I'm happy to see it. They should have included Roku in that too!
> Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching.
Most likely case is that the tv is computing hash locally and sending the hash. Judging by my dnstap logs, roku TV maintains a steady ~0.1/second heartbeat to `scribe.logs.roku.com` with occasional pings to `captive.roku.com`. The rest are stragglers that are blocked by `*.roku.com` DNS blackhole. Another thing is `api.rokutime.com`, but as of writing it's a CNAME to one of `roku.com` subdomains.
The block rates seem to correlate with watch time increasing to ~1/second, so it's definitely trying to phone home with something. Too bad it can't since all its traffic going outside LAN is dropped with prejudice.
If your network allows to see stuff like that, look into what PS5 is trying to do.
If you're tracking packets can't you tell by the data size? A 4k image is a lot more data than a hash.
I do suspect you're right since they would want to reduce bandwidth, especially since residential upload speeds are slow but this is pretty close to verifiable, right?
Also just curious, what happens if you block those requests? I can say Samsung TVs really don't like it... but they will be fine if you take them fully offline.
> If you're tracking packets can't you tell by the data size? A 4k image is a lot more data than a hash.
I admit, I've not gotten around to properly dumping that traffic. For anyone wanting to do this, there's also a spike of DNS requests every hour on the hour, even if tv is off(well, asleep). Would be interesting to see those too. Might be a fun NY holiday project right there. Even without decrypting (hopefully) encrypted traffic, it should be verifiable.
> Also just curious, what happens if you block those requests?
Due to `*.roku.com` DNS black hole, roku showed no ads but things like Netflix and YouTube using standard roku apps("channels") worked fine. I now moved on to playing content using nvidia shield and blocking outside traffic completely. Only odd thing is that the TV occasionally keeps blinking and complains about lack of network if I misclick and start something except HDMI input.
Hashing might not work since the stream itself would be a variable bitrate, meaning the individual pixels would differ and therefore the computed file hash
These are two articles I liked that are referenced in the Python ImageHash library on PyPi, second article is a follow-up to the first.
Here's paraphrased steps/result from first article for hashing an image:
1. Reduce size. The fastest way to remove high frequencies and detail is to shrink the image. In this case, shrink it to 8x8 so that there are 64 total pixels.
2. Reduce color. The tiny 8x8 picture is converted to a grayscale. This changes the hash from 64 pixels (64 red, 64 green, and 64 blue) to 64 total colors.
3. Average the colors. Compute the mean value of the 64 colors.
4. Compute the bits. Each bit is simply set based on whether the color value is above or below the mean.
5. Construct the hash. Set the 64 bits into a 64-bit integer. The order does not matter, just as long as you are consistent.
The resulting hash won't change if the image is scaled or the aspect ratio changes. Increasing or decreasing the brightness or contrast, or even altering the colors won't dramatically change the hash value.
In the same way that Shazam can identify songs despite the audio source being terrible over a phone, mixed with background noise. It doesn't capture the audio as a WAV and then scan its database for an exact matching WAV segment.
I'm sure it is way more complex than this, but shazam does some kind of small windowed FFT and distills it to the dominant few frequencies. It can then find "rhythms" of these frequency patterns, all boiled down to a time stream of signature data. There is some database which can look up these fingerprints. One given fingerprint might match multiple songs, but since they have dozens of fingerprints spread across time, if most of them point to the same musical source, that is what gets ID'd.
Main data comes from unbound[1], I use vector[2] to ship and transform logs. Dnstap[3] log format IME works better than the standard logs, especially when it comes to more complex queries and replies. Undesired queries get 0.0.0.0 as a response which I track.
Besides what others have said, another dead simple option is to use Nextdns: https://nextdns.io
Doesn't require running anything locally and supports various block rules and lists and allows you to enable full log retention if you want. I recommend it to non-techies as the easiest way to get something like pi-hole/dnscrypt-proxy. (but of course not being self-hosted has downsides)
edit: For Roku, DNS blocking like this only works if Roku doesn't use its own resolver. If it's like some Google devices it'll use 8.8.8.8 for DNS resolution ignoring your gateway/DHCP provided DNS server.
My router owns the IP 8.8.8.8 when seen from inside my network; the Roku literally can't ask Google for DNS via DNS, HTTP, or DNS-over-TLS.. It also answers DNS requests on port 53, and believes that there is no scribe.logs.roku.com, along with many other domains.
The downside is that Google seems to think I'm in a botnet, and wants us to login to see anything on YouTube.
I've explored that! Couldn't figure it out but it certainly sounds possible. And even easier solution is just to block all DNS resolvers except your chosen one. When 8.8.8.8 doesn't work GDevices will fallback to the DHCP assigned resolver (usually your gateway)
I'm a noob at this, but can you do that when it is DoT or DoH? Like I thought the point of them is that you can't forget the DNS request. Even harder with oDoH, right? So does that really get around them?
Replace your router's DNS with something like pi-hole or a bog standard dnsmasq, turn up the logging, that's it. Ubiquiti devices I think also offer detailed DNS logging but not sure.
My suggestion would be to configure your own router using a Linux distro. It's not as difficult as it sounds, the kernel already does most of the heavy lifting. All you need to really do is enable packet forwarding and configure the firewall using iptables rules (block all in, allow all out is a reasonable default). I use Unbound as my recursive DNS resolver, together with Hagezi's blacklists to provide DNS filtering. I filter ports 53 and 853, and filter by IP known public DNS servers (Hagezi maintains a list). DHCP is provided by the isc-dhcp-server package on Debian.
That's a more or less complete home router, with plenty on spare resources to run internal or external services like a Wireguard tunnel, file server, or the Docker/Podman runtime.
That being said, I still wouldn't connect a "smart" TV to the Internet. There are better options like a Linux HTPC.
It's polite to give parsers (human or otherwise) hints that they're about to encounter text which is now intended for a different kind of parser.
I recently forgot to surround my code in ``` and Gemini refused to help with it (I think I tripped a safety guardrail, it thought I was targeting it with an injection attack). Amusingly, the two ways to work around it were to fence off my code with backticks or to just respond to:
> I can't help you with that
With
> Why not?
After which it was then willing to help with the unquoted code. Presumably it then perceived it as some kind of philosophical puzzle rather than an attack.
Fair question, it does look a bit jarring when not rendered. I write a lot of markdown and it's a very strong force of habit to use backticks to sort of highlight a technical term and turn it into a noun.
Similar to writing endash as a double hyphen.
When I read what I write, my eyes glance through backticks and maybe come back if I need to parse the inner term in more detail.
That sounds so expensive it's hard to see it making money. You'd processing a 2fps video stream for each customer. That's a huge amount of data.
And all that is for the chance to occasionally detect that someone's seen an ad in the background of a stream? Do any platforms even let a streamer broadcast an NFL game like the example given?
I used to work for an OTT DSP adtech company i.e. a company that bid on TV ad spots in real time. The bidding platform was handling millions of requests per second, and we were one of the smaller fish in the sea. This system is very real. Your tv is watching what you’re watching. I built the attribution pipeline, which is what this is. If you go buy a product from one of these ads, this is how they track (attribute) it. Not to be alarmist butttt you have zero privacy.
The TV thing isn't a new story, this was public. Everyone should have known about it and no one cared. (I could inset a boilerplate rant about Snowden here)
Those datacenters are not being built so that you can talk to ChatGPT all day, they are being built to generate and optimize ads. People who were not previously very suggestible are going to be. People who are suggestible will have their agency sold off to the highest bidder.
