stuff like this. Probably would need to be robust in the presence of re-encoding, more compression, etc..
I thought the 2013 amendment to the VPPA largely defanged it by allowing sharing with customer consent (which is probably one of the clauses in the million-word customer agreement nobody reads).
Are health providers using PS5s in a context where information may be leaked to other providers? What kind of information would you expect to be displayed that might violate HIPAA?
As other users mentioned, these screenshots are almost certainly not being transmitted as screenshots as the bandwidth costs would be enormous. The screenshots are converted to a hash on the user’s device before being sent to a server where the hash is compared to a database of known hashes. A user’s x-ray would just appear as a hash. This might still constitute a HIPAA violation, but I doubt it.
I’m not sure what relevance there is to other providers?
I work with a lot of small medical offices, and they do use consumer Smart TVs in some contexts. I typically limit their network access for other reasons, and displaying X-rays isn’t something I’ve personally facilitated, but it wouldn’t shock me to discover it’s being done in other clinics, and the popularity of cloud-based ePHR software has left a lot of smaller clinics with very limited internal I.T. services.
The destination isn’t relevant, if the image leaves the clinic at all without consent, that’s a HIPAA violation. Fortunately, I think it’s more likely that the images are sampled and/or hashed in a way that means the full image isn’t technically transmitted, but considering the consequences and costs of a data breach, I’d definitely be wary of it.
I'd like to weaponize all this scanning into a force for good. Instead of phoning home to Roku, send the fingerprints up to an ADID database registering every ad on the planet. Open up an API so that any video stream can detect an ad and inject Max Headroom replacement clips.
Come on hackers. We could murder the global economy with this shit.
I've been thinking about this as well - make a small device that in real time detects ads and turns off audio an video while it's playing. I'd rather see a blank screen than an ad. That way, the whole ad pyramid scheme stays intact while the conversion rates plummet.
Same here. I've done this for podcasts (not in real time) and it works great. TV should be easier in some ways since the video stream and captions can also indicate an ad.
I used to find when listening to a good many podcasts with VLC there would be:
> ... See you after the break.
brief pause
> And we're back ...
Unfortunately, most ads are now burnt in. The 10 second advance will skip through them, but as it's usually the host parroting the ad text and it's easy to over shoot.
I'm sure somebody's done it, but mine isn't. I do make sure to pull the microphones out of the controllers at least so while they can watch everything I'm doing on my screen they can't listen to the entire house.
Like, Apple knows what you're watching within the Apple TV app obviously.
But it's certainly not taking screenshots every second of what it displaying when you use other apps -- which shows and ads you're seeing. Nor does Apple sell personal data.
Other video apps do register what shows you're in the middle of, so they can appear on the top row of your home screen. But again, Apple's not selling that info.
ACR needs to die. It’s an absurd abuse of the privileged position that a TV has - a gross violation of privacy just to make a few bucks. It should be absolutely nobody’s business to know what you watch except your own; the motivation behind the VPPA was to kill exactly this type of abuse.
The greatest irony is that HDCP goes to great lengths to try and prevent people from screenshotting copyrighted content, and here we have the smart TVs at the end just scraping the content willy-nilly. If someone manages to figure out how to use ACR to break DRM, maybe the MPAA will be motivated to kill ACR :)
ACR — Automatic Content Recognition: tech in some smart TVs/apps that identifies what’s on-screen (often via audio/video “fingerprints”) and can report viewing data back to vendors/partners.
VPPA — Video Privacy Protection Act: a U.S. law aimed at limiting disclosure of people’s video-viewing/rental history.
HDCP — High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection: an anti-copy protocol used on HDMI/DisplayPort links to prevent interception/recording of protected video.
DRM — Digital Rights Management: a broad term for technical restrictions controlling how digital media can be accessed, copied, or shared.
MPAA — Motion Picture Association of America: the former name of the main U.S. film-industry trade group (now typically called the MPA, Motion Picture Association).
Enormous effort goes into stopping users from capturing a single frame, while manufacturers quietly sample the screen multiple times a second by design
The ship has sailed on that one. The telematics from the car can also be sent back to the mothership, i.e. if you’re driving like a lunatic, pulling donuts, harsh acceleration and so on.
Laws can change, but I’m not hopeful, tbh. Digital privacy problems are just too abstract to viscerally anger most people. That may change as people that grew up in surveillance capitalism mature, but being so used to invasive data grabs might replace ignorant complacency with aware complacency.
Are you saying that not monitoring e.g. heart rate constantly through some electronic device that sends the data somewhere (let’s assume somewhere under my control) is negligence?
Seriously, why can't we just have a law that makes entirely illegal the retention of any personally identifiable information in any way that is legible to the retainer.
You can store my data for me, but only encrypted, and it can be decrypted only in a sandbox. And the output of the sandbox can be sent only back to me, the user. Decrypting the personal data for any other use is illegal. If an audit shows a failure here, the company loses 1% of revenue the first time, then 2%, then 4, etc.
And companies must offer to let you store all of your own data on your own cloud machine. You just have to open a port to them with some minimum guarantees of uptime, etc. They can read/write a subset of data. The schema must be open to the user.
Any systems that have been developed from personal user data (i.e. recommendation engines, trained models) must be destroyed. Same applies: if you're caught using a system that was trained in the past on aggregated data across multiple users, you face the same percentage fines.
The only folks who maybe get a pass are public healthcare companies for medical studies.
Fixed.
(But yeah it'll never happen because most of the techies are eager to screw over everyone else for their own gain. And they'll of course tell you it's to make the services better for you.)
Sending packages in the mail would be interesting. Though I suppose the only person that really needs to know your exact address is the delivery company, so maybe you could mail things with the address encrypted with the delivery company's public key..
I want my TVs to track me as much as a 1970s toaster. They have no business knowing who I am or anything about my life, yet alone twice a second capturing what I watch.
Once a generation starts to accept that everything they do is getting tracked, things may never go back, it may even lead autocracy.
The hard part _includes_ the crypto and the sandboxing. Short of playing security theater games like "chuck it in a TEE", the moment your data needs any kind of processing, or possesses relationships with other users data (or their ability to view your data, like a social media feed), the complexity increases exponentially.
in fact, cookies legible to anything except the single sandboxed webpage running on your local browser would be illegal and thus never exist to begin with
Context based ads also give away information about the user. Because if you buy the goods that were advertised the vendor knows which contexts apply to you. It is not very precise information and it may involve probabilities, but it is still information.
I've had the advertising settings disabled on my LG C2 for a while and yesterday I decided to browse the settings menu again and found that a couple new ones had been added and turned on by default.
This is what seemingly every app does. They add 15 different categories for notifications / emails / whatever, and then make you turn off each one individually. Then they periodically remove / add new categories, enabled by default. Completely abusive behavior.
Want to unsubscribe from this email? Ok, you can do it in one click, but we have 16 categories of emails we send you, so you'll still get the other 15! It's a dark pattern for sure.
Thanks again for unsubscribing! This is your weekly reminder that you are still unsubscribed. As usual, we've included a little bonus for you to enjoy at the end of this unsubscribe-reminder e-mail: a complementary full edition of this week's newsletter!
They’re sad they can’t point that particular marketing hose at you, anymore, but appreciate confirming your validity as a lead they’ll sell to data brokers.
e+ is such an unintuitive decimal representation system. going in blindly, it's completely non-obvious what "e" stands for, surely "d" would make far more sense. also, the namespace for e is plenty filled up as is, and, most of all, +12 implies 12 additional digits, not digits after the point
Google's choice to use it for calculation results despite having essentially no restriction on text space always annoyed me. I think this is the first time I've seen a human using it
And if you just add them to your spam filter, it won't even work easily, because they deliberately shift around the domains and subdomains they send from every so often.
I just use a unique address for each service. Any email that gets leaked or is getting unsubscribe resistant spam is added to /etc/postfix/denied_recipients :)
this is where LLMs could actually help. create spam filters that an LLM can parse and deny if it looks close enough. but then again, hallucinations would be kind of terrible.
I agree this would be a good use of an LLM (assuming that it was running locally). I wouldn't put one in charge of deleting my messages, but I could see one being used to assign a score to messages and based on that score moving them out of my inbox into various folders for review.
Same can be achieved with a catch all domain and a sub for every service you use. Cost $13/year. Extra protection: now if you lose access to your email provider, you still have access to future emails.
Yep. Had that happen with the United app a few weeks ago. Unsolicited spam sent via push notification to my phone. Turns out that they added a bunch of notification settings - of course all default to on.
Turned them all off except for trip updates that day.
Best part is- yesterday I received yet another unsolicited spam push message. With all the settings turned off.
So these companies will effective require you to use their app to use their service, then refuse to respect their own settings for privacy.
I've taken to "Archiving" apps like this on my Android phone. When I need it, I can un-archive it to use it. Keeps the list of things trying to get my attention a little bit smaller.
I just hellban every app from sending any notifications, except for a select few. Apps get like a one strike policy on notification spam. If they send a single notification I didn't want, I disable their ability to send notifications at all.
Also all notifications/etc are silent, except for alarms, pages, phone calls, and specific named people's texts.
Everything else... no. YouTube was the worst offender before for me.
Another technique for me is to avoid apps like Instagram, Facebook and Youtube. I run them all through mobile Firefox with uBlock origin and custom block scripts that block sponsored posts and shorts. This combines well with having Youtube's history turned off which prevents the algorithmic suggestions.
I give apps a one strike policy on notification spam. If they do it at all, I'm uninstalling it until I actually need to use it next (if I can't find an alternative). And the same goes for getting in my way to beg for a review on the app store: that's a shortcut to getting a one-star rating.
The main exception to this is the notification spam from Google asking me to rate call quality after every damn call. I don't have my phone rooted, so I can't turn off that category of notification.
Why even give most apps even one chance? For almost every app I have zero interest in ever getting a notification from. I see no reason to give them an opportunity to annoy me even once.
