Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/17/privacy-pros-opt-out.html
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Tv’s? Disable Wifi. Seriously. TV became watchable again without the ads being pushed at every I changed the fucking channel.
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There are TVs that display ads when changing a channel? Who buys these things?
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I hate looking at stuff on BB only to find the click-through is behind a paywall. (Or not available outside of the US)
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It’s a ploy to get you to buy VPN service (now available through the BB Store!)
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It is a ploy to get you to move to the US to help skew the voting landscape away from the Alt-Right.
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At least we were able to see the Roku setting. Because I am currently lounging on the sofa with my American bulldog, I immediately fired up the Roku and changed the privacy settings.
Linkedin is creepy. They have managed to identify people I know IRL who are not in my industry and whom I have never sent an email, who are not even within a few degrees of connection, people I have met on the street while walking with my dog and that is my sole contact with them. I routinely check privacy settings on LI and shut down any access they granted themselves in sneaky ways.
I did. I didn’t know that was going to happen. It’s a normal smart TV from Samsung. There are certain channels that, when you first change to them, shrink the picture to one corner (about 70 percent of normal) and then show an ad in the surrounding frame for about thirty seconds. There were other annoyances that also went away when I shut off wifi. Hybrid TV sucks.
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Thanks for warning. I wouldn’t suspect this kind of thing, especially from manufacturer like Samsung. When I was buying TV to use as a computer monitor, I avoided smart ones due to planned obsolescence and higher possibility of failure. Now I have another reason to avoid them 
I think that turning wifi off is a good idea - friend’s father runs a TV repair shop, and says that smart TVs typically get slower with time. It seems to be caused by firmware updates - reinstalling firmware generally fixes it.
A simpler solution: don’t use any of these services.
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I got a popup but could view the site here in the UK [shrug].
Thank you, Cory!!! This info has been a long time coming!
Washington Post lets me see something like three articles a month. This is about half as many articles as people link to on Twitter with blind shortened URLs, so those three get used up pretty fast.
When I remember it, I go look up the article’s title and see if it’s been picked up by another paper. In this case, the article has been picked up by another paper and was readable sans pay wall: http://www.dailytribune.com/article/DT/20180617/BUSINESS/180619715
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Thank you, now I could read the details.
One thing that the article forgets is about third parties. It is not sufficient to click that you do not want yahoo (or samsung, linkedin, etc…) not to process your private data to send you “personalised advertisement”. You also need to request that you data is not shared by third parties. No, it does not come automatically.
I found that with yahoo / oath. With the new regulation, they presented me with a page to click and accept. After having de-activated all tracking, there was a large “accept” button and a much smaller link to click at the very bottom of the page. That tiny link opened a very long list of third party trackers. Firms I knew nothing about (but the few I checked proved to be real advertisement middlemen). I could not count them, there were probably more than hundred and they needed to be deactivated one by one. It took me about 30 minutes.
Fellow yahoo users can just check and confirm whether the option exists in the USA. I am interested to know.
People using linkedin or a samsung TV could check whether there is something similar (I don’t use either, so I would not know). Google and Facebook do not appear to have a similar list, but I don’t think they want to sell their data to middlemen. I know as a fact that google has a system called “cookie reauthentication” to keep their data to themselves, while still selling out your preferences.
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