Avoid owning a TV? Your friends will. Maybe you can not have a FB/IG/WhatsApp account, only use cash, not have a mobile phone, but Meta (or Google, or Apple) can still detect your face in the background of photos/videos and know where you shop, travel and when.
This is really interesting. Can you expand on this? What are OTT and DSP in this context?
Do you have a sense for what data is tracked and how it's used? Or if this sort of system is blind in certain cases? (eg: I hook up an N64 to the a/v ports -- will I get retro game ads on the TV?)
OTT = over the top = ads that aren't shown on cable ("linear")
DSP = demand-side platform = real-time bidding on ad space on behalf of advertisers
What data is tracked? Don't think we can see what's plugged into the TV if it's not connected to the internet but besides that... all of it... If we have your TV we know where you live. We know what you're watching (hopefully our customers' ads!). We know all the devices that connect to your home network. We know where those devices go when you leave the house. We know you were driving down this stretch of road when you saw that ad on that billboard or on the side of that truck ("out-of-home" advertising). We know if you saw that ad and then bought something ("conversion" + "attribution"). We know what apps you have downloaded. Did you know Candy Crush is spying on you, too? Did you know Grindr sells your IP address? We likely know your age and your race and how much your home cost and where you went to college and how many kids you have ("segmentation"). Privacy laws have gotten in the way a little bit, but not much - it's less "we can't get this data anymore" and more "here's the hoop(s) we now have to jump through but we still get it".
I don't want to freak anyone out. In my time in adtech I never felt like anyone was using this data for anything besides "Please buy more coca-cola..." but you never know. Privacy _can_ exist it's just insanely hard because there's so much money hell-bent on tracking you down.
They can definitely work out who you are from your IP address. (or get close enough that the advertisers don't care) Not too many people are putting a VPN on their router and using throwaway accounts for their smart TVs. This might be difficult anyhow if your log into major services such as Amazon, etc, who will know who you are.
I'm not saying this is impossible to avoid, but it ends up being a LOT of work when the alternative is just not connecting the TV to the internet and using a laptop / Apple TV / etc. instead.
The perils of the capitalist system man. For what’s its worth, I left adtech many moons ago specifically because it is a horrifyingly depressing industry and very very not fun to talk about at parties.
I'm glad you got out, but given your vantage point what would you say to those who feel pressured to do these types of jobs? Would you say more "it isn't worth it" or "if you have to... but get out as fast as possible" or something else?
Forgive me, but I'd actually like to hear vrosas's response or someone else with a similar background. I appreciate you trying to answer my question and help try to make me informed, but I don't want to hear speculation, especially the rather obvious ones. That's not helping, it just adds more noise to the conversation and discourages a response by them. We all know money pays the bills, no one needs to hear that. But hey, if that's what they say, then you'll be proven right. So let's wait and find out. I really do want to understand their mentality. I hope you do too because how else do we break the cycle?
My man’s not wrong. Adtech has some seriously cool engineering problems and scale. It’s its own form of high frequency trading mixed with everyone you’d imagine from a modern day Mad Men. Plus tons and tons and tons of money.
But that's different from money pays by bills. And I think it's also important to recognize that there can be some fun in this due to the challenge.
I started on another side of engineering and I get that. Building rockets is exciting and fun. But while you build those things it's easy to forget you're building something much more destructive.
It’s not different. I take jobs to pay bills and in the selection process pick opportunities that offer career growth and interesting problems. Money pays the bills.
I've talked to a lot of engineers building DRM technology, and most of them are just a combination of swept up in the fun of the challenge, and also deeply bought into the idea of protecting intellectual property. I would say probably 90% don't see any philosophical issues with what they're building at all. If you can convince them of that, quite a few of them would probably try to get out, but it's quite an uphill battle. I forget who said the quote and the exact words, but something along the lines of it's very difficult to disabuse somebody of a belief when their livelihood depends on believing it.
As someone who was in an industry that I later discovered was doing things I wasn't personally ethically okay with, I would advise them to do similar to me. Start looking for a new gig and just get out as soon as you can.
Unfortunately as an individual there just isn't much you can do. There will always be someone willing to do the job that you aren't willing to do. Just get out and find something you can sleep at night doing
This is incredibly close-minded of you. It’s important creative work can be compensated for. This debate was tired in 2002. You should at least understand the other side instead of treating it with the moral simplicity that’d apply equally to Nazis.
Heh, I love that you accuse me of being closed-minded on this, while simultaneously claiming that nothing relevant has happened since 2002 because you're "tired" of the debate.
I'd also recommend you actually find out about somebody's background before making such a giant assumption about how much they know about the issue.
And if you don't think DRM has been used to abuse legitimate users, you yourself have a significant amount of understanding the other side to do. A great start might be just reviewing some of the anecdotes in this comment section or any of the other many threads that continually happen on HN. It turns out that DRM technology has actually changed a bit in the last 24 years, and it's not just about "protecting" IP
If I read a full biography of you, does it change anything about my perception that you're close-minded for saying working on DRM is obviously 100% morally wrong and it's beyond you to understand why anyone would?
Why stop here? We can also blame the people, who implemented such features on the TVs, the people who worked at companies, who used data acquired by these devices for advertisement, the people who worked on the mentioned ads for such devices and the people who bought products from companies, that spend money on such marketing techniques.
At this point you might as well blame the average guy for global warming...
The average guy is exactly the person responsible for global warming. The evil of the world is just the meta accumulation of the average person following their mirco incentives.
Having you own morale and ethics is far from futile. Each individual should be able to question the law and object taking part in something they don't agree, as long as it doesn't break the law.
Killing someone is legal in certain countries for different reasons (I'm not talking about war). Not sure I would like to get involved in that business, for instance if I don't agree on how and why people are sentenced to death in my country.
Some people are built with low ethics. Sure, if it's not made illegal, they'll always find someone to do it. Looks like in that case it might be illegal, as TV makers are sued.
It isn't ethically unsound. It's a commons/coordination problem. What is the optimal strategy in infinite-round prisoners dilemma with randomized opponents? The randomization effectively makes it an infinite series of one-round prisoners dilemma. So the best strategy is always to defect.
The only way you can change this is very high social trust, and all of society condemning anyone who ever defects.
If morality never factors into your own decisions, you don't get to be upset when it doesn't factor into other peoples'. In other words, society just sucks when everyone thinks this way, even if it true that resolving it is hard.
This is an intellectually and morally deficient position to take. There is no moral principle in any system anywhere in the history of the universe that requires me to bind myself to a contract that nobody else is bound to.
We can all agree, as a society, "hey, no individual person will graze more than ten cows on the commons," and that's fine. And if we all agree and someone breaks their vow, then that is immoral. "Society just sucks when everyone thinks this way" indeed.
But if nobody ever agreed to it, and you're out there grazing all you're cattle, and Ezekiel is out there grazing all his cattle, and Josiah is out there grazing all his cattle, there is no reasonable ethical principle you could propose that would prevent me from grazing all my cattle too.
> There is no moral principle in any system anywhere in the history of the universe that requires me to bind myself to a contract that nobody else is bound to.
Is there not? I don't feel this makes sense to me, as the conclusion seems to be "if everyone (or perhaps a large amount of people) do it, then it's not immoral". My immediate thought goes to moral systems that universalise an action, such that if everyone did it and it makes the world worse, then it's something that you should not do. That would be an example of a system that goes counter to what you say. Since morals are personal, you can still have that conclusion even if other people do not subscribe to the same set of moral beliefs that you have. Something can be immoral to you, and you will refuse to do it even if everyone else does.