Honestly because I won't remember to go into the settings page and disable it. When a notification comes in, there's a quick route to disable forever, otherwise I have to go preemptively digging
Sending ad notifications is a recent trend, normally Apple guidelines don’t allow it, but they know that Apple cannot much fuss about with all the regulatory pressure.
It’s the enshitification of the notification system, the apps are already filled with ads and now they’re making you open the app or splash things on your face.
Boarding pass. For the airline apps, it probably is a good assumption that most people want to get a notification that their flight is delayed, or started boarding, etc..
This is why whenever you try to do anything significant on a web site with a phone, they tell you to "Download our app". Detection is very good now. Slack can see right through desktop mode, cheater, and will redirect you to the app regardless.
Never had that issue on Vanadium browser, or Brave or even Firefox. I personally refuse to download an app if there is a website for the same. For a long time I was even using door dash in browser.
When I get email like that, I mark it as spam. That trains the spam filters to remove their marketing email from everyone's inbox. I see it as a community service.
LinkedIn does the same thing re emails, notifications, etc that they send. I think I turned off notifications that connections had achieved new high scores in games they play on LinkedIn. Absurd.
I’m at the point where I just cleared everything out of Linkedin and have designated all LinkedIn emails as spam. It’s just a modern equivalent to a slave market, where slaves vote to be the pick-me alpha slave.
LinkedIn is one the most useless app ever. I have trashed it countless times, but I do use it now and ten to keep up with companies and respond to a few solicitations. There is almost never anything of value in my feed, between the fake jobs and the low value self-promotion AI-written posts. Who even reads this? Not even mentioning the political, and pseudo-activist posts. And this happens despite systematically marking all of these posts irrelevant or “inappropriate for LinkedIn”. This app is beyond repair. Uninstalling.
That behavior is what finally got me off Facebook awhile back.
Edit: And something similar with Windows now that I think about it; there was a privacy setting which would appear to work till you re-entered that menu. Saving the setting didn't actually persist it, and the default was not consumer-friendly.
I have a Hisense TV which recently did the same. It turned on personal recommendations and advertising. I have no idea where the ads are or how it works; I only use devices over HDMI. I'm sure the TV is spying on me incessantly nonetheless.
I’m using my tv with all the stuff disabled (the ones it’s possibly disable), but even then I realize I don’t trust them and I don’t trust their choices. Because they get to say sorry and not held responsible.
I want smart tv because I want use my streaming services but that’s it. I also want high quality panels. Maybe the solution is high quality TVs where you just stick a custom HDMI device (similar to Amazon fire stick) and use it as the OS. Not sure if there are good open source options since Apple seems to be another company that keeps showing you ads even if you pay shit load of money for their hardware and software, Jobs must turning in his grave
I think they probably would, with maybe the exception of Apple TV. It’s probably not a coincidence that Apple TVs are the only hardware in this space that isn’t sold at a loss (or near loss), the rest are simply Trojan horses to park in the living room and maximize profit elsewhere by leveraging its privileged access to your eyeballs and/or ears (really no orifice is safe from these companies anymore, watch out for Smart Bidets).
When a new permission appears without notice and defaults to the most-violating setting, gaslighting you into the illusion of agency but in fact you never had any, you've been Zucked.
The real trick is to never connect your TV to the internet under any circumstances. These things are displays, they don't need the internet to do their job. Leave that to the game consoles and streaming boxes.
Existing LTE is fine. If they wanted to embed modems in the TVs they could do it now. I'm guessing they simply don't have to, simply because a huge number of consumers will dutifully hand over their Wi-Fi passwords.
While this is certainly possible, I’d imagine this sort of thing would be found quite quickly and would result in a massive lawsuit if not disclosed on the package.
It's going to happen on any device. It's a software thing. If LG isn't doing it, it's Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. My PS5 basically shows ads on some system ui screens (granted mostly for "game" content but it still counts).
"All of the big TV makers" except Vizio which is owned by Walmart, of course, who happens to do ACR and ad targeting:
> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]
Well it wouldn't be Texas if there wasn't some grotesque corruption involved. Vizio is the absolute worst of the TV manufacturers when it comes to this shit, so now it's clear Texas is really just trying to bully Walmart's competition rather than do something positive for consumers.
It should be illegal to set information collection settings to on by default. Being watched is considered a threat almost universally across all animals.
you would be incredibly uncomfortable with someone wide-eyed staring you down and taking notes of your behavior, wouldnt you? This is what tech companies are doing to everyone by default and in many cases they actively prevent you from stopping them. It is the most insane thing that people only seem to mildly complain about.
Humans are intensely social creatures, and are not adapted to feel the same way about things done invisibly versus visibly. That's how you end up in weird situations where people know the pervasive spying we're subjected to is wrong, but can't muster the will to act on it most of the time. It's cases like these where "voting with your wallet" produces terrible results. On one end you have organized groups of people figuring out chinks in human instincts, and on the other you have an unorganized mass of people doing what feels right or is expedient. You need coordination on both ends for competition and optimization to play out and find an acceptable compromise.
I skimmed through what the TX governor/attorney general/whatever it's called said, and I don't think he even understands "privacy". All he's bothered about is that the data is going to China instead of American companies.
What American TV manufacturers is there? LG is from Korea as well, Sony is originally from Japan and there two smaller (I assume, since Koreans dominate display market) Chinese manufacturers. But together those five are most of the units manufactured globally, so makes sense to sue them to have the biggest impact.
But they named companies that are not Chinese eg Samsung. I think the claims are well spirited and the China argument is an aggravating factor for many, so no harm in having it. Will likely lead to higher interest in the case, so that's good.
It's always amazing how many people plop anti-consumer comments out here. Like, of course you bastards deserve to be served ads on your own TV that you just paid $800 for. Because why? Because ... the market is wise, and "the market" is screwing us, so ... we must ... deserve to be screwed?
Whatever is being offered to us must be the best deal we can get, because ... it's being offered to us?
What drives this sentiment? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
Exactly. The free market has very little recourse when companies basically all start doing the same thing, and more or less don’t tell you about it. You certainly don’t see “takes a screenshot of your TV every 2s and uploads it for us to analyze” plastered all over the boxes! I guess the idea is the consumer will be omniscient and that a company will come along offering a privacy protecting alternative… but those incentives just doooo not work!
Seriously, totally deranged to think the “free market” is capable of protecting humans against widespread nefarious behavior from colluding actors with vast amounts of money and power.
A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept and markets like electronics are nowhere near free. Collusion is something that happens in an oligopoly. The fact many markets degenerate into oligopolies and monopolies is why we need government. 30 years ago I feel like people understood this. Now it seems everyone thinks they know what free market means just because they heard the term one time.
I like this branch of discussion and I want it to keep growing. What has to happen to make an electronics market free? Is the situation about spyware TV/cars can not be improved in any kind of Libertarian or Anarcho-Capitalist world without the Government? Is bad government worse for the electronics market than absence of any governments?
Some things like semiconductor fabrication will have huge barriers to entry for the foreseeable future due to being massively capital intensive and involving lots of trade secrets etc. We can't really do much about this.
What we (ie. the government) can do is ensure no entities own the entire supply chain, so you can't run a fab and also market finished consumer goods. That way, manufacture of consumer goods (including the software) from the raw fabricated parts gets a much lower barrier to entry.
We can also force consumer manufacturers to advertise all "features" that we deem to be important. We already do things like energy ratings, why not privacy ratings too? The more information consumers have the better.
Make no mistake, any capital intensive industry like electronics will degenerate into an oligopoly without government, or you can dream of a day where everyone can print semiconductor wafers at home.
It's driven by the fact that many of these people work for companies doing similar things, and this is how they resolve the cognitive dissonance. Otherwise they'd have to accept that their work is unethical.
Because the companies are selling technology to us cheaper than cost in exchange for this? I do think they should be required to offer a revenue-neutral way to turn off ads but it would cost several hundred dollars and only me & 5 other weirdos on this website would buy it.
We all know that they would artificially increase the price of those models and exclude tons of features to punish users and say it’s not profitable.
They should not be allowed to track user at all as a hardware manufacturer, let the users purchase the tracking software themselves and get a rebate back.
I don't like ACR at all.. but after reading all the raging about ads on TVs I thought they would be terrible. Then I got one recently - the ads are literally just links to watch movies & TV series I might be interested in, on my TV? Like yes I do want my TV to show me some things I might be interested in watching, the same way Youtube does. I don't like the increasing privacy violations like ACR being used to tune those "ads", but seeing recommendations on my TV is a feature I like..
Heck if I had strong guarantees that the data generated by ACR was used only to tune recommendations/ads using an anonymous advertising ID like IDFA and not linked to any personally identifying information, I would want that too. But sadly there is no privacy and no way of ensuring that now.
Not everyone feels like that. Yesterday the app of my tv provider on my Samsung TV home screen suddenly shows a Prime icon in its place, prompting to install the app if you use muscle memory to control the TV. I am unable to remove this annoying ad. I really really hate ads and will go to great lengths to avoid seeing any in my private home. So I see this as an invasion of my privacy. Not buying Samsung anymore.
I feel this is a generally strange situation. TVs seem to be pretty much the only tech that is somehow inflation proof, and that is largely due to the surveillance capitalist approach they come with.
I am a strong privacy advocate, but I also believe in customers choice. Hence, the primary issue I have with this technology is not its existence, but the lack of transparency in the pricing and the inability to truly properly opt out of this data collection.
At some point in the past year, I‘ve read someone suggest a „privacy label“ for electronics, akin to the energy efficiency labels that exist around the world. The manufacturers should be forced to disclose the extend of the data collection as well as the purpose and the ability to opt out on the product packaging, before the customer makes the purchase
Sadly, it seems like the contingent of people who have a problem with Smart TVs is small but noisy, and has no real market power. If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
Sort of reminds me how we complain loudly about how shitty airline service is, and then when we buy tickets we reliably pick whichever one is a dollar cheaper.
The problem is that consumers are not savvy. They go to the store, and compare TVs based on features presented. Colors, refresh rate, size, etc.
Its only when they get home (and likely not even right away) that they discover their TV is spying on them and serving ads.
