Several people suggested not to connect the TV to Internet, effectively preventing uploads of user data.
The manufacturer does not want that, they want the revenue from your data. Some TVs will refuse to work when not connected to the mother ship, for example displaying an internet connection message on screen.
wonder what would happen if you bought and then ran your own Dns redirecting the url they want to reach to one you control. Is that ‘hacking’? Would you run afoul of the Computer Fraud and abuse act in the U.S?
So I think what I hear you saying is: it wasn’t reasonably affordable until manufacturing computing hardware by modern slave labor was accepted as “part of the bargain”. And there’s no way the affluent parts of the world could have replicated that in the non-tech time/world. Do I have that right?
Copy/paste of my reply to the other user that said more or less the same thing:
So I think what I hear you saying is: it wasn’t reasonably affordable until manufacturing computing hardware by modern slave labor was accepted as “part of the bargain”. And there’s no way the affluent parts of the world could have replicated that in the non-tech time/world. Do I have that right?
Would you say, also, that now there’s more externalizing of costs to the end-users/consumers? Not only in terms of dollars [edit to add: also e-waste, pollution, etc.], but in annoyance and psychological burden…
So… this is all very important and serious, but the 10 year-old in me wants to be friends with Cory and Alice so I can go to their house after school to play video games.
My 5yr old Vizio won’t display the time when ethernet and wifi are pulled …which I did in 2014 when we found out they were calling home. No pop-up nagging though. Haven’t updated since. Not sure what I’ll do when this puppy dies.
Now I just have to wonder what the AppleTV is doing. (I’m so clever…unplug the tv but leave Apple on the backbone).
TV manufacturers are correct: the profit margin is lower and lower. So they look at how to monetize that profit.
Back in the 80s what was the profit margin on a CRT TV?
Now there’s like an entire province in china devoted to just making TVs (hyperbolically speaking) so the market is rather flooded. Get this one! NO get this one cheaper!! HELLS NO THIS ONE IS EVEN CHEAPER!!!
So, as all good capitalists do, manufacturers look at how to capitalize on their product. These days, there’s more value in selling information and data than the goods themselves. So I don’t blame them. This is today’s marketplace.
That of course will work. But in doing so you are sacrificing the benefits of network access:
Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, weather “widgets”, firmware updates, etc.
It seems like there would be a market for a product that took in the connection from your smart device and went out to the router/Internet. It would act as the TV’s firewall, allowing good connections (to Hulu), and denying bad connections (to the TV’s mothership). And occasionally, you’d allow connections to the mothership if, say, you wanted a firmware update. (Im not too up on current routers; it seems like such a product must already be out there?)
Ideally, this could be in software. Someone could write a “Little Snitch” widget for the smart TV. But the [virtually useless] widget library on these smart devices is no doubt more tightly regulated than Apples app store.
The slave labour part isn’t relevant. Even an expensive handbuilt cray supercomputer wouldn’t offset the cost savings you get from being able to send millions and millions of spam emails per hour. When your ISP shuts you down, you move to another. Or even better, you hijack botnets to do that for you.
There’s no equivalent scale in Meatspace that comes close. On the net all mailboxes worldwide are milliseconds away, and the difference in cost to mailing 1, 1000, or 100,000 is infinitesimal.
I solve this by connecting my Vizio to wifi with a reserved DHCP address for that device, but blocking all network access for that host. I guess if they wanted to get really tricky, they could try randomizing the MAC address after I gave it the wifi password. TV is probably from 2014 or so, and aside from a little icon when you pop up the menu, it doesn’t complain. I never use the menu after the setup is done.
To all those saying “well you lose the smart features if you don’t put it on a network”, I watch all that stuff on a PC (that does some of it’s own spying, but I have control over that too) connected to the TV. It’s always up to date, it gets security fixes long after the TV will stop getting updates (if it ever got updates at all). I can play games on it and watch just about ANY streaming service I want.
Weather i can check on my phone or PC. Netflix and other services i can get through my gaming console, if i didn’t have it i could use something like a Roku which i would 100% prefer over having a smart TV watching everything i do. So i dont see the downside to not connecting a smart TV besides it potentially displaying annoying messages about wanting to have connection, if it doesnt then i definitely dont see a downside.
More or less, though I think it would probably still be economical to do even if the people manufacturing the computing hardware were paid a fair wage. The slave labor just makes the hardware so cheap that pretty much every one who sells something can get in on the racket.
As I said, I am just speculating so I could very well be wrong.
Surely some of this could have been done in the pre-digital age, e.g. stores that allowed people to buy on credit, or companies that sold things through the mail, could collate and sell records of what people bought on a regular basis, and sell that data to a marketer who could aggregate and analyze it. But without a computer, even the most basic aggregation and analysis would have to be done by a human, by hand (imagine getting a mixture of hand- and type-written paper records of what people in a metro area bought, and trying to pull out all the people who regularly buy a certain brand of toothpaste). So many person-hours of work would be needed to create an ultimately pretty crude customer profile, in the hopes that you could then direct market to people by phone or mail (again, done by a human by hand). So it probably just wasn’t worth the cost to do it.
Of course it’s relevant. It’s a foundation/base layer propping up the entire scheme. If there were only “handbuilt” expensive machines in the world the number of eyeballs in front of screens would be drastically reduced, and the “market” for spam would follow.
Exactly. With current level of automation labour costs make only a small part of final product price, I guess that it’s no more than a few precent.
They wouldn’t be handbuilt or expensive - in 1980’s computers were manufactured more locally, without slave labour and with much less automation. They weren’t all that expensive.
For example ZX Spectrum was made in UK:
And various clones were made all around the world:
Many of those have Ethernet and/or WiFi, but I’d expect they’re more tolerant of not being connected. The typical usage involves connection to a PC, and the Ethernet may just be there for integration with a Crestron system.