> But if nobody ever agreed to it [...] there is no reasonable ethical principle you could propose that would prevent me from grazing all my cattle too.
Why not? I don't quite understand your conclusion. Why could the conclusion not be "I feel what everyone else is doing is wrong, and I will not do it myself"? Is it because it puts you at a disadvantage, and you believe that is unfair? Perhaps this is the "reasonable" aspect?
Your confusion is understandable. The way the terms "moral" and "ethical" are thrown around is sloppy in most vernacular. Generally, ethics refers to system-wide morality. E.g., I may feel that personal morality compels me to offer lower rates to clients, even though a higher rate may be acceptable under legal ethics. I tried to make that distinction clear in my post ("moral principle in any system") but perhaps I didn't do a good enough job.
The original poster was not referring to individual moral feelings, but to formal ethical systems subject to systematized logical thinking: "classic example of an ethically unsound argument."
There is no religious tradition, no system of ethics, no school of thought in moral philosophy, that is consistent with that position. The closest you might come is Aristotelian virtue ethics. But it would be a really strained reading that would result in the position that opting out of commons mismanagement is required. Aristotle specifically said that being a fool is not a virtue. If anything, a virtue ethics lens would compel someone to try to establish formal community rules to prevent the tragedy of the commons.
I think this argument would justify slavery: no one (white people) has decided that holding others as slaves is bad, therefore I can hold slaves.
But let me entertain it for a moment: prior to knowing, e.g., that plastics or CO2 are bad for the environment, how should one know that they are bad for the environment. Fred, the first person to realize this would run around saying "hey guys, this is bad".
And here is where I think it gets interesting: the folks making all the $ producing the CO2 and plastics are highly motivated to say "sorry Fred, your science is wrong". So when it finally turns out that Fred was right, were the plastics/CO2 companies morally wrong in hindsight?
You are arguing that morality is entirely socially determined. This may be partially true, but IMO, only economically. If I must choose between hurting someone else and dying, I do not think there is a categorically moral choice there. (Though Mengzi/ Mencius would say that you should prefer death -- see fish and the bear's paw in 告子上). So, to the extent that your life or life-preserving business (i.e. source of food/housing) demands hurting others (producing plastics, CO2), then perhaps it is moral to do so. But to the extent that your desire for fancy cars and first class plane tickets demands producing CO2...well (ibid.).
The issue is that the people who benefit economically are highly incentivized to object to any new moral reckoning (i.e. tracking people is bad; privacy is good; selling drugs is bad; building casinos is bad). To the extent that we care about morality (and we seem to), those folks benefitting from these actions can effectively lobby against moral change with propaganda. And this is, in fact, exactly what happens politically. Politics is, after all, an attempt to produce a kind of morality. It may depend on whom you follow, but my view would be that politics should be an approach to utilitarian management of resources, in service of the people. But others might say we need to be concerned for the well-being of animals. And still others, would say that we must be concerned with the well-being of capital, or even AIs! In any case, large corporations effectively lobby against any moral reckoning against their activities and thus avoid regulation.
The problem with your "socially determined morality" (though admittedly, I increasingly struggle to see a practical way around this) is that, though in some ways true (since society is economics and therefore impacts one's capacity to live) is that you end up in a world in which everyone can exploit everyone else maximally. There is no inherent truth in what the crowd believes (though again, crowd beliefs do affect short-term and even intermediate-term economics, especially in a hyper-connected world). The fact that most white people in the 1700s believed that it was not wrong to enslave black people does not make that right. The fact that many people believed tulips were worth millions of dollars does not make it true in the long run.
Are we running up against truth vs practicality? I think so. It may be impractical to enforce morality, but that doesn't make Google moral.
Overall, your arguments are compatible with a kind of nihilism: there is no universal morality; I can adopt whatever morality is most suitable to my ends.
I make one final point: how should slavery and plastics be handled? It takes a truly unfeeling sort of human to enslave another human being. It is hard to imagine that none of these people felt that something was wrong. Though google is not enslaving people nor are its actions tantamount to Nazism, there is plenty of recent writing about the rise of technofascism. The EAs would certainly sacrifice the "few" of today's people for the nebulous "many" of the future over which they will rule. But they have constructed a narrative in which the future's many need protection. There are moral philosophies (e.g. utilitarianism) that would justify this. And this is partially because we have insufficient knowledge of the future, and also because the technologies of today make highly variable the possible futures of tomorrow.
I propose instead that---especially in this era of extreme individual power (i.e. the capacity to be "loud" -- see below)---a different kind of morality is useful: the wielding of power is bad. As your power grows, so to does the responsibility to consider its impact on others and to more aggressively judge every action one takes under the Veil of Ignorance. Any time we affect the lives of others around us, we are at greater risk of violating this morality. See eg., Tools for Conviviality or Silence is a Commons (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609969). Google and the tech companies are being extremely loud, and you'd have to be an idiot to see that it's not harmful. If your mental contortions allow you to say "harm is moral because the majority don't object," well, that looks like nihilism and certainly doesn't get us anywhere "good". But my "good" cannot be measured, and your good is GDP, so I suppose I will lose.
It is definitely ethically unsound and it is definitely a common example even related to Nazis. Similar to "just following orders". Which I'll remind everyone, will not save you in a court of law[0]...
You are abdicating your own moral responsibility on the assumption of a deterministic reality.
The literal textbook version of this ethical issue, one you'll find in literally any intro to ethics class is
If I don't do this job then somebody else will. The only difference is that I will not get paid and if I get paid I will do good with that money where as if somebody else gets paid they might not.
Sometimes a variant will be introduced with a direct acknowledgement of like donating 10% of your earnings to charity to "offset" your misgivings (ᶜᵒᵘᵍʰ ᴱᶠᶠᵉᶜᵗᶦᵛᵉ ᴬˡᵗʳᵘᶦˢᵐ ᶜᵒᵘᵍʰ).
But either way, it is you abdicating your personal responsibility and making the assumption that the job will be done regardless. But think about the logic here. If people do not think like you then the employer must then start offering higher wages in order to entice others. As there is some function describing people's individual moral lines and their desire for money. Even if the employer must pay more you are then helping deter that behavior because you are making it harder to implement. Alternatively the other person that does the job might not be as good at the job as you, making the damage done less than had you done the job. It's not hard to see that often this will result in the job not even existing as truthfully these immoral jobs are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Even if you are making the assumption that the job will be done it would be more naive to assume the job is done to the same quality. (But kudos on you for the lack of ego and thinking you aren't better than other devs)
Most of those convicted at the Nuremberg trials eventually had their sentences commuted and only served a fraction of their time. Only a few were convicted and executed. Justice rarely prevails.
Objectively incorrect. There is no reasonable argument that it's ethically unsound. The fact that you immediately Godwin'd should have been your first clue.
> There is no reasonable argument that it's ethically unsound.
I didn't claim the argument was reasonable.
> The fact that you immediately Godwin'd
Well it is a classic example.
Considering you're a military lawyer I'm absolutely certain you've heard this example before and its connection to Nazi Germany. I'm not dating anyone is a Nazi for making that argument, but it is a classic example when pointing to how Ordinary Men can do atrocities. And no, I didn't make a grammatical mistake there.
You're right to push back in case I intended something different. But I'll state this clearly: those LEO, ICE agents, and judges are committing crimes.
But the fact that not all criminals are punished or prosecuted does not change the laws either.
