This. I’ll gladly pay more for an AppleTV as my primary streaming platform for this very reason. Kudos to Mozilla for pointing out that the AppleTV is one of the few boxes where the vendor isn’t deeply interested in your behavioural data.
5 Likes
It’s funny, though, because said data doesn’t have any intrinsic monetary value. The reason people want it is for marketing purposes, because it is supposed to help sell things. If the data are always more valuable than the sales…well, that really suggests some kind of bubble, doesn’t it?
5 Likes
I recently bought a Sony flat CRT 32" TV. 720p, HDMI, Component, Composite, some others…
It’s huge, but great, my retro game console light guns work, and it doesn’t fucking spy on me.
4 Likes
This whole people’s behavior as profit thing is really messed up.
One step below a cat stealing your soul. Does Vizio mean cat in some language?
4 Likes
I don’t own a TV and can’t imagine ever having one again.
TV is dead.
You can buy large computer monitors these days. They don’t do any of this crap.
3 Likes
Ooooh, my Vizio data is going to be so valuable.
Watched HDMI1 for a few hours. Watched HDMI3 for 30 minutes.
Hope they paid top dollar for that information that I’m just giving away here.
2 Likes
Took longer than I expected to get an “I don’t own a TV” comment. Something must be off today.
5 Likes
couldn’t you plug it into a power strip with a switch and turn it off with that? I dunno how new TVs work. is there a danger of screwing up their operating system when you force a shut down that way?
1 Like
Sure. Some models take longer to reboot than it took a 1950ies TV set to warm up its bulbs, though. Progress, or so I’m told.
5 Likes
Sure, but if you’ve got a nice clean wall-mounted setup with an outlet directly behind the TV that’s a pain. Plus that means you need to use the remote to turn it back on, which is annoying if you’re just using it as a monitor for a game system or whatever. I prefer a built-in button.
3 Likes
HDMI is a digital signal. Your TV can certainly snoop on the “content protection” information that is present and find out a lot more than “HDMI1”
5 Likes
I have one of the last plasma TV’s made by Samsung, it’s HD and dumb, and gobbles up electricity to the point where you can feel heat radiate off of it, but after that dies I might go back to not having a TV set at all. It’s not just that they’re spying on their users, SmartTV’s just seem to be a more disposable product built with a life which ends once the manufacturer decides to stop supporting the software in it. I understand they can be still used, but users are still going to have to navigate screens with defunct options, unnecessary bootup times, things that are just annoying and a constant reminder that you’ve got a hobbled product.
4 Likes
What, you don’t want HTML and WebGL overlays on your reading or show or whatever? How are you going to MST3K all the things and watch RESTful pharma ads fight for space? What will you run fuzzers on to always be fronting on the internet, knocking the set back and forth between Film Threat mode, Cahiers du Cinema mode, Paris Review and Fangoria modes?
Sure, you looked at Radio over ATSC 3.0 and wondered how many 20s you’d have to roll to hear something decent, but with local storage …yeah, I dunno, maybe it plays your .flac files.
7 Likes
I bet he didn’t own a TV way before it was cool to not own a TV.
3 Likes
more than twice as much profit from their “Platform Plus” service, which includes advertising and data farming, than they did from actual TVs.
That’s the key word. No one makes much profit off TVs or any other hardware*, just a lot of revenue. Not surprising that data, which has minimal cost, makes more money.
*(Apple may be the exception)
1 Like
I’m just glad that my Sony noise-cancelling headphones sound awesome in their stock configuration, because the legalese I saw when I tried their Android app convinced me to immediately nope out and uninstall it. Their software side learned the wrong lesson from the rootkit debacle, or else they learned the wrong lesson. Fortunately, before buying mine I had the opportunity to try a pair with my own music and liked them a lot.
2 Likes
Samsung TVs have been called out before for being able to upload screenshots.
And yeah, Automatic content recognition - Wikipedia
In 2015, ACR technology spread to even more applications and smart TVs. Social applications and TV manufacturers like Facebook, Twitter, Google, WeChat, Weibo, LG, Samsung, and Vizio TV have used ACR technology either developed by themselves or integrated from third party ACR providers.
Data data everywhere
2 Likes
…and not a drop to think.
4 Likes
Think I’ll keep my 11 year old Panasonic non-smart plasma running as long as I can.
I dislike all in one sets anyway as it’s a single point of failure.
Plus there seems a tendency to drop support for one streaming service or another while my five year old Roku just keeps chugging along and can be replaced for less than two movie tickets and a light dinner in these here parts.
2 Likes
