Smart TVs with an internet connection: Lets grab screenshots and send them to cooperate analysis advertisement department.
It’s going to get to the point where we’ll need 3rd party open source OSes for every device in our homes.
“Your toaster is spying on you, use ToastOS instead.”
Reminds me of the Cory Doctorow story Unauthorized Bread. It’s as depressing as it is relevant even though it tries to shoot for hope.
I have faith that soon even ‘dumb’ devices will ship with small multi-year battery powered cell-connected evices that cannot be disabled, and are not part of an OS.
You’re not too far off: there are water kettles and rice cookers (Xiaomi) and vacuum cleaners with app support (and definitely not collecting telemetry…)
There are also refrigerators, washers, dryers and dishwashers that collect telemetry.
And toilets
💩
I basically just assume that anything which is closed-source, networked and has sensors of any kind is a spying device. It’s easier than evaluating each one individually.
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In what way?
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I see. I guess I don’t use some of the technology that others do, so I probably don’t have this problem to the same extent others would.
Eh. Its an upfront decision that’s pretty easy to figure out if a TV or something has it. A TV being an extreme case where you know for near certain it has it even. Its about as hard as looking for anything else you care about in a product in most anything else this might be a concern with - I can quickly see if a TV is a smart TV or not.
Disclaimer: I am aware that the TV market specifically is kiiinda weird with their dedicated TV remote button deals that let them sell TV units at a loss (to then be remade by these deals). I still feel this is not much harder a way to live life… I mean, what, I’m gonna spend an extra 20 minutes looking for a TV?
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Modern electronics and computers are a nightmare.
I’ve decided my next TV will be a Digital Sinage Display.
I have an LG “Smart” TV, but because I don’t use it much (view the News in the Public TV and little more) I never connected it to the WiFi, so offline this Live Plus is irrelevant for me.
Not necessarily. Manufacturers have been known to use ad-hoc networks to find a path back home.
For example your neighbour gets a smart tv and connects to the internet. Now your smart tv connected to your neighbours and phones home.
Any proof of this. First I’ve heard about it.
It’s not this the way Apple tag and findmyphone works?
Any TV nowadays is a smart TV, dumb TV are not longer exist since several years, but I don’t think that the TV can connect to the Neighbours WiFi (so smart to crack the passcode, normally long as my arm, my router even with an inbuild Firewall, well…), and even if it is the case, they log the activity of the neighbours WiFi, not mine. There isn’t any network activity in my TV, apart watching 99% Public TV which don’t have ads in most EU countries (because of this, movies in EU public TV are country restricted, I can watch these only in the PC, visiting their homepage using an Proxy with an server of the corresponding country).
It’s not connecting to your neighbours wifi. Your neighbours tv can make its own hidden wifi, that your tv can look for. Once your tv connects to the other tv, it could send whatever data it likes through neighbours tv. Since their tv is internet connected it would get back to manufactures servers.
Now, I haven’t researched this, or have any hard proof of manufactures doing this. But the technology itself would be fairly trivial to implement, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happening.
As others have said, the only sure-fire way to ensure no connection is to remove the wifi chip altogether.
Well, as said before, with the use I give to the TV, it’s anyway irrelevant for me. Logging the news or an ocassional docu in the public TV? Which ads will they show in channels which don`t have?
For what we see nowadays in TV, I often thought to substitute it with a Fishtank, smarter content, HD 3D, true color and no spyware
Enough is enough. If I ever buy a TV, I will personally tear out anything even remotely resembling an antenna (including destroying PCB antennas).
I’ve never found a compelling reason to buy a TV. Now if computer monitors ever go “smart” then I’m in trouble.
Unfortunately, many have already gone “smart” in some capacity - which for me means doing anything I have not expressly allowed it to do. A relatively harmless example is my monitor sometimes deciding it needs to do “OLED protect” - and I cannot stop it from doing that sometimes. At least the idea behind that behaviour is legit (preventing burn-ins) - but ignoring the user’s wishes absolutely not. A clanker that is my property will never get to tell me what it wants to do.
Dude. You bought an LG and gave it access to the Internet. What did you expect?