What I'm concerned about is people becoming disenfranchised and apathetic. Dismissing the laws we have that does punish LEO, ICE agents, and judges for breaking the laws. To take a defeatist attitude. Especially in this more difficult time where that power is being abused more than ever. But a big reason it is being able to be abused is because a growing apathetic attitude by people. By people giving up.
So I don't know about you and your positions. I don't know if you're apathetic or invested. All I know is a random comment from a random person. It isn't much to go on. But I hope you aren't and I hope you don't spread apathy, intentionally or not.
If, for ethical reasons, fewer people were willing to take these jobs, then either salaries would have to rise or the work would be done less effectively.
If salaries rise, the business becomes more expensive and harder to scale.
If effectiveness drops, the systems are less capable of extracting/using people’s data.
Either way, refusing these jobs imposes real friction on the surveillance model.
If you want a deontological answer:
You have a responsibility not to participate in unethical behavior, even if someone else would.
The fact that it can be used to "justify" almost anything. It obviously doesn't work as a defense in the court, and neither does it work as a justification for doing legal but unethical things.
Soooo.... Why did you build it for them? You didn't have to further enable it. Despise people who just drop this kind of thing without any hint of repentance or contrition.
Would love to know what are the best things we can do to prevent this sort of tracking in general. PiHole? Don't re-use emails? On a scale of 1 to fucked are we cooked?
I don't think they mean that kinda streamer - the idea is the roku tv can tell you're watching an ad even if it's on amazon prime, apple tv, youtube, twitch, wherever, and associate the ad watching with your roku account to potentially sell that data somehow?
That way they aren't cut out of the loop by you using a different service to watch something and still have a 'cut'.
The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity.
Not super tough to pull off. I was experimenting with FAISS a while back and indexed screenshots of the entire Seinfeld series. I was able take an input screenshot (or Seinfeld meme, etc) and pinpoint the specific episode and approx timestamp it was from.
> The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity.
this is most likely the case, although there's nothing stopping them from uploading the original 4K screengrab in cases where there's no match to something in their database which would allow them to manually ID the content and add a hash or just scrape it for whatever info they can add to your dossier.
I thought that similar inputs do not give similar hashes..but apparently that is cryptographic hashing. Locality-Sensitive Hashing methods (e.g. Perceptual hashing[1]) makes similar inputs have similar hashes.
I immediately did a little exploration for potential utility in neuroimaging analyses...not that anything was immediately obvious to me, but I love learning about things like this.
That's the thing about scaling; you offload the work to the "client" (the TV in this case) and make it do the work, it need not send back more than a simple identifier or string in an API call (of course they'll send more), so they get to use a little bit of your electricity and your TVs processing power to collect data on you and make money, with relatively little required from them, other than some infra to handle the requests, which they would have had anyway to collect the telemetry that makes them money.
Client side processing like this is legitimate and an excellent way to scale, it just hits a little different when it's being used for something that isn't serving you, the user.
Confirming how many people actually seen the ad is worth big bucks. No one wants to pay for ads they cannot confirm and publisher can make up impressions - if you can catch publisher making up numbers you might get a huge discount or loads of money back.
Not necessarily, it can be done on-device, the screenshot hashed, and the results deduplicated and accumulated over time, then compressed and sent off in a neat package. It'd still be a huge amount of data when you add it all up, but not too different from the volume that e.g. web analytics produces.
Then server-side the hash is matched to a program or ad and the data accumulated and reduced even further before ending up in someone's analytics dashboard.
Are there video "thumbprints" like exists for audio (used by soundhound/etc) - IE a compressed set of features that can reliably be linked in unique content? I would expect that is possible and a lot faster lookup for 2 frames a second. If this is the case, the "your device is taking a snapshot every 30 seconds" sounds a lot worse (not defending it - it's still something I hope can be legislated away - something can be bad and still exaggerated by media)
Given that the TV is trying to match one digital frame against another digital frame, you could probably get decent results even with something super naive like downsampling to a very low resolution, quantizing the color palette, then looking for a pixel for pixel match.
All this could be done long before any sort of TV-specific image processing, so the only source of "noise" I can think of would be from the various encodings offered by the streaming service (e.g. different resolutions and bitrates). With the right choice of downsample resolution and color quantization I have to imagine you could get acceptable results.
I've been led to believe those video thumbprints exist, but I know the hash of the perceived audio is often all that is needed for a match of what is currently being presented (movie, commercial advert, music-as-music-not-background, ...).
This is why a lot of series uploaded to YouTube will be sped up, slowed down, or have their audio’s pitch changed; if the uploader doesn’t do this, it gets recognized by YouTube as infringing content.
You only need to grab a few pixels or regions of the screen to fingerprint it. They know what the stream is and can process it once centrally if needed.
This is especially annoying and just incredibly creepy -- I was watching a clip of Smiling Friends on YouTube (via my Apple TV), and I suddenly got a banner telling me to watch this on HBO Max.
The problem with 'well just don't buy it' is that in many product categories, enshittification has become so entrenched that there are no longer options to avoid it. The availablity of product features is driven by market forces, if it's no longer profitable to sell a TV that doesn't require online connectivity for the purposes of ads, then such TVs will no longer be sold.
Alternatives like using monitors designed for digital signage come with drawbacks. Expense, they don't have desirable features like VRR, HDR or high refresh rates, since they aren't needed for those use cases. Older TV models will break and supply will dry up.
In the long term, this problem, not just TVs but the commercial exploitation of user data across virtually all electronic devices sold, isn't something that can be solved with a boycott, or by consumers buying more selectively. The practice needs to be killed with legislation.
VRR is Variable refresh rates, so if there is nothing going on in the content, they can bring the refresh rate down and save processing, thermal issues and energy. If there is a lot going on(say a game), they can ramp the refresh rate back up super high.
There are a few different "standards" around VRR, not every device supports all of them.
Their explanation of the reason for VRR is bad. The primary reason people want it is gaming where the game is not locked to a specific frame rate. Without VRR, the timing of a frame being delivered isn't necessarily going to match when the display is expecting a new frame. This leads to one of two effects. Either the display is forced to hold an old frame for longer and pick up the new frame on the next refresh cycle, which creates stutter. Or the display switches which frame its using partway through the refresh cycle, which creates a visual tear in the image.
Source? This sort of conspiracy started with "smart tvs will connect to open wifi networks", then evolved to "it uses amazon sidewalk", and apparently now morphed into "tvs have 5g modems". Given how poorly supported the prior claims were, that does not bode well for the 5G claim.
Isn't that one of the marketed advantages of 5G. Lot of smart IoT devices including TVs being able to connect independently.
What we are lacking is implementation but the tech and probably the intent was always there. If HDMI ethernet connectivity(HEC) had gained traction, we would have seen a fire stick, apple tv or roku providing internet to your tv without asking for explicit consent.
I agree that I misquoted you, but that's a distinction without a difference in this context. "SIM card and baseband radio inside" means 5G, 4G, 3G, whatever. I still demand that you produce proof that there are TVs with "SIM card and baseband radio inside".
I was curious so I did some research. These devices do seem to be being produced, currently mostly overseas. The inclusion of 5G support does not seem to be hidden or nefarious. They provide a SIM card slot just like your phone would. Some models are incorporating a built-in router to provide connectivity to other devices. It seems like the cellular companies are promoting these TV's too, with built in service.
My opinion is this is just a consolidation of devices. I have many friends who live off their phone data plan giving hotspot to the TV and other devices. Now being moved into a common device format, the TV. I don't think they can spy any more effectively this way. Eexcept via the router integration that gives them way more access, but I'm sure this exists already as a wifi feature on tvs. Just technology trudging along. Perhaps they have a secret sim card or esim embedded, that might be a risk as the hardware is already there for a valid reason.