This is a perfect situation where government regulation is required. Ideally, something that protects our privacy. But, minimally something like a required 'nutrition label' on any product that sends our data off device.
As far as I know, there is nothing to prevent Samsung from selling you a TV, then sending out a software update in two years which forces you to accept a new terms of service that allows them to serve you ads. If you do not accept, they brick your TV.
So it’s not a question of being savvy. As a consumer you can’t know what a company will choose to do in the future.
The lawsuit seems to be about using ACR, not the presence of ads.
> As far as I know, there is nothing to prevent Samsung from selling you a TV, then sending out a software update in two years which forces you to accept a new terms of service that allows them to serve you ads. If you do not accept, they brick your TV.
To the parent commenters' point, this is a perfect example of a situation where governments should be stepping in.
That ought to be a slam dunk win in court. Especially since they probably won't show up to my local small claims court and I'll just send them the judgement.
The thing that prevents a TV mfg from bricking your device is that they'd be instantly (and successfully) sued. In fact, there have already been many such class actions, ie with printer inks.
The downside is that it's sometimes easier and cheaper to just pay off the class and keep doing it.
True. But it does work for food safety, and to help curb underage drinking and smoking, to stop lousy restaurants from serving unsafe food and for lots of other stuff we take for granted.
Top down governance isn't a silver bullet, but it has its place in a functioning society.
I wouldn't say they aren't savvy. Many aren't, but also I don't blame them. Often you can buy a perfectly reasonable device and then they ad spying and adverts after you bought it. Most reviewers also don't talk about this stuff, and there are no standards for any of it (unlike e.g. energy consumption).
I went with Philips Hue smart lighting specifically because it could work without an account or any internet access for the bulbs or hub.
Guess what became required this year? At least it seems I can still use them offline if I don't use the official app. But the official app is now just a popup requiring me to create an account. I'm not sure if I could add new lights using third party apps. Not like I'm ever buying a Hue product again though.
The problem is lack of information at time of purchase, in both cases. It's so onerous to figure out what these products are doing that people give up. Same in the airline case. If any of the airlines actually provided better service at a higher price, they'd have a market, but it's impossible to assess that as an end user with all the fake review bullshit that's all over the Internet these days.
The only cases where it's clearcut are a few overseas airlines like Singapore Airline who have such a rock solid reputation for great service that people will book them even if the price is 2x.
I don’t agree with this. The only way this would make sense is if consumers were made aware of spying vs not spying prior to purchase.
But TV manufacturers can change the TV’s behavior long after it is purchased. They can force you to agree to new terms of service which can effectively make the TV a worse product. You cannot conclude the consumer didn’t care.
This 'Wild West' is easily solved with decent consumer law. Spying could be shut down over night if laws levied fines on TV manufacturers pro rata—ie fines would multiply by the number of TV sets in service.
If each TV attracted a fine two to three times the amount manufacturers received from selling its data the practice would drop stone dead.
All it takes is proper legislation. Consumers just lobby your politicians.
We're past the point when most people can claim ignorance. And surely we have enough protection to at least defend against the "changed the terms and conditions after purchase" situation? They can't force me to do anything, and then stop working if I refuse.
For now maybe? Consumer protections are at an all time low at the moment. Your exact argument about “we all know this just nobody cares and stop whining” is exactly what will be cited if you attempt to take action if they brick your device.
A situation in which many people care a little,but a few people care a lot in the other direction,is almost exactly what government is for. Ken Paxton has issues, for sure, but good on him in this case.
There is a market and people pay for it. However they are mostly not TVs, but monitors and those paying for it have the budget to pay far more. However this market will always exist because some of those are showing safety messages in a factory and if the monitor in any way messes those up there will be large lawsuits.
> Sadly, it seems like the contingent of people who have a problem with Smart TVs is small but noisy, and has no real market power.
No one cares. Smart TVs are super awesome to non tech people who love them. Plug it in, connect to WiFi - Netflix and chill ready. I have a friend who just bought yet another smart TV so he can watch the Hockey game from his bar.
> If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
What happened to that Jumbo (dumbo?) TV person who was on here wanting to build these things? My guess is they saw the economics and the demand and gave up. I applaud them for trying though. I still cling to my two dumb 1080 Sony TVs that have Linux PC's hooked to them.
Wouldn’t smart TVs that didn’t spy on you also be awesome? Seems like a knowledge gap to me. This gets solved as soon as people realize what’s happening. Right now they don’t realize TVs are cheap because of the ad subsidy.
"If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one."
The problem is easily solved and I'm surpised more people don't do it. For years I've just connected a PVR/STB (set top box) to a computer monitor. It's simple and straightforward, just connect the box's HDMI output into a computer monitor.
Moreover, PVR/STBs are very cheap—less than $50 at most, I've three running in my household.
If one wants the internet on the same screen just connect a PC to another input on your monitor. This way you've total isolation, spying just isn't possible.
Just put the HDMI into the TV set input and forget connecting the internet. That's the situation with one of my TVs and it gives a great picture. Also it works fine with my projection monitor.
Do you have a nice 65” OLED monitor option with solid display settings supporting Dolby modes, etc I can examine? I tried to find one and nobody is selling.
Not 65" but for a really large picture I just use the HDMI input on the smart TV sans internet and it's fine (also the TV makes a good large monitor). Works well on the projection monitor too.
..and constant notifications that the network is not connected, that there are wifi APs nearby, do you want to configure one(?), and that it's been 157 days since the last software update, and that you should connect your tv to the internet to get newest bestest firmware with 'new features'.
I think government is the only way to regulate below pain threshold nonsense that weighs down society.
but I think small issues in society might translate to small issues for government action, and regulatory capture has a super-high roi overturning "minor" stuff.
I suspect only showing real harm for something is the only way to get these things high-enough priority for action.
I kind of wonder if the pager attacks, or the phone nonsense in ukraine/russia might make privacy a priority?
If no one manufactures such a product, how does the "market" express this desire?
Buying one toaster, that would last your lifetime, is easily manufactured today, and yet no company makes such a thing. This is true across hundreds of products.
The fact is, manufacturing something that isn't shit, is less profitable, so what we're gonna get is shit. It doesn't really matter what people "want".
Not the person you're asking, but about as frequently as I replace washing machines. The fact that I'm doing it at all is the problem, especially since both machines had been "solved" by the late 1970s.
The non-electric office tools I have from that era are perpetual. Eternal.
If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
I don't think they would. There are some TV manufacturers that are better about not nagging you (which is one of the reasons why I bought a Sony last year), but as time moves forward, companies have been less likely to leave money on the table. This is just the logical result of capitalism. Regulation will be the only way to protect consumer privacy.
Similarly, air travel gets worse as consumer protection regulations gets rolled back
This isn't really an accurate analysis because it assumes the only parties involved are the TV manufacturers and the purchasing consumers. In fact the third party is ad brokers and so the calculus to alienate some users in pursuit of ad dollars is different.
This sounds like victim blaming to me. "What do you mean you don't understand how software and the internet works and thought this was just a TV?!"
If you want to make a free market argument you need to look up what a free market is. In particular, consumers need to have perfect information. Do you really think if manufacturers were obligated to make these "features" clear that most people wouldn't care?
This is exactly why the current ad model is broken.
Users are tracked without real consent, advertisers still waste budgets, and everyone loses except the platforms collecting the data.
What’s interesting is that you can actually build effective ads without spying at all — by targeting intent signals instead of identities, and rewarding users transparently for engagement.
The tech is already there, but the incentives are still backwards.
Fundamentally how is this any different from what Google or Meta or Comcast or AT&T do? Comcast knows everything that goes to the TV and sells that data.
At&T sells your browsing data…
Those are services you pay for monthly.
Sure the method is different but it’s the same goal. Company x learns your interests so It can monetize you by selling to advertisers
AT&T sounds like the same thing, Google sounds different because they theoretically claim to not sell your data, and instead sell ads, and Google can show you an ad you want to see because Google knows you so well. It doesn’t precisely sell you to advertisers in the same way.
Anyways, the whole thing sucks for consumer privacy and needs to be outlawed. The problem is that companies come up with unique, tricky ways of exploiting you, and people can never fully understand it without a lot of effort. Someone might be ok using Google and seeing contextual ads, but wouldn’t be ok if they knew Google was saving a screenshot of their browser every second and uploading and reselling it. The first can feel innocuous, the second feels evil.
Isn’t this a thing for all providers? YouTube definitely spies on what you look at and Netflix knows as well. Or is this just because a TV actually doesn’t provide the content, just the view? And is there’s a difference if you have a streaming device like Roku?
Nevada has a gaming dept that certifies the firmware in "slot" machines. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for TVs. Maybe include cars too... they like to phone home more than they should.
> accusing them of “secretly recording what consumers watch in their own homes.”
Secret? There's T's&C's that people agree to when starting up their TV that tells them.
That doesn't make it right of course and it shouldn't just be opt-in, it should be banned entirely. If you want to analyse my viewing behaviour, pay me.
I would be curious to see a comparison of the T&Cs in these TVs.
I generally agree that reading the T&C is on the user and you cannot blame the lack if transparency onto the company, IF the T&C are sufficiently comprehensible. Some T&Cs I‘ve read are written in obscure enough legalese that it might as well be considered hidden information
So you buy a new TV, unpack and install it, and then when the whole family is gathered around, you suddenly get this confirmation on the TV if you agree with their T&C. Are you supposed to reject them and return the TV at this point? T&C should be part of the purchase agreement, instead of being forced upon the user while using the product after purchase. Any one-sided change of T&C after purchase should be invalid and punishable.
Did they sue Google for reading all your emails? Or Meta for seeing all your personal history? Or Walmart for determining someone's very personal relationships based on their buying patterns? Or just every salesman out there whose job is to be nosy about customer's life and work?
The thing is, I want smart features, I just don't want those smart features to be tied to the display. A separate box allows more consumer choice, which is generally a better experience. Easily flashable firmware would be an acceptable alternative for the same reason.
