Post-purchase monetization (viewing and traffic analysis that your “smart tv” phones home about, and that the company who makes your tv sells to advertisers for analytical and targeting purposes).
Mine has never been connected to the internet.
That’s great but if you have a lower end one (and maybe higher end - not sure what they’re doing recently tbh), it may try to sniff out unsecured or public access SSIDs to connect without your knowledge or consent and transmit metrics and metadata anyways.
We use a Linux media computer for all our watching, the TV is used as nothing more than a simple monitor. So if our TV does that, jokes on them, because all the metrics they can get is when we turn it on and off and that we watch through HDMI at the TV max resolution. 🤣🤣🤣
I stopped watching traditional TV 25 years ago, 2nd best decision I ever made, after marrying my wife. 😀
Same here, friend! Same here!
We use a Linux minicomputer as the driver.
On not watching TV: I stopped around 22 years ago. It feels so good.
There would be nothing for one to connect to out here. There’s no WiFi except mine and no cell service unless you go outside.
I would probably desolder the antenna if I was in the city though.If this is a concern, connecting to a decoy SSID that isn’t actually connected to the internet may be the play.
If the device (TV) in question is doing sketchy things like sniffing for open wireless networks, I don’t think pointing it manually at a zero-access WAP stub is going to stop it - it’ll probably just dump that connection and look for another one that works.
So what would you suggest as a countermeasure? In theory rendering the on-board wifi inoperable would work, but this requires an actual alteration to the device and some technical knowledge on how to do so without damaging the TV itself.
Edit: in addition to privacy issues, this sort of behavior would be an actual cybersecurity risk.
Testing the connectivity of your connection is trivial, and the system could easily try to find another of you had no access.
Has there been any evidence of internet-enabled TVs actually doing this, or is it speculative?
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And the cheapest components combined with shortcuts that cause early failure.
As gross as the business is, I do appreciate all the people who blindly agree to all the data mining, privacy violating agreements on their shiny new TVs because they’re a lot of the reason why I can get a 77 inch OLED for so cheap. Manufacturers like LG, Sony and Samsung make some great hardware but their software is worse than Bonzi Buddy.
But yeah, I disable every bit of “smart” and AI functionality (replace it with an Apple TV or something that isn’t loaded with ads and constantly phoning home) and set the location to Albania (which also has the benefit of fully blocking some other “features” from even appearing as an option.
While reading this comment, I’ve realized that like 15 years ago I was dreaming of such a world of cheap devices, partially paid off by their users creating entropy for some deus-ex-machina big data thing that everyone needs. Those dreams had such a retrofuturistic flavor.
I mean, were this done in a way preventing personalized spying, could be nice.
We finally had to break down and accept a smart TV as our last purchase. I didn’t want anything like that on my network. It never gets updates, it never talks to home, it never asks me to agree to anything. The way a display should be.
I do have a few IOT monitors, but they are relegated to the banishment VLAN and are unaware there is anything else on network in the house.
For those who want an dumb TV, you want to shop for a commercial signage display. It’s what a TV should be.
Projectors are also a good option if you want a huge picture with a simple display.
Did you have to shop carefully for a smart TV that you can use dumbly?
You can use pretty much any smart TV dumbly. The most obvious way to do so is to just not connect it to the internet, but if you want it on the network for certain things (like home automation), just don’t agree to the bullshit when you first power it on, create a login, or enable any of the ad-tracking junk disguised as features like “live TV plus” (which is often hidden across multiple menus). The Home Screen for it will forever look like a generic menu begging you to configure your TV, but if you have other stuff plugged into it you’ll hardly ever have to see it.
To really be sure you can use a raspberry pi running a pi-hole server to see if it’s phoning home at all. My LG does nothing online except when I have it pull an update in the rare instance that one comes out with an improvement I care about.
Using a digital signage screen is an interesting suggestion that comes up often, but if you’re a home theater junkie you might have trouble finding one of those at the same level of quality as the best smart TVs at a comparable price. There’s always a trade off to find between what you’re looking for, what you’re willing to deal with, and what you can work around.
I ask because I’ve heard that some TVs brick themselves if you don’t connect to internet and wasn’t sure how common that was.
There are still a few brands of dumb consumer TVs on the market, although they’re becoming harder to find. Ars Technica did a roundup in December.
Need to source commercial monitors, used for menus.
The plot below shows the price of TVs across Best Buy’s Black Friday ads for the last 25 years. The units are “dollars per area-pixel”: price divided by screen area times the number of pixels (normalized so that standard definition = 1). This is to account for the fact that bigger, higher resolution TVs are more expensive. You can see that, in line with the inflation chart, the price per area-pixel has fallen by more than 90%.
Yay! Now do computer ram from 1980 to 2020 before Ai was involved, and discuss size per dollar. You wanna do CPUs or hard drives next?