It’s far less important for ad-free content. They mainly want to connect your ad watching behaviour to an email and then have loyalty program data connected to the same email so that they can identify which ads convert vs not.
There's probably compact signatures extracted from the screenshots (color profiles, OCR, etc) which are then uploaded later in bulk. You don't need the full original image to be able to reliably uniquely identify the content if you have an index of it already.
I'm wondering if there is some sort of steganographic watermark that broadcasters are including in media, to enable stuff like this. Probably would need to be robust in the presence of re-encoding, more compression, etc..
I thought the 2013 amendment to the VPPA largely defanged it by allowing sharing with customer consent (which is probably one of the clauses in the million-word customer agreement nobody reads).
Are health providers using PS5s in a context where information may be leaked to other providers? What kind of information would you expect to be displayed that might violate HIPAA?
As other users mentioned, these screenshots are almost certainly not being transmitted as screenshots as the bandwidth costs would be enormous. The screenshots are converted to a hash on the user’s device before being sent to a server where the hash is compared to a database of known hashes. A user’s x-ray would just appear as a hash. This might still constitute a HIPAA violation, but I doubt it.
I’m not sure what relevance there is to other providers?
I work with a lot of small medical offices, and they do use consumer Smart TVs in some contexts. I typically limit their network access for other reasons, and displaying X-rays isn’t something I’ve personally facilitated, but it wouldn’t shock me to discover it’s being done in other clinics, and the popularity of cloud-based ePHR software has left a lot of smaller clinics with very limited internal I.T. services.
The destination isn’t relevant, if the image leaves the clinic at all without consent, that’s a HIPAA violation. Fortunately, I think it’s more likely that the images are sampled and/or hashed in a way that means the full image isn’t technically transmitted, but considering the consequences and costs of a data breach, I’d definitely be wary of it.
I'm sure somebody's done it, but mine isn't. I do make sure to pull the microphones out of the controllers at least so while they can watch everything I'm doing on my screen they can't listen to the entire house.
I'd like to weaponize all this scanning into a force for good. Instead of phoning home to Roku, send the fingerprints up to an ADID database registering every ad on the planet. Open up an API so that any video stream can detect an ad and inject Max Headroom replacement clips.
Come on hackers. We could murder the global economy with this shit.
I've been thinking about this as well - make a small device that in real time detects ads and turns off audio an video while it's playing. I'd rather see a blank screen than an ad. That way, the whole ad pyramid scheme stays intact while the conversion rates plummet.
Isn't the segment who will set this up also likely to have a low conversion rate to begin with?
You'd need to make it so easy that it becomes fully mainstream. I suspect that's what happened to adblockers, it got a bit too "standard" for (Google's) comfort.
Same here. I've done this for podcasts (not in real time) and it works great. TV should be easier in some ways since the video stream and captions can also indicate an ad.
I used to find when listening to a good many podcasts with VLC there would be:
> ... See you after the break.
brief pause
> And we're back ...
Unfortunately, most ads are now burnt in. The 10 second advance will skip through them, but as it's usually the host parroting the ad text and it's easy to over shoot.
I work for a company that does some work on Internet advertising and one of the main issues that came up when we discussed supporting smart TV platforms was how we could protect our proprietary advertising audience data while still showing ads on these devices. Knowing what ads we show the user tells them what the user is interested in, which is valuable information for our competitors.
Unfortunately, we were not able to solve that problem, and instead to just use lower fidelity user models for advertising on smart TVs. That makes smart TV ads less valuable, but allows us to keep our competitive advantage on desktop and mobile.
If I’m understanding you right, I’m confident it’s screen analysis. I have a Hisense Roku TV I exclusively use with an AppleTV. I get creepy intrusive popups telling me: “you could be watching this on other streaming providers!” all the time. So it “knows” what’s being displayed on the screen regardless of what app (or HDMI input) is being used.
Like, Apple knows what you're watching within the Apple TV app obviously.
But it's certainly not taking screenshots every second of what it displaying when you use other apps -- which shows and ads you're seeing. Nor does Apple sell personal data.
Other video apps do register what shows you're in the middle of, so they can appear on the top row of your home screen. But again, Apple's not selling that info.
ACR needs to die. It’s an absurd abuse of the privileged position that a TV has - a gross violation of privacy just to make a few bucks. It should be absolutely nobody’s business to know what you watch except your own; the motivation behind the VPPA was to kill exactly this type of abuse.
The greatest irony is that HDCP goes to great lengths to try and prevent people from screenshotting copyrighted content, and here we have the smart TVs at the end just scraping the content willy-nilly. If someone manages to figure out how to use ACR to break DRM, maybe the MPAA will be motivated to kill ACR :)
ACR — Automatic Content Recognition: tech in some smart TVs/apps that identifies what’s on-screen (often via audio/video “fingerprints”) and can report viewing data back to vendors/partners.
VPPA — Video Privacy Protection Act: a U.S. law aimed at limiting disclosure of people’s video-viewing/rental history.
HDCP — High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection: an anti-copy protocol used on HDMI/DisplayPort links to prevent interception/recording of protected video.
DRM — Digital Rights Management: a broad term for technical restrictions controlling how digital media can be accessed, copied, or shared.
MPAA — Motion Picture Association of America: the former name of the main U.S. film-industry trade group (now typically called the MPA, Motion Picture Association).
Enormous effort goes into stopping users from capturing a single frame, while manufacturers quietly sample the screen multiple times a second by design
The ship has sailed on that one. The telematics from the car can also be sent back to the mothership, i.e. if you’re driving like a lunatic, pulling donuts, harsh acceleration and so on.
‘Telematics’ is not how the word ‘insurance’ is spelled. Anyone that owns an uninsured car or home that cannot afford to replace a total loss or hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills in the case of a major accident is negligent. Anyone without wealth lacking health insurance is negligent.
Having sensor logs of the space temp and CO2 ppm in your house when it’s burning down isn’t going to help you at all.
Car telemetry might help diagnose car issues, but I’m not aware of manufacturers using it that way, I’ve heard plenty about selling location data and driving habits.
Constantly monitoring your heart rate and blood pressure sounds like a good way to develop hypochondria.
Majority of population is wearing some sort of smartwatch tho.
Absence of PM2.5 is exactly how I debunked a false smoke alarm while I was overseas. Or I flagged excessive power use after friends left appliance on while I was away. Or water leak sensors flagged one toiled cistern dripping.
There’s a difference between the owner having telemetry on their own car, and the manufacturer having telemetry on the cars they’ve sold. One is taking care of your assets, and the other is spying on customers.
Have they resolved the class-action lawsuit about workers sharing and making memes from pictures and videos of people inside their homes, garages, naked, with their pets, their kids, their laundry, their sex toys, etc? Mozilla said they're the least bad but they're definitely not good.
It's not just FSD footage. Footage was recorded while the cars were charging. From Reuters:
As an example, this person recalled seeing “embarrassing objects,” such as “certain pieces of laundry, certain sexual wellness items … and just private scenes of life that we really were privy to because the car was charging.”
To be clear, looking at video surreptitiously recorded inside peoples' homes is absolutely spying. And saying you get actual consent from click-through "opt-in" forms which opting out would kill huge swaths of their car's functionality, and not deliberately and loudly informing them of how invasive the videos were is frankly, ridiculous. Those forms are obviously pretext for tech companies to do things with people's data that they'd never consent to if they really understood the implications.