I'd be happy with a setup box giving me the ability to add apps for streaming services or whatever, but I don't want that STB spying on my either. I feel like even if all TVs were dumb monitors we'd just be moving the real problem of insane levels of data collection and spying to another device. We need strong regulation with real teeth to prevent the spying at which point all of our devices should be protected.
A separate box allows more consumer choice, which is generally a better experience.
In the life of my last TV (10+ yrs), I've had to switch out that separate box three times. It would have sucked & been way more expensive to have had to replace the TV each time.
Firmware can be updated, sure, but there's the risk of some internal component failing. There's the risk of the services I want to use not being compatible. I'd also prefer to use an operating system I'm familiar with, because, well, I'm familiar with it, rather than some custom firmware from a TV company whose goal is to sell your data, not make a good user experience...
Of course, this ties back to the enshittification of the Internet. Every company is trying to be a data broker now though, because they see it as free passive income.
Regarding the failure of internal components--there are some 'failure' modes which I had not even contemplated previously.
I have a TV that's only about 5-6 years old and has a built in Roku. It mostly works fine, but the built in hardware is simply not fast enough to play some streaming services, specifically some stuff on F1TV. And before anyone asks, it's not a bandwidth problem--I have gigabit fiber and the TV is using ethernet.
Anyway, between that, general UI sluggishness and the proliferation of ads in the Roku interface, I switched to an Apple TV and haven't looked back.
Hi-fi and AV enthusiasts have known that "separates" is where it's at since the beginning. Unfortunately it's such a small segment compared to mass market junk "content" devices and it's only shrinking as more people are seduced by the convenience of the shit stuff.
We've already had TVs which only started serving ads after a few months of use. What's stopping them from selling TVs which stop working if it hasn't been able to connect to the mothership for a few weeks?
And instead of a full brick, let's just downgrade to 360p and call it an "expiration of your complementary free Enhanced Video trial".
>We've already had TVs which only started serving ads after a few months of use. What's stopping them from selling TVs which stop working if it hasn't been able to connect to the mothership for a few weeks?
Same thing that prevents your phone manufacturer from adding a firmware level backdoor that uploads all your nudes to the mothership 1 day after the warranty expires. At some point you just have to assume they're not going to screw you over.
That's not a good answer, unless you just want cable. YouTube, Netflix, etc won't work. Buying hardware is paying extra which is already a deterrent, but anyway just shifts the problem to that piece of hardware - is the stick vetted to not do any harm? Other solutions are often impractical or overly complex for non-technical people. I haven't seen any good answers to date. I guess your TV just shouldn't spy on everything you watch? Seems like a reasonable expectation.
My TCL/Roku TV recently started showing popups during streams with services like YouTubeTV and PlutoTV, that basically say, "Click here to watch this same program on the Roku Network". I poked around the settings on the TV, and sure enough, there were some new "smart" settings added and enabled by default. I disabled the settings, and the popups stopped. But it's only a matter of time before something else appears.
Because with a stick, I can easily decide to chuck it and replace with another. Over and over again. Hard to do with a TV. Even if I had the money, disposing of one is a royal pain.
For now. They’re about to undergo a CEO change, again. Who knows what will happen in the future, particularly if the shareholders expect the perceived value provided by enshittification.
John Ternus, SVP of Hardware Engineering, is considered the front runner for CEO right now. The board wants a more product oriented CEO this time. Things could change but makes me optimistic.
I do the same thing. My PC is hooked up via HDMI to a receiver which goes to the TV via HDMI. I use VNC on my phone to remote control it. It works well. The phone’s touch screen functions as a mouse and you can pull up the phone’s on screen keyboard to type. My wife is extremely non technical and does fine with it. Usually we just use the browser to watch ad-blocked YouTube or unofficial sports streams.
And a guest wifi that is password free on by default. All it takes is a neighbor to get a new router from the ISP. I just had to turn my guest wifi off because I noticed a lot of bandwidth on it (likely coming from our neighbor who was bragging about cord cutting).
My Wi-Fi isn't. I live about 2 miles away from my closest neighbor, so it was an inconvenience.
The trick was finding TV's and what not that don't need an Internet connection. Vizio was the only brand I could find that still had just dumb tv flat screens, believe it or not.
I would much rather buy a dumb TV. I feel that the smart TV experience is an opportunity it eventually make TVs feel dated and slow. I would rather buy a standalone streamer that I can plug in. Buying a new $100 dollar streamer every couple years is cheaper and produces less e-waste than buying a new giant TV.
I isolate smart TVs and other IOT devices to a separate network/subnet, and usually block their network access unless they need an update.
A related alternative would be that the listed tv price included the price of time spent viewing ads, and the sale price of your usage data (and that changing the price, say by showing more ads, required agreement).
A DUMB TV costs $x, while a badly behaved smart TV costs $y up front, plus $z per hour for the next few years, where y is potentially slightly less than x.
The exist, for commercial/enterprise use (usually digital signage and meeting rooms). They cost a few times more than consumer-grade, because of the word 'enterprise'
Likely much smaller sales volume as well. Economies of scale are a thing, especially where marketing (largely through dealers / vendors / distributors) is a major expense.
I have this article growing in the back of my head that is currently mostly a rant about how impractical technology turned out by comparing the current state with the old days. It's hard as there are countless examples and I want to address only the most embarrassing ones. Dumb vs smart TV alone could fill a tomb worth of downgrades. Do you remember the variable resistor, the rotary knob that provided volume control? The ease of use, the granularity, the response time!
I currently have volume control on my TV, one on the OS on the computer that drives it and one on the application that makes the picture. That is only half the problem
Look at "Commercial" TVs. This is what they call dumb TV's nowadays. I guess they're mainly targeted at businesses who want a TV to for things like informational displays, conferences, etc.
I only found this out because I thought my 15 year old plasma TV had died, but it ended up being the power cord.
As long as the firmware is proprietary and cannot be inspected or modified, the only reliable way to avoid snooping by tech industry is not to connect any "smart" device to the Internet. Use the TV as a dumb monitor for a PC under your control (running Linux). If streaming service X will not run on Linux because DRM is not implemented or enforceable on a free device, do without it, or find alternative sources for the content (hint: Linux ISOs).
I've been using my pi-hole as my DNS and then also firewall blocking the TV from phoning out on port 53 in case the manufacturer has hardcoded DNS. Though I agree with the point and I shouldn't have to do this. This is just mitigation.
It wouldn't even need to use any sort of standards-based DNS-like thing at all, if they control the server (on a stable IP address in the TV's firmware) and the client (the TV). It could be any data scheme (probably https for simplicity and blending in) along the lines of "give me all the other IP addresses I'll need, which aren't as stable as the one in my firmware."
Regardless, what is the benefit of putting the TV on the network but preventing it from doing DNS lookups anyway, even if you could be sure you succeed?
You say "only", but if it is illegal, optional, and can be detected freely, it is very likely to not happen. For all the snark one can muster about DOJ, with those three things in place, it could get expensive very quickly to try to circumvent the law.
Absolutely yes. My prescribed CPAP came with 5G that uploads data for their app and for your physician to monitor your progress. You basically wouldn’t even know it had one, the plan must be managed by the company and automatically connects where ever you take it.
Maybe not yet - but 5g was built with the idea of making them cheap. It takes a couple years to design the cheap modems and then a few more years to get them in TVs, so they could well be coming in the near future yet - only time will tell. And the modem will also be your wifi so you can't really rip it off without losing other useful things.
>but 5g was built with the idea of making them cheap
For bandwidth, maybe. It's still going to add cost to the BOM. They'll have to recoup that somehow. Say a 5G modem costs $20 (random number). For it to actually make money, it'll need to be otherwise not connected to the internet, otherwise it can just use wifi instead. Out of 100 people, how many do you think won't connect it to the internet for privacy reasons? 1? 5? 10? Keep in mind, if they don't connect to the internet, they'll need to go out and get another device to watch netflix or whatever, so they're highly incentivized to. Say 10 out of 100 don't, and with this sneaky backdoor you now can sell ads to them. For that privilege, you paid $200 per disconnected TV, because for every disconnected TV with a 5G module, you need to have a 5G module in 9 other TVs that were already connected to the internet. How could you ever hope to recoup that expense?
assume they are aiming for $1 in large quantites. I don't know thier number but that is closer. And the cost will be low because they are bulk buying excess data. They can send this at 3am when everyone is asleep so cell companies can give a deep discount.
again the above is the plan, reality often changes.
If you're planning on using the TV as a dumb display for another device, and are determined enough to physically remove a cellular modem, then the TV's own WiFi is not a useful thing either, even if integrated into the same chip.
If you want the TV to be on your network (for casting or streaming or whatever) and you also want to filter that traffic (allowing connections only to the services you want to use) then you need it to be on your own network (wifi, if there's no ethernet port) and not on someone else's network (cellular).
The China angle will grab headlines, but the more uncomfortable truth is that the entire smart TV ad model seems to depend on surveillance most users never fully understood they were opting into
While I agree (and I agree with the upstream comments, too), there's often deeper reasons why we can short circuit fully evaluating an argument made on its merits: often the "merits", or lack thereof, are derived from the party's values and beliefs, and if we know those values to be corrupt, it's likely that subsequent arguments are going to be similarly corrupt.
There's only so much time in the day, only so much life to live. Could a blog post written by the worst person you know have a good point, even though it's titled something like "An argument in favor of kicking puppies" by Satan himself? I mean, true, I haven't read it, yet. There could be a sound, logical argument buried within.
This is also what "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" teaches, essentially. Trust is hard-won, and easily squandered.
"A lie is around the world before the truth has finished tying its shoes."
"Flood the Zone" is why some of us are so exhausted, though.
In these instances, the argument has to come from someone who is self-aware enough of the short-circuit to say "okay, look, I am going to address that elephant" — but mostly, that's not what happens.
Thankfully in this case, all we need get through is the title.
Perhaps. But you also need to ask why Paxton is doing this as this case will vaporize as soon as that is accomplished. I would be much more optimistic if California were also signed onto this.