Are you saying that not monitoring e.g. heart rate constantly through some electronic device that sends the data somewhere (let’s assume somewhere under my control) is negligence?
From Wikipedia: “Telemetry is the in situ collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment (telecommunication) for monitoring.”
There is nothing “tele” about going to the doctor, and nothing automatic about the information they gather. You’re conflating telemetry and simple examination or observation. Most types of examination are not telemetry, and many types of telemetry are not as benign as simple observation/examination. There is telemetry on my car but I can’t access the data. It’s not for my benefit— it’s for Jeep’s benefit. I don’t need it and I don’t want it.
Laws can change, but I’m not hopeful, tbh. Digital privacy problems are just too abstract to viscerally anger most people. That may change as people that grew up in surveillance capitalism mature, but being so used to invasive data grabs might replace ignorant complacency with aware complacency.
Mostly only because Tesla doesn't share this data outside of Tesla, unless they leak it to news outlets to make it look like the accident was all your fault and not Tesla's.
Tesla tends to only leak that stuff when they look bad. It's not like they are necessarily outright lying, they are just telling their version of the truth....
I point out tesla specifically because they had headlines about sharing camera feeds as memes. The Mozilla report clearly shows tesla is not an outlier, more like "middle of the pack".
"...pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees."
Two-second Google search. It's not very charitable to accuse someone of lying without even looking. It's even mentioned in that mozilla breakdown.
> I point out tesla specifically because they had headlines about sharing camera feeds as memes.
Your baseless assumptions are your own fault.
I gave citations for your specific questions. There’s multiple articles about the odious things that happened that you clearly have no interest in acknowledging. I’m not your research assistant. Go read them. You’re clearly more interested in defending Tesla than understanding people’s complaints. Cope? Shill? I’ll never know, and I’ll definitely never care.
lol, cringe. Great way to protect your ego when someone is serially pointing out how baseless your glib snapbacks are. I use em dashes because I learned to write at a competent university, instead of, say, Breaking Bad. In fact, it played a large role in early LLM development, so if they ever used student writing in their data sets, I might be a tiny part of the reason these models use so many em dashed to begin with. Hell, I don’t even use grammarly anymore. And I made this alt when I switched from dev to design, before the shitty job market switched me from design to manufacturing. And exactly who would I be “botting for?” The only person in this thread that started championing a particular company is you. The thread itself started with me bemoaning data collection among the auto industry, and mentioned that Tesla is the least bad at even if they’re still bad. So… am I botting for “big bicycle?” Part of the large Schwinn-backed anti-car virtual astroturfing brigade? Maybe an extremely aggressive public transit advocacy group? Exactly who cares enough about people stanning Tesla to point some robot propaganda machination at it? And since you were enough of a creep to go through my comment history looking for excuses to ignore what I was saying rather than actually engage with it, did you see ANY other indication that was a theme? Lol. So keep trying to scrounge up some cope, “bitch.”
You've been following my comments for a while, especially trying to dunk on Tesla with falsehoods and lies. Argue with Mozilla about their results, not me.
I’ve provided citations. You were commenting in a thread that branched off of my comment. I got my criticism from the Mozilla article, and most of my citations were linked to in the Mozilla article. I’d say you should actually read the subsection on Tesla, but you clearly can’t accept reality and have some weird Tesla obsession. Get help.
I've had the advertising settings disabled on my LG C2 for a while and yesterday I decided to browse the settings menu again and found that a couple new ones had been added and turned on by default.
This is what seemingly every app does. They add 15 different categories for notifications / emails / whatever, and then make you turn off each one individually. Then they periodically remove / add new categories, enabled by default. Completely abusive behavior.
Want to unsubscribe from this email? Ok, you can do it in one click, but we have 16 categories of emails we send you, so you'll still get the other 15! It's a dark pattern for sure.
They’re sad they can’t point that particular marketing hose at you, anymore, but appreciate confirming your validity as a lead they’ll sell to data brokers.
e+ is such an unintuitive decimal representation system. going in blindly, it's completely non-obvious what "e" stands for, surely "d" would make far more sense. also, the namespace for e is plenty filled up as is, and, most of all, +12 implies 12 additional digits, not digits after the point
Google's choice to use it for calculation results despite having essentially no restriction on text space always annoyed me. I think this is the first time I've seen a human using it
The letter "e" (for "exponent") has meant "multiplied by ten to the power of", since the dawn of computing (Fortran!), when it was impossible to display or type a superscripted exponent.
In computing, we all got used to it because there was no other available notation (this is also why we use * for multiplication, / for division, etc). And it's intuitive enough, if you already know scientific notation, which Fortran programmers did.
Scientific notation goes back even further, and is used when the magnitude of the number exceeds the available significant digits.
E.g., Avogadro's number is 6.02214076 × 10⁻²³. In school we usually used it as 6.022 × 10⁻²³, which is easier to work with and was more appropriate for our classroom precision. In E notation, that'd be 6.022E-23.
1.3076744e+12 is 1.3076744 × 10¹². The plus sign is for the positive exponent, not addition. You could argue that the plus sign is redundant, but the clear notation can be helpful when working with numbers that can swing from one to the other.
And if you just add them to your spam filter, it won't even work easily, because they deliberately shift around the domains and subdomains they send from every so often.
I just use a unique address for each service. Any email that gets leaked or is getting unsubscribe resistant spam is added to /etc/postfix/denied_recipients :)
Luckly they don't seem to shift the addresses they send to, so if you own the domain you use for email you can make dedicated addresses for each service you sign up for. Then filter based on the `to:` field.
this is where LLMs could actually help. create spam filters that an LLM can parse and deny if it looks close enough. but then again, hallucinations would be kind of terrible.
I agree this would be a good use of an LLM (assuming that it was running locally). I wouldn't put one in charge of deleting my messages, but I could see one being used to assign a score to messages and based on that score moving them out of my inbox into various folders for review.
I'd be really interested to see a comparison between LLM spam scoring and a traditional spam scoring algorithm because an LLM is essentially a spam generator. Can that be used to make a better spam detector?
Same can be achieved with a catch all domain and a sub for every service you use. Cost $13/year. Extra protection: now if you lose access to your email provider, you still have access to future emails.
Thanks again for unsubscribing! This is your weekly reminder that you are still unsubscribed. As usual, we've included a little bonus for you to enjoy at the end of this unsubscribe-reminder e-mail: a complementary full edition of this week's newsletter!
Yep. Had that happen with the United app a few weeks ago. Unsolicited spam sent via push notification to my phone. Turns out that they added a bunch of notification settings - of course all default to on.
Turned them all off except for trip updates that day.
Best part is- yesterday I received yet another unsolicited spam push message. With all the settings turned off.
So these companies will effective require you to use their app to use their service, then refuse to respect their own settings for privacy.
I've taken to "Archiving" apps like this on my Android phone. When I need it, I can un-archive it to use it. Keeps the list of things trying to get my attention a little bit smaller.
I just hellban every app from sending any notifications, except for a select few. Apps get like a one strike policy on notification spam. If they send a single notification I didn't want, I disable their ability to send notifications at all.
Also all notifications/etc are silent, except for alarms, pages, phone calls, and specific named people's texts.
Everything else... no. YouTube was the worst offender before for me.
Another technique for me is to avoid apps like Instagram, Facebook and Youtube. I run them all through mobile Firefox with uBlock origin and custom block scripts that block sponsored posts and shorts. This combines well with having Youtube's history turned off which prevents the algorithmic suggestions.
I give apps a one strike policy on notification spam. If they do it at all, I'm uninstalling it until I actually need to use it next (if I can't find an alternative). And the same goes for getting in my way to beg for a review on the app store: that's a shortcut to getting a one-star rating.
The main exception to this is the notification spam from Google asking me to rate call quality after every damn call. I don't have my phone rooted, so I can't turn off that category of notification.
Why even give most apps even one chance? For almost every app I have zero interest in ever getting a notification from. I see no reason to give them an opportunity to annoy me even once.
Honestly because I won't remember to go into the settings page and disable it. When a notification comes in, there's a quick route to disable forever, otherwise I have to go preemptively digging
Sending ad notifications is a recent trend, normally Apple guidelines don’t allow it, but they know that Apple cannot much fuss about with all the regulatory pressure.
It’s the enshitification of the notification system, the apps are already filled with ads and now they’re making you open the app or splash things on your face.
This is why whenever you try to do anything significant on a web site with a phone, they tell you to "Download our app". Detection is very good now. Slack can see right through desktop mode, cheater, and will redirect you to the app regardless.
Never had that issue on Vanadium browser, or Brave or even Firefox. I personally refuse to download an app if there is a website for the same. For a long time I was even using door dash in browser.
I get the sarcasm, but it's like comparing apples to oranges. Calling a number and talking to people is vastly different to clicking some buttons on your phone. App/website have almost same user interface, just different ways to get to that interface. Calling the number is totally different interface.
Boarding pass. For the airline apps, it probably is a good assumption that most people want to get a notification that their flight is delayed, or started boarding, etc..
When I get email like that, I mark it as spam. That trains the spam filters to remove their marketing email from everyone's inbox. I see it as a community service.
That behavior is what finally got me off Facebook awhile back.
Edit: And something similar with Windows now that I think about it; there was a privacy setting which would appear to work till you re-entered that menu. Saving the setting didn't actually persist it, and the default was not consumer-friendly.
LinkedIn does the same thing re emails, notifications, etc that they send. I think I turned off notifications that connections had achieved new high scores in games they play on LinkedIn. Absurd.
LinkedIn is one the most useless app ever. I have trashed it countless times, but I do use it now and ten to keep up with companies and respond to a few solicitations. There is almost never anything of value in my feed, between the fake jobs and the low value self-promotion AI-written posts. Who even reads this? Not even mentioning the political, and pseudo-activist posts. And this happens despite systematically marking all of these posts irrelevant or “inappropriate for LinkedIn”. This app is beyond repair. Uninstalling.
The real trick is to never connect your TV to the internet under any circumstances. These things are displays, they don't need the internet to do their job. Leave that to the game consoles and streaming boxes.
Existing LTE is fine. If they wanted to embed modems in the TVs they could do it now. I'm guessing they simply don't have to, simply because a huge number of consumers will dutifully hand over their Wi-Fi passwords.
While this is certainly possible, I’d imagine this sort of thing would be found quite quickly and would result in a massive lawsuit if not disclosed on the package.
It's going to happen on any device. It's a software thing. If LG isn't doing it, it's Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. My PS5 basically shows ads on some system ui screens (granted mostly for "game" content but it still counts).
I have a Hisense TV which recently did the same. It turned on personal recommendations and advertising. I have no idea where the ads are or how it works; I only use devices over HDMI. I'm sure the TV is spying on me incessantly nonetheless.
I’m using my tv with all the stuff disabled (the ones it’s possibly disable), but even then I realize I don’t trust them and I don’t trust their choices. Because they get to say sorry and not held responsible.
I want smart tv because I want use my streaming services but that’s it. I also want high quality panels. Maybe the solution is high quality TVs where you just stick a custom HDMI device (similar to Amazon fire stick) and use it as the OS. Not sure if there are good open source options since Apple seems to be another company that keeps showing you ads even if you pay shit load of money for their hardware and software, Jobs must turning in his grave
The TV would definitely spy on you, the connected device might not. And even if it does, you can pick one from a company you mind less, or who you've already given up on trying to prevent spying on you. For me, that means a Chromecast; I haven't managed the effort to de-Google, and most of what I watch is Youtube anyway. For some that might be Apple, who is probably the least egregious offender among the big companies. Or you could use a Raspberry Pi or other small computer and have even more control, at the cost of being higher effort.
I think they probably would, with maybe the exception of Apple TV. It’s probably not a coincidence that Apple TVs are the only hardware in this space that isn’t sold at a loss (or near loss), the rest are simply Trojan horses to park in the living room and maximize profit elsewhere by leveraging its privileged access to your eyeballs and/or ears (really no orifice is safe from these companies anymore, watch out for Smart Bidets).
When a new permission appears without notice and defaults to the most-violating setting, gaslighting you into the illusion of agency but in fact you never had any, you've been Zucked.
Seriously, why can't we just have a law that makes entirely illegal the retention of any personally identifiable information in any way that is legible to the retainer.
You can store my data for me, but only encrypted, and it can be decrypted only in a sandbox. And the output of the sandbox can be sent only back to me, the user. Decrypting the personal data for any other use is illegal. If an audit shows a failure here, the company loses 1% of revenue the first time, then 2%, then 4, etc.
And companies must offer to let you store all of your own data on your own cloud machine. You just have to open a port to them with some minimum guarantees of uptime, etc. They can read/write a subset of data. The schema must be open to the user.
Any systems that have been developed from personal user data (i.e. recommendation engines, trained models) must be destroyed. Same applies: if you're caught using a system that was trained in the past on aggregated data across multiple users, you face the same percentage fines.
The only folks who maybe get a pass are public healthcare companies for medical studies.
Fixed.
(But yeah it'll never happen because most of the techies are eager to screw over everyone else for their own gain. And they'll of course tell you it's to make the services better for you.)
I want my TVs to track me as much as a 1970s toaster. They have no business knowing who I am or anything about my life, yet alone twice a second capturing what I watch.
Once a generation starts to accept that everything they do is getting tracked, things may never go back, it may even lead autocracy.
Arguably we already have autocracy (call it emergent, if you like) in both the EU and America due to a combination of abdication and subversions of democratic will, self-governance, and sovereign nationhood over the last many decades, which is really starting to show its ugly nature just recently.
People forget, autocracies don’t just show up one day and announce “ok, we’re going to do autocracy now and I’m your dictator. Ok? Good?” They are conditions that have a long tail setup and preparation and then an accelerating escalation (where it seems we are now) and then, if not adequately countered, it bursts into place almost overnight.
That has resulted in the state of, in the EU, unelected (popularly) Commission Presidents dictating and dominating all of Europe, and the Presidency using powers it wasn’t supposed to have to tariff and threaten countries with destruction, conferred upon the office by a Congress that has also failed its core function.
Shallow thinkers tend to think in terms of the past archetypes, but it is unlikely that we will ever see anything like one of the middle eastern or Latin American autocrats with a clownish amount of metals on their chests ruling the West. It is a small cabal of people that manage a new kind of patronage system where everyone gets a piece of the plunder of the peasants. Call it neo-aristocracy if you like, until a better term emerges. Remember, the new tricks and lies tend to not be the same as the old tricks and lies.
It's exhausting getting "normies" to care about that. Frankly that ship has sailed, on a cultural level. Things that were unthinkable 20 years ago are just... yeah that's normal whatever.
Sending packages in the mail would be interesting. Though I suppose the only person that really needs to know your exact address is the delivery company, so maybe you could mail things with the address encrypted with the delivery company's public key..
You don’t even need to go this far. Just make deletion a right and clear consent a requirement like GDPR did. That’ll kill all these systems that depend on collecting information about people without their knowledge.