Paxton, however, doesn't give one iota of damn about individual freedom. So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge.
Unfortunately, we don't have Molly Ivins around anymore to tell us what is really going on here in the Texas Laboratory for Bad Government.
> So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge
This is about being in the news as much as possible. He is in a close 3 way race for the 2026 Republican spot for US Senate. The other two are current old-school conservative senator John Cornyn, and new comer MAGA Wesley Hunt (but not as MAGA as Paxton). Lots of in-fighting over funding, so Paxton is making sure to get in the news as much as possible.
Throughout the year he has been in the news for things that are useful like this and another suit against a utility company for causing a fire and others for typical maga things like lawsuit to stop harris county (Houston) funding legal services for immigrants facing deportation or immigrant-serving nonprofits or a "tip-line" for bathroom enforcement or lawsuits against doctors...it goes on and on and on. It's a page out of the Trump playblook, its like watching a trump clone. And thats the point.
"The TVs “are effectively Chinese-sponsored surveillance devices, recording the viewing habits of Texans at every turn without their knowledge or consent,” the lawsuits said."
This explains why Vizio, who is owned by Walmart, was not sued.
Sony, Samsung, and LG are not Chinese companies but they are being sued. It's more likely that Vizio is not included because they already got hit by the FTC (but not hard enough to disable ACR).
No, that's the problem - it's not good advocacy. The destructionist movement is more appropriately seen as arbitraging away existing concern about the issues they claim to take up. Their politicians' main use for reformist political causes are as cudgels for threatening businesses with, after which they back off once their own pockets get lined. As a libertarian who cares about many of the causes of individual freedom they dishonestly champion, I'm well acquainted with their abuse of ideals.
Yeah pretty much. No regulators are batting an eye at the industrial data gathering schemes of Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. and they never have. And the only major social network under real legal scrutiny is TikTok.
The American Government wants to have the cake and eat it too, as per usual. They want to leave the massive column of the economy that is surveillance capitalism intact and operating, and making them money, and they want to make sure those scary communists can't do the same. Unfortunately there isn't really a way to take down one without taking down the other, unless you legally enshrine that only American corporations have a right to spy on Americans. And (at time of comment anyway) they seem to not want to openly say the reason is just naked nationalism/racism.
And of course: casual reminder that Vizio does extensive ACR and ad targeting, and even bought a company doing it to facilitate that:
> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]
But I'm sure Texans are fully aware and consented to this, right?
This is the same AG who sued Tylenol over autism. While we can applaud the effort (broken clock theory?), it’s all but guaranteed he’s getting paid for helping another entity. Corruption is on the menu and fully expected these days.
As a reminder if you own an LG TV, turn off the sneakily named "Live Plus" thing. This "option" makes your LG TV spy on you, tracking and reporting what you watch based on the image that is shown on the TV.
You need to go to Settings -> All Settings -> General -> System -> Additional Settings to make sure the "Live Plus" option is OFF.
Check it periodically, as it sometimes turns itself back on again after updates.
It seems like there is a big business opportunity for someone to create a box you attach to your network to filter outgoing info, and incoming ads. Too much work for a tiny team to research what everything is talking to, and MITM your devices and watch DNS queries, etc, but if there was something dead simple to block a Samsung fridge from getting to its ad server, I have to think it would sell.
I thought of pi-hole but I’m not sure it is dead simple. I’m thinking a box that your incoming internet connections connects to and an outgoing connection to your wifi router.
The market probably isn’t big enough yet, but I’ll bet it grows. I mean _Texas_ is bringing it up!
I tried using a Pi-hole for this exact reason: prevent bullcrap TV ads. My Roku TV wouldn't stopped working. I had to whitelist so many roku-related domains that it basically became pointless.
I had the same issue, decided to remove Roku instead…
I used to have a Roku TV, plus a a few of the standalone Roku Ultras for my other (non-Roku) TVs. I got a full page advert when I started up the TV one day and started the process of replacing them all (I think it is when Roku were experimenting with that).
Over about a year I replaced them with Apple TVs* and the user experience is far better, plus the amount of tracking domains reported by Pi-hole dropped precipitously! The TVs don't have internet access at all, they are just driven via the HDMI port now.
* I replaced the Ultras first, and when the Roku TV eventually started acting laggy on the apps I replaced the Roku TV as well.
You probably overestimate the market for something like that. Most people don't know or care. Those that do are more likely to hang out on HN or adjacent places and know how to deal with it themselves anyways.
A sibling comment says "just use Pi-hole" which kind of works and is also inadequate. A similar system is Ad Guard Home. These work at the DNS level with preset lists of bad domains. They aren't necessarily going to catch your TV calling out to notanadserver.samsung.com because that domain name is not recorded in the list of naughty domains. They are definitely not going to help if your device reaches out via IP.
Another approach is to disallow all DNS or only allow *.netflix.com for the TV. In my experience attempting to only allow certain domains is a game of whackamole where everyone in the house complains their stuff is broken because it needs undocumentedrandomdomain.com.
>Another approach is to disallow all DNS or only allow *.netflix.com for the TV. In my experience attempting to only allow certain domains is a game of whackamole where everyone in the house complains their stuff is broken because it needs undocumentedrandomdomain.com.
...not to mention that apps have random third party SDKs that are required, and might not work if you block those domains. A/B testing/feature flags SDKs, and DRMs (for provisioning keys) come to mind.
Until Samsung builds a fridge that won't cool if it goes more than some period of time (a week?) without pinging their servers. They'd probably get away with it given the friction of getting a large appliance out of your home and back to the store. Bonus evil points for making this feature active only after the return/warranty period expires.
Good for Texas. State governments often protect us from the federal government. Many laws that we have now were only passed at the federal level when about 2/3 of states previously passed the same laws (e.g., women's voting rights).
I've said it before and I will probably say it again, this is digital assault and should be thought of and treated that way. Companies, and their officers, should be treated criminally for things like this. Most people do not know/understand this is happening and that is by design. Is this view a little hyperbolic? Possibly, but the privacy scales are so far tipped against the average person right now that we need more extreme views and actions to start fixing things.
It has been increasingly interesting to me how aligned the interests of platforms are with advertisers against the end consumer.
I don't think I have ever heard a person say they enjoy watching ads (except maybe the super bowl and even then it's a pretty short list).
Despite that, it seems like ads continue to multiply and companies get even more annoying and slimy with how they integrate them.
I guess what I'm wondering is where the breaking point is, when people start abandoning ad-filled platforms all together and ads become less profitable to sell/purchase.
The person or company to figure out a way other than ads to monetize eye balls (and its not just data, that's only used to make better ads) will be the next Google.
That still doesn't escape ACR, AFAIK. These "smart" TVs still capture screenshots from HDMI inputs.
That's one of the reasons I only buy Sony for years now. ACR & the like are opt-out at the first terms/privacy screen, and you can even go into Android/Google TV settings and just disable the APK responsible. (Samba something-something)
It's better not to connect the TV to the Internet at all. This will solve most of your problems. Use a Linux HTPC to stream content (not an Apple box, they collect telemetry and profile users like others).
I googled how to disable ACR on my new Samsung TV. Followed the instructions only to find out that it was disabled already. That, combined with a built-in physical microphone switch (which I noticed in the quick start guide before I'd even attached the wall mount) made me quite impressed with Samsung off the bat.
It does have some weird behaviors, though, like occasionally letting me know it has some kind of AI features or something, or bringing up a pop-up on the screen letting my kid know how to use the volume control on the remote every time he uses the volume control on the remote for the first time since power-on.
I loathe whenever an older family member ends up at the TV menu, since chances are they will not be able to find their way back to whatever external device they were trying to use the TV as a monitor for. TVs using android seem to be irritated that you even plan on using some external device plugged into the HDMI ports.
You may want to look into an AVR (audio/video receiver), also known as a home theater receiver. Aside from powering speakers, that's their core function: connect a variety of inputs (HDMI, AirPlay, radio, composite, etc. etc.) to one or more outputs.
Pro plaintif not only because of privacy concerns, but if it raises the cost of televisions by introducing a production inefficiency, it is one step against the Baumol Effect.
I'd never thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right, particularly in Germany, by a factor of at least 3-4. 50-55" mid-range TV: plenty under 400 EUR. Double-glazed window about that size, custom-made (because just about all windows in Germany are custom-made): 1200 EUR, and that was about six years ago - I shudder to think what it would be now.
Ha, we had a company email to all employees saying that we are not allowed to view any company confidential material on any Samsung TVs and appliances because they will take a screenshot of whatever it is you are watching and send it back to Samsung, unless explicitly disabled in settings but that setting is frequently "bugged" and just turns itself back on after some firmware updates.
> "This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries."
But, but, but, you agreed to the TOS didn't you, or else you cannot use your TV.
I have a cheap samsung from 5 years ago that pops up a dialog when it boots. I've never read it or agreed to it. It goes away after about 5 seconds. After that I stream using HDMI and all is well. It's also never been connected to a network.
Can't say what other TVs do, but this one works fine without TOS etc. If there is some feature or other that doesn't work due to this, I can say I've never missed it.
As far as I can tell, I'm doing that right now with a new higher-end Samsung television. The installer showed me how to make it boot directly to the active HDMI source and skip the Samsung smart hub. The TV has never been online and I don't see any reason to change that — what possible improvement could a firmware update bring? I don't use any of the television's software-enabled features.
I think this comes from strictly looking at the world in left/right terms. Texas is a pretty libertarian state. This is probably the entire reason the founders ensconced the states into the union the way they did.
This country is a _spectrum_ of ideas. It's not bipolar. Only the moneyed interests behind political parties want you to think this way.
I guess I just don't understand people who face what should be welcome political surprise with extreme and hyperbolic negativity. It's a feature of this forum which honestly bothers me. It's entirely unproductive and strikes me as a bad faith effort to avoid giving credit to "the other side" even when they're enacting a policy which benefits us all.
I was the original commenter you replied to, and I should say I am not negative at all. In fact it’s just extreme skepticism, it’s different. Given the track record and history of the state I still fully expect this to be a met grab opportunity and will be extremely happy and give credit and praise if they actually end up doing anything. My comment is only skepticism but I guess it’s a close cousin of negativity with a nuance
The comment I replied to said Texas has a liberterian streak. There is nothing libertarian about denying free speech, putting religion up in schools, not selling alcohol because of religion, etc.
But if someone want to praise a state that goes out of its way to tell other people how to live because of religion and say they are “libertarian” because they sue a TV manufacturer, I don’t think that tips the scales
Walmart owns Vizio. Vizio buys components from other manufacturers and has assembly performed overseas. Not sure where the software comes from, but likely one of those suppliers.
It’s impossible to offer any differing opinions or discussion on the differences between the smart TV thing and your whataboutism without triggering a flame war and being downvoted to oblivion.
What does this have to do at all with the posted article about smart TV’s?
Next do Smart TVs listening to you. This is the #1 cause of "uncanny" ads that people get on Facebook, etc. when they think their phone is listening to them. It's usually their TV doing the listening.
> Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching.
https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-...
I wouldn't be surprised if my PS5 was doing the same thing when I'm playing a game or watching a streaming service through it.
The block rates seem to correlate with watch time increasing to ~1/second, so it's definitely trying to phone home with something. Too bad it can't since all its traffic going outside LAN is dropped with prejudice.
If your network allows to see stuff like that, look into what PS5 is trying to do.
I do suspect you're right since they would want to reduce bandwidth, especially since residential upload speeds are slow but this is pretty close to verifiable, right?
Also just curious, what happens if you block those requests? I can say Samsung TVs really don't like it... but they will be fine if you take them fully offline.
I admit, I've not gotten around to properly dumping that traffic. For anyone wanting to do this, there's also a spike of DNS requests every hour on the hour, even if tv is off(well, asleep). Would be interesting to see those too. Might be a fun NY holiday project right there. Even without decrypting (hopefully) encrypted traffic, it should be verifiable.
> Also just curious, what happens if you block those requests?
Due to `*.roku.com` DNS black hole, roku showed no ads but things like Netflix and YouTube using standard roku apps("channels") worked fine. I now moved on to playing content using nvidia shield and blocking outside traffic completely. Only odd thing is that the TV occasionally keeps blinking and complains about lack of network if I misclick and start something except HDMI input.
Firewall is based on hand-rolled nftables rules.
[1]: https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/ [2]: https://vector.dev [3]: https://dnstap.info/Examples/
Doesn't require running anything locally and supports various block rules and lists and allows you to enable full log retention if you want. I recommend it to non-techies as the easiest way to get something like pi-hole/dnscrypt-proxy. (but of course not being self-hosted has downsides)
edit: For Roku, DNS blocking like this only works if Roku doesn't use its own resolver. If it's like some Google devices it'll use 8.8.8.8 for DNS resolution ignoring your gateway/DHCP provided DNS server.
Have you got any recommendations for further reading on this topic?
It's a developer thing, using backticks means the enclosed text is emphasised when rendered from Markdown.
And all that is for the chance to occasionally detect that someone's seen an ad in the background of a stream? Do any platforms even let a streamer broadcast an NFL game like the example given?
Is this data linked to me personally in some way (e.g. though an account) or is it anonymous data?
If you see a unattended laptop in a coffeeshop, do you steal it because “someone will steal it, so it might as well be me”?
Ready to do anything for money as long as it seems legal-ish or your ass is covered by hierarchy?
The only way you can change this is very high social trust, and all of society condemning anyone who ever defects.
You are abdicating your own moral responsibility on the assumption of a deterministic reality.
The literal textbook version of this ethical issue, one you'll find in literally any intro to ethics class is
Sometimes a variant will be introduced with a direct acknowledgement of like donating 10% of your earnings to charity to "offset" your misgivings (ᶜᵒᵘᵍʰ ᴱᶠᶠᵉᶜᵗᶦᵛᵉ ᴬˡᵗʳᵘᶦˢᵐ ᶜᵒᵘᵍʰ).But either way, it is you abdicating your personal responsibility and making the assumption that the job will be done regardless. But think about the logic here. If people do not think like you then the employer must then start offering higher wages in order to entice others. As there is some function describing people's individual moral lines and their desire for money. Even if the employer must pay more you are then helping deter that behavior because you are making it harder to implement. Alternatively the other person that does the job might not be as good at the job as you, making the damage done less than had you done the job. It's not hard to see that often this will result in the job not even existing as truthfully these immoral jobs are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Even if you are making the assumption that the job will be done it would be more naive to assume the job is done to the same quality. (But kudos on you for the lack of ego and thinking you aren't better than other devs)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
Not in the USA. LEO or ICE - or even some judges misuse and never are punished. Qualified immunity.
Moral is different story. Too many people in HN work in Google or Apple. That by itself if immoral.
Some doesn't change the law.
You're right to push back in case I intended something different. But I'll state this clearly: those LEO, ICE agents, and judges are committing crimes.
But the fact that not all criminals are punished or prosecuted does not change the laws either.
What I'm concerned about is people becoming disenfranchised and apathetic. Dismissing the laws we have that does punish LEO, ICE agents, and judges for breaking the laws. To take a defeatist attitude. Especially in this more difficult time where that power is being abused more than ever. But a big reason it is being able to be abused is because a growing apathetic attitude by people. By people giving up.
So I don't know about you and your positions. I don't know if you're apathetic or invested. All I know is a random comment from a random person. It isn't much to go on. But I hope you aren't and I hope you don't spread apathy, intentionally or not.
That way they aren't cut out of the loop by you using a different service to watch something and still have a 'cut'.
Client side processing like this is legitimate and an excellent way to scale, it just hits a little different when it's being used for something that isn't serving you, the user.
source: backend developer
Then server-side the hash is matched to a program or ad and the data accumulated and reduced even further before ending up in someone's analytics dashboard.
All this could be done long before any sort of TV-specific image processing, so the only source of "noise" I can think of would be from the various encodings offered by the streaming service (e.g. different resolutions and bitrates). With the right choice of downsample resolution and color quantization I have to imagine you could get acceptable results.
Not super tough to pull off. I was experimenting with FAISS a while back and indexed screenshots of the entire Seinfeld series. I was able take an input screenshot (or Seinfeld meme, etc) and pinpoint the specific episode and approx timestamp it was from.
this is most likely the case, although there's nothing stopping them from uploading the original 4K screengrab in cases where there's no match to something in their database which would allow them to manually ID the content and add a hash or just scrape it for whatever info they can add to your dossier.
And how many options do you need to toggle to actually opt out?
I never felt more motivated to pi-hole the TV.
Or just disconnect from the internet entirely? You already have an apple tv. Why does your tv need internet access?
Alternatives like using monitors designed for digital signage come with drawbacks. Expense, they don't have desirable features like VRR, HDR or high refresh rates, since they aren't needed for those use cases. Older TV models will break and supply will dry up.
In the long term, this problem, not just TVs but the commercial exploitation of user data across virtually all electronic devices sold, isn't something that can be solved with a boycott, or by consumers buying more selectively. The practice needs to be killed with legislation.
What we are lacking is implementation but the tech and probably the intent was always there. If HDMI ethernet connectivity(HEC) had gained traction, we would have seen a fire stick, apple tv or roku providing internet to your tv without asking for explicit consent.
My opinion is this is just a consolidation of devices. I have many friends who live off their phone data plan giving hotspot to the TV and other devices. Now being moved into a common device format, the TV. I don't think they can spy any more effectively this way. Eexcept via the router integration that gives them way more access, but I'm sure this exists already as a wifi feature on tvs. Just technology trudging along. Perhaps they have a secret sim card or esim embedded, that might be a risk as the hardware is already there for a valid reason.
This place like a flat-earther gathering sometimes.
For example, check out https://github.com/akamhy/videohash
I’m shocked to be agreeing with Ken Paxton but he’s right on this one.
Are health providers using PS5s in a context where information may be leaked to other providers? What kind of information would you expect to be displayed that might violate HIPAA?
Also how would other providers be privvy to this view of this xray?
I work with a lot of small medical offices, and they do use consumer Smart TVs in some contexts. I typically limit their network access for other reasons, and displaying X-rays isn’t something I’ve personally facilitated, but it wouldn’t shock me to discover it’s being done in other clinics, and the popularity of cloud-based ePHR software has left a lot of smaller clinics with very limited internal I.T. services.
The destination isn’t relevant, if the image leaves the clinic at all without consent, that’s a HIPAA violation. Fortunately, I think it’s more likely that the images are sampled and/or hashed in a way that means the full image isn’t technically transmitted, but considering the consequences and costs of a data breach, I’d definitely be wary of it.
Come on hackers. We could murder the global economy with this shit.
> ... See you after the break.
brief pause
> And we're back ...
Unfortunately, most ads are now burnt in. The 10 second advance will skip through them, but as it's usually the host parroting the ad text and it's easy to over shoot.
Like, Apple knows what you're watching within the Apple TV app obviously.
But it's certainly not taking screenshots every second of what it displaying when you use other apps -- which shows and ads you're seeing. Nor does Apple sell personal data.
Other video apps do register what shows you're in the middle of, so they can appear on the top row of your home screen. But again, Apple's not selling that info.
But I do trust apple more
Isn't that too much data to even begin to analyze? The only winner here seems like S3.
The greatest irony is that HDCP goes to great lengths to try and prevent people from screenshotting copyrighted content, and here we have the smart TVs at the end just scraping the content willy-nilly. If someone manages to figure out how to use ACR to break DRM, maybe the MPAA will be motivated to kill ACR :)
VPPA — Video Privacy Protection Act: a U.S. law aimed at limiting disclosure of people’s video-viewing/rental history.
HDCP — High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection: an anti-copy protocol used on HDMI/DisplayPort links to prevent interception/recording of protected video.
DRM — Digital Rights Management: a broad term for technical restrictions controlling how digital media can be accessed, copied, or shared.
MPAA — Motion Picture Association of America: the former name of the main U.S. film-industry trade group (now typically called the MPA, Motion Picture Association).
TV / TVs — Television(s).
You can store my data for me, but only encrypted, and it can be decrypted only in a sandbox. And the output of the sandbox can be sent only back to me, the user. Decrypting the personal data for any other use is illegal. If an audit shows a failure here, the company loses 1% of revenue the first time, then 2%, then 4, etc.
And companies must offer to let you store all of your own data on your own cloud machine. You just have to open a port to them with some minimum guarantees of uptime, etc. They can read/write a subset of data. The schema must be open to the user.
Any systems that have been developed from personal user data (i.e. recommendation engines, trained models) must be destroyed. Same applies: if you're caught using a system that was trained in the past on aggregated data across multiple users, you face the same percentage fines.
The only folks who maybe get a pass are public healthcare companies for medical studies.
Fixed.
(But yeah it'll never happen because most of the techies are eager to screw over everyone else for their own gain. And they'll of course tell you it's to make the services better for you.)
Once a generation starts to accept that everything they do is getting tracked, things may never go back, it may even lead autocracy.
Good times.
Google's choice to use it for calculation results despite having essentially no restriction on text space always annoyed me. I think this is the first time I've seen a human using it
It’s also pretty common on scientific and graphing calculators; the first time I saw it was in junior school in maths.
I think it scratches a similar itch to putting up a game camera to see what sort of vermin are running around in your back yard.
Turned them all off except for trip updates that day.
Best part is- yesterday I received yet another unsolicited spam push message. With all the settings turned off.
So these companies will effective require you to use their app to use their service, then refuse to respect their own settings for privacy.
Also all notifications/etc are silent, except for alarms, pages, phone calls, and specific named people's texts.
Everything else... no. YouTube was the worst offender before for me.
Uber. Hands down. I'm using it a lot less since they started sending ads on the same notification channel as my ride updates.
The main exception to this is the notification spam from Google asking me to rate call quality after every damn call. I don't have my phone rooted, so I can't turn off that category of notification.
It’s the enshitification of the notification system, the apps are already filled with ads and now they’re making you open the app or splash things on your face.
Edit: And something similar with Windows now that I think about it; there was a privacy setting which would appear to work till you re-entered that menu. Saving the setting didn't actually persist it, and the default was not consumer-friendly.
I want smart tv because I want use my streaming services but that’s it. I also want high quality panels. Maybe the solution is high quality TVs where you just stick a custom HDMI device (similar to Amazon fire stick) and use it as the OS. Not sure if there are good open source options since Apple seems to be another company that keeps showing you ads even if you pay shit load of money for their hardware and software, Jobs must turning in his grave
When a new permission appears without notice and defaults to the most-violating setting, gaslighting you into the illusion of agency but in fact you never had any, you've been Zucked.
Search for 5g miot or 5g massive iot or maybe even 5g redcap
> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizio
you would be incredibly uncomfortable with someone wide-eyed staring you down and taking notes of your behavior, wouldnt you? This is what tech companies are doing to everyone by default and in many cases they actively prevent you from stopping them. It is the most insane thing that people only seem to mildly complain about.
Also, if i remember what I read well, he may not be aware that Samsung is not Chinese.
Whatever is being offered to us must be the best deal we can get, because ... it's being offered to us?
What drives this sentiment? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
Seriously, totally deranged to think the “free market” is capable of protecting humans against widespread nefarious behavior from colluding actors with vast amounts of money and power.
What we (ie. the government) can do is ensure no entities own the entire supply chain, so you can't run a fab and also market finished consumer goods. That way, manufacture of consumer goods (including the software) from the raw fabricated parts gets a much lower barrier to entry.
We can also force consumer manufacturers to advertise all "features" that we deem to be important. We already do things like energy ratings, why not privacy ratings too? The more information consumers have the better.
Make no mistake, any capital intensive industry like electronics will degenerate into an oligopoly without government, or you can dream of a day where everyone can print semiconductor wafers at home.
You can look at Vizio's quarterly statements before Walmart bought them: their devices were margin negative and "Platform+" (ads) made up for it: https://investors.vizio.com/financials/quarterly-results/def...
They should not be allowed to track user at all as a hardware manufacturer, let the users purchase the tracking software themselves and get a rebate back.
Heck if I had strong guarantees that the data generated by ACR was used only to tune recommendations/ads using an anonymous advertising ID like IDFA and not linked to any personally identifying information, I would want that too. But sadly there is no privacy and no way of ensuring that now.
I am a strong privacy advocate, but I also believe in customers choice. Hence, the primary issue I have with this technology is not its existence, but the lack of transparency in the pricing and the inability to truly properly opt out of this data collection.
At some point in the past year, I‘ve read someone suggest a „privacy label“ for electronics, akin to the energy efficiency labels that exist around the world. The manufacturers should be forced to disclose the extend of the data collection as well as the purpose and the ability to opt out on the product packaging, before the customer makes the purchase
Sort of reminds me how we complain loudly about how shitty airline service is, and then when we buy tickets we reliably pick whichever one is a dollar cheaper.
Its only when they get home (and likely not even right away) that they discover their TV is spying on them and serving ads.
This is a perfect situation where government regulation is required. Ideally, something that protects our privacy. But, minimally something like a required 'nutrition label' on any product that sends our data off device.
So it’s not a question of being savvy. As a consumer you can’t know what a company will choose to do in the future.
The lawsuit seems to be about using ACR, not the presence of ads.
To the parent commenters' point, this is a perfect example of a situation where governments should be stepping in.
That ought to be a slam dunk win in court. Especially since they probably won't show up to my local small claims court and I'll just send them the judgement.
The downside is that it's sometimes easier and cheaper to just pay off the class and keep doing it.
> ...This is a perfect situation where government regulation is required.
Isn't this precisely the dynamic which causes governments to have an interest in ensuring that consumers don't become savvy?
This didn't work for GDPR cookie warnings.
Top down governance isn't a silver bullet, but it has its place in a functioning society.
I agree more legislation is required.
Guess what became required this year? At least it seems I can still use them offline if I don't use the official app. But the official app is now just a popup requiring me to create an account. I'm not sure if I could add new lights using third party apps. Not like I'm ever buying a Hue product again though.
The only cases where it's clearcut are a few overseas airlines like Singapore Airline who have such a rock solid reputation for great service that people will book them even if the price is 2x.
But TV manufacturers can change the TV’s behavior long after it is purchased. They can force you to agree to new terms of service which can effectively make the TV a worse product. You cannot conclude the consumer didn’t care.
If each TV attracted a fine two to three times the amount manufacturers received from selling its data the practice would drop stone dead.
All it takes is proper legislation. Consumers just lobby your politicians.
I am not convinced of this. there is more recurring revenue involved in spying on people
No one cares. Smart TVs are super awesome to non tech people who love them. Plug it in, connect to WiFi - Netflix and chill ready. I have a friend who just bought yet another smart TV so he can watch the Hockey game from his bar.
> If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
What happened to that Jumbo (dumbo?) TV person who was on here wanting to build these things? My guess is they saw the economics and the demand and gave up. I applaud them for trying though. I still cling to my two dumb 1080 Sony TVs that have Linux PC's hooked to them.
The problem is easily solved and I'm surpised more people don't do it. For years I've just connected a PVR/STB (set top box) to a computer monitor. It's simple and straightforward, just connect the box's HDMI output into a computer monitor.
Moreover, PVR/STBs are very cheap—less than $50 at most, I've three running in my household.
If one wants the internet on the same screen just connect a PC to another input on your monitor. This way you've total isolation, spying just isn't possible.
but I think small issues in society might translate to small issues for government action, and regulatory capture has a super-high roi overturning "minor" stuff.
I suspect only showing real harm for something is the only way to get these things high-enough priority for action.
I kind of wonder if the pager attacks, or the phone nonsense in ukraine/russia might make privacy a priority?
If no one manufactures such a product, how does the "market" express this desire?
Buying one toaster, that would last your lifetime, is easily manufactured today, and yet no company makes such a thing. This is true across hundreds of products.
The fact is, manufacturing something that isn't shit, is less profitable, so what we're gonna get is shit. It doesn't really matter what people "want".
This is true for toasters and TVs...
The non-electric office tools I have from that era are perpetual. Eternal.
I don't think they would. There are some TV manufacturers that are better about not nagging you (which is one of the reasons why I bought a Sony last year), but as time moves forward, companies have been less likely to leave money on the table. This is just the logical result of capitalism. Regulation will be the only way to protect consumer privacy.
Similarly, air travel gets worse as consumer protection regulations gets rolled back
If you want to make a free market argument you need to look up what a free market is. In particular, consumers need to have perfect information. Do you really think if manufacturers were obligated to make these "features" clear that most people wouldn't care?
Users are tracked without real consent, advertisers still waste budgets, and everyone loses except the platforms collecting the data.
What’s interesting is that you can actually build effective ads without spying at all — by targeting intent signals instead of identities, and rewarding users transparently for engagement.
The tech is already there, but the incentives are still backwards.
Sure the method is different but it’s the same goal. Company x learns your interests so It can monetize you by selling to advertisers
Anyways, the whole thing sucks for consumer privacy and needs to be outlawed. The problem is that companies come up with unique, tricky ways of exploiting you, and people can never fully understand it without a lot of effort. Someone might be ok using Google and seeing contextual ads, but wouldn’t be ok if they knew Google was saving a screenshot of their browser every second and uploading and reselling it. The first can feel innocuous, the second feels evil.
[1] https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000298248/hearing-in-la...
Secret? There's T's&C's that people agree to when starting up their TV that tells them.
That doesn't make it right of course and it shouldn't just be opt-in, it should be banned entirely. If you want to analyse my viewing behaviour, pay me.
I generally agree that reading the T&C is on the user and you cannot blame the lack if transparency onto the company, IF the T&C are sufficiently comprehensible. Some T&Cs I‘ve read are written in obscure enough legalese that it might as well be considered hidden information
I like the suggested "Don't Upload My Bits" backronym.
In the life of my last TV (10+ yrs), I've had to switch out that separate box three times. It would have sucked & been way more expensive to have had to replace the TV each time.
Firmware can be updated, sure, but there's the risk of some internal component failing. There's the risk of the services I want to use not being compatible. I'd also prefer to use an operating system I'm familiar with, because, well, I'm familiar with it, rather than some custom firmware from a TV company whose goal is to sell your data, not make a good user experience...
Of course, this ties back to the enshittification of the Internet. Every company is trying to be a data broker now though, because they see it as free passive income.
I have a TV that's only about 5-6 years old and has a built in Roku. It mostly works fine, but the built in hardware is simply not fast enough to play some streaming services, specifically some stuff on F1TV. And before anyone asks, it's not a bandwidth problem--I have gigabit fiber and the TV is using ethernet.
Anyway, between that, general UI sluggishness and the proliferation of ads in the Roku interface, I switched to an Apple TV and haven't looked back.
Yes I know there is a theoretical capability for it to connect to unsecured WIFI. No one still has unsecured WIFI anymore
And instead of a full brick, let's just downgrade to 360p and call it an "expiration of your complementary free Enhanced Video trial".
Same thing that prevents your phone manufacturer from adding a firmware level backdoor that uploads all your nudes to the mothership 1 day after the warranty expires. At some point you just have to assume they're not going to screw you over.
That'd be quite naive in my opinion.
Google devices are out because they are developed by a advertising company.
The Roku CEO outright said they sell Roku devices below costs to advertise to you.
The stick is $30 and trivially replaced. The TV is closer to $1000. Worst-case scenario I'll just hook up an HTPC or Blue-Ray player to the TV.
I've literally never seen a router with a guest wifi enabled by default, from any ISP or otherwise - is that a common thing where you live?
The trick was finding TV's and what not that don't need an Internet connection. Vizio was the only brand I could find that still had just dumb tv flat screens, believe it or not.
I isolate smart TVs and other IOT devices to a separate network/subnet, and usually block their network access unless they need an update.
A DUMB TV costs $x, while a badly behaved smart TV costs $y up front, plus $z per hour for the next few years, where y is potentially slightly less than x.
They cost more because they aren’t subsidised by this junk.
It’s a good hypothesis. Every one I’ve seen is the consumer version in a more-rugged exterior running different software, so I’m sceptical.
I currently have volume control on my TV, one on the OS on the computer that drives it and one on the application that makes the picture. That is only half the problem
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/pblj86/windows...
I own a 60 year old black and white tv. If the volume knob vanished people would know the problem is in my head.
I only found this out because I thought my 15 year old plasma TV had died, but it ended up being the power cord.
I'm surprised they haven't switched to using DoH, which would prevent this from working.
Regardless, what is the benefit of putting the TV on the network but preventing it from doing DNS lookups anyway, even if you could be sure you succeed?
Modern cars have cellular modems, I unplugged mine, and would not hesitate to take apart a TV and physically rip off the modem.
https://www.resmed.com/en-us/products/cpap/machines/airsense...
For bandwidth, maybe. It's still going to add cost to the BOM. They'll have to recoup that somehow. Say a 5G modem costs $20 (random number). For it to actually make money, it'll need to be otherwise not connected to the internet, otherwise it can just use wifi instead. Out of 100 people, how many do you think won't connect it to the internet for privacy reasons? 1? 5? 10? Keep in mind, if they don't connect to the internet, they'll need to go out and get another device to watch netflix or whatever, so they're highly incentivized to. Say 10 out of 100 don't, and with this sneaky backdoor you now can sell ads to them. For that privilege, you paid $200 per disconnected TV, because for every disconnected TV with a 5G module, you need to have a 5G module in 9 other TVs that were already connected to the internet. How could you ever hope to recoup that expense?
again the above is the plan, reality often changes.
.its an insane lawsuit, there are basically two outcomes crazy side effects from his lawsuit:
Tvs are banned. (Possibly can only texas permitted tv)
Or if he loses, which might be his donors goal of him litigating so terribly, all your data now belongs to the companies.
Theres no consumer friendly option here
There's only so much time in the day, only so much life to live. Could a blog post written by the worst person you know have a good point, even though it's titled something like "An argument in favor of kicking puppies" by Satan himself? I mean, true, I haven't read it, yet. There could be a sound, logical argument buried within.
This is also what "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" teaches, essentially. Trust is hard-won, and easily squandered.
"A lie is around the world before the truth has finished tying its shoes."
"Flood the Zone" is why some of us are so exhausted, though.
In these instances, the argument has to come from someone who is self-aware enough of the short-circuit to say "okay, look, I am going to address that elephant" — but mostly, that's not what happens.
Thankfully in this case, all we need get through is the title.
This guy does nothing good on purpose.
Paxton, however, doesn't give one iota of damn about individual freedom. So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge.
Unfortunately, we don't have Molly Ivins around anymore to tell us what is really going on here in the Texas Laboratory for Bad Government.
This is about being in the news as much as possible. He is in a close 3 way race for the 2026 Republican spot for US Senate. The other two are current old-school conservative senator John Cornyn, and new comer MAGA Wesley Hunt (but not as MAGA as Paxton). Lots of in-fighting over funding, so Paxton is making sure to get in the news as much as possible.
Throughout the year he has been in the news for things that are useful like this and another suit against a utility company for causing a fire and others for typical maga things like lawsuit to stop harris county (Houston) funding legal services for immigrants facing deportation or immigrant-serving nonprofits or a "tip-line" for bathroom enforcement or lawsuits against doctors...it goes on and on and on. It's a page out of the Trump playblook, its like watching a trump clone. And thats the point.
This explains why Vizio, who is owned by Walmart, was not sued.
The American Government wants to have the cake and eat it too, as per usual. They want to leave the massive column of the economy that is surveillance capitalism intact and operating, and making them money, and they want to make sure those scary communists can't do the same. Unfortunately there isn't really a way to take down one without taking down the other, unless you legally enshrine that only American corporations have a right to spy on Americans. And (at time of comment anyway) they seem to not want to openly say the reason is just naked nationalism/racism.
> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]
But I'm sure Texans are fully aware and consented to this, right?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizio
Easy fix
You need to go to Settings -> All Settings -> General -> System -> Additional Settings to make sure the "Live Plus" option is OFF.
Check it periodically, as it sometimes turns itself back on again after updates.
The market probably isn’t big enough yet, but I’ll bet it grows. I mean _Texas_ is bringing it up!
I used to have a Roku TV, plus a a few of the standalone Roku Ultras for my other (non-Roku) TVs. I got a full page advert when I started up the TV one day and started the process of replacing them all (I think it is when Roku were experimenting with that).
Over about a year I replaced them with Apple TVs* and the user experience is far better, plus the amount of tracking domains reported by Pi-hole dropped precipitously! The TVs don't have internet access at all, they are just driven via the HDMI port now.
* I replaced the Ultras first, and when the Roku TV eventually started acting laggy on the apps I replaced the Roku TV as well.
Another approach is to disallow all DNS or only allow *.netflix.com for the TV. In my experience attempting to only allow certain domains is a game of whackamole where everyone in the house complains their stuff is broken because it needs undocumentedrandomdomain.com.
...not to mention that apps have random third party SDKs that are required, and might not work if you block those domains. A/B testing/feature flags SDKs, and DRMs (for provisioning keys) come to mind.
“X + 1”
I hope they’re enjoying the video footage.
I do have a smart TV, but I have no use for it since my NVIDIA Shield does all the lifting.
A good enough android TV dongle will cost €30. So...
I don't think I have ever heard a person say they enjoy watching ads (except maybe the super bowl and even then it's a pretty short list).
Despite that, it seems like ads continue to multiply and companies get even more annoying and slimy with how they integrate them.
I guess what I'm wondering is where the breaking point is, when people start abandoning ad-filled platforms all together and ads become less profitable to sell/purchase.
The person or company to figure out a way other than ads to monetize eye balls (and its not just data, that's only used to make better ads) will be the next Google.
No, Google will copy them and shut them down.
From there I could pick an app or input on the Apple TV and then I'm good.
That's all I want, nothing these TVs try to provide I want, quite the opposite.
I loathe ending up on the TV menu...
That's one of the reasons I only buy Sony for years now. ACR & the like are opt-out at the first terms/privacy screen, and you can even go into Android/Google TV settings and just disable the APK responsible. (Samba something-something)
It does have some weird behaviors, though, like occasionally letting me know it has some kind of AI features or something, or bringing up a pop-up on the screen letting my kid know how to use the volume control on the remote every time he uses the volume control on the remote for the first time since power-on.
Still, a pretty decent TV nonetheless.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VIZIO_Official/search/?q=ads
https://www.reddit.com/r/VIZIO_Official/search/?q=advertisin...
It's amazing to see what they have gotten away with in the last few years. The average consumer has no choice and now way to opt out of the nonsense.
But, but, but, you agreed to the TOS didn't you, or else you cannot use your TV.
Can't say what other TVs do, but this one works fine without TOS etc. If there is some feature or other that doesn't work due to this, I can say I've never missed it.
/s
I think this comes from strictly looking at the world in left/right terms. Texas is a pretty libertarian state. This is probably the entire reason the founders ensconced the states into the union the way they did.
This country is a _spectrum_ of ideas. It's not bipolar. Only the moneyed interests behind political parties want you to think this way.
They tried to fire teachers who spoke bad about a racist podcaster
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/15/texas-education-teac...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
Weed is still illegal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_Texas
You can’t sell liquor on Sunday
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_laws_of_Texas
There is a state law restricting what can be discussed in public schools
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/12/02/texas-public-schools...
And he is pushing for schools to post the 10 commandments
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...
But if someone want to praise a state that goes out of its way to tell other people how to live because of religion and say they are “libertarian” because they sue a TV manufacturer, I don’t think that tips the scales
What does this have to do at all with the posted article about smart TV’s?
edit: why the downvotes?