(Same goes for the credit bureaus and all the information brokers that slurp up every bit of de-anonymize information they can get.)
The hard part _includes_ the crypto and the sandboxing. Short of playing security theater games like "chuck it in a TEE", the moment your data needs any kind of processing, or possesses relationships with other users data (or their ability to view your data, like a social media feed), the complexity increases exponentially.
in fact, cookies legible to anything except the single sandboxed webpage running on your local browser would be illegal and thus never exist to begin with
Context based ads also give away information about the user. Because if you buy the goods that were advertised the vendor knows which contexts apply to you. It is not very precise information and it may involve probabilities, but it is still information.
Agree.
Also they say it’s not personally identifiable if they know everything about you but associates it as anonymously. Basically renaming you to random artifact. Fees
La like major loophole. That’s why I don’t like chrome.
Saying that I think I am already hooked on free and/or easy to search etc etc BS. Basically take my data for convenience and some advanced tech. Honestly feels like addiction.
"All of the big TV makers" except Vizio which is owned by Walmart, of course, who happens to do ACR and ad targeting:
> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]
Well it wouldn't be Texas if there wasn't some grotesque corruption involved. Vizio is the absolute worst of the TV manufacturers when it comes to this shit, so now it's clear Texas is really just trying to bully Walmart's competition rather than do something positive for consumers.
It should be illegal to set information collection settings to on by default. Being watched is considered a threat almost universally across all animals.
you would be incredibly uncomfortable with someone wide-eyed staring you down and taking notes of your behavior, wouldnt you? This is what tech companies are doing to everyone by default and in many cases they actively prevent you from stopping them. It is the most insane thing that people only seem to mildly complain about.
Humans are intensely social creatures, and are not adapted to feel the same way about things done invisibly versus visibly. That's how you end up in weird situations where people know the pervasive spying we're subjected to is wrong, but can't muster the will to act on it most of the time. It's cases like these where "voting with your wallet" produces terrible results. On one end you have organized groups of people figuring out chinks in human instincts, and on the other you have an unorganized mass of people doing what feels right or is expedient. You need coordination on both ends for competition and optimization to play out and find an acceptable compromise.
> Humans are intensely social creatures, and are not adapted to feel the same way about things done invisibly versus visibly.
This is why the EFF or some other privacy watchdog should fund a ad campaign depicting Google, Facebook etc. as a creepy stalker character peeking through someone's window, following them around, noting everything they do, gaslighting them etc.
Expose this abnormal norm for the disgusting behavior it is.
It's always amazing how many people plop anti-consumer comments out here. Like, of course you bastards deserve to be served ads on your own TV that you just paid $800 for. Because why? Because ... the market is wise, and "the market" is screwing us, so ... we must ... deserve to be screwed?
Whatever is being offered to us must be the best deal we can get, because ... it's being offered to us?
What drives this sentiment? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
Exactly. The free market has very little recourse when companies basically all start doing the same thing, and more or less don’t tell you about it. You certainly don’t see “takes a screenshot of your TV every 2s and uploads it for us to analyze” plastered all over the boxes! I guess the idea is the consumer will be omniscient and that a company will come along offering a privacy protecting alternative… but those incentives just doooo not work!
Seriously, totally deranged to think the “free market” is capable of protecting humans against widespread nefarious behavior from colluding actors with vast amounts of money and power.
A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept and markets like electronics are nowhere near free. Collusion is something that happens in an oligopoly. The fact many markets degenerate into oligopolies and monopolies is why we need government. 30 years ago I feel like people understood this. Now it seems everyone thinks they know what free market means just because they heard the term one time.
"A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept"
How would we know the real-world properties of a theoretical concept from economics? We understand pieces of economics, but certainly not the whole thing. Let's say we make the market free-er and free-er. Apart from politics junkies, who knows for sure how that behaves?
I like this branch of discussion and I want it to keep growing. What has to happen to make an electronics market free? Is the situation about spyware TV/cars can not be improved in any kind of Libertarian or Anarcho-Capitalist world without the Government? Is bad government worse for the electronics market than absence of any governments?
Some things like semiconductor fabrication will have huge barriers to entry for the foreseeable future due to being massively capital intensive and involving lots of trade secrets etc. We can't really do much about this.
What we (ie. the government) can do is ensure no entities own the entire supply chain, so you can't run a fab and also market finished consumer goods. That way, manufacture of consumer goods (including the software) from the raw fabricated parts gets a much lower barrier to entry.
We can also force consumer manufacturers to advertise all "features" that we deem to be important. We already do things like energy ratings, why not privacy ratings too? The more information consumers have the better.
Make no mistake, any capital intensive industry like electronics will degenerate into an oligopoly without government, or you can dream of a day where everyone can print semiconductor wafers at home.
It's driven by the fact that many of these people work for companies doing similar things, and this is how they resolve the cognitive dissonance. Otherwise they'd have to accept that their work is unethical.
I've wondered about cognitive dissonance. Another "cog diss" possibility is, maybe I have a strong aversion to admitting that I'm getting screwed. Maybe I can relieve those feelings by arguing publicly that I'm not getting screwed. Or that it's "inevitable" for me to be screwed.
Because the companies are selling technology to us cheaper than cost in exchange for this? I do think they should be required to offer a revenue-neutral way to turn off ads but it would cost several hundred dollars and only me & 5 other weirdos on this website would buy it.
We all know that they would artificially increase the price of those models and exclude tons of features to punish users and say it’s not profitable.
They should not be allowed to track user at all as a hardware manufacturer, let the users purchase the tracking software themselves and get a rebate back.
That may be a good point. But I don't think it's an answer to my question.
My question was, Why do people get so passionate about being screwed? Say consumers really are receiving a $300 discount in exchange for being forced to watch say 30 hours of ads. Is that really such a fantastic opportunity that I'm going to go cheer for it publicly, or claim it's consumers' fault, or it should be mandatory, or we must just accept it because (whatever)?
I think most people don't see the basic trade of "you charge me less but get my data & my attention" to be a bad deal, particularly when the upside is a large TV which was a _huge_ status symbol (for better or worse) not even 15 years ago.
I'll speak for myself. I think it's pretty universal that when someone says "I want X", people believe them. Where I find myself slightly rarer is that when someone's purchasing decisions says "I want X", I believe them.
People seem earnestly willing to trade their attention and data for ~a couple hundred dollars (this was my best estimate of how much cheaper ads make TVs - about $50 per year of ownership with 5ish years of ownership typical). I am much more worried that people who are not earnestly willing (me and the 5 other weirdos mentioned in my OP) don't really have a good outlet. It would be a genuine loss if the government no longer let people trade their attention and data for a cheaper TV, according to the people (I really had to resist capitalizing there) themselves. I don't have to like it to believe them.
I don't like ACR at all.. but after reading all the raging about ads on TVs I thought they would be terrible. Then I got one recently - the ads are literally just links to watch movies & TV series I might be interested in, on my TV? Like yes I do want my TV to show me some things I might be interested in watching, the same way Youtube does. I don't like the increasing privacy violations like ACR being used to tune those "ads", but seeing recommendations on my TV is a feature I like..
Heck if I had strong guarantees that the data generated by ACR was used only to tune recommendations/ads using an anonymous advertising ID like IDFA and not linked to any personally identifying information, I would want that too. But sadly there is no privacy and no way of ensuring that now.
Not everyone feels like that. Yesterday the app of my tv provider on my Samsung TV home screen suddenly shows a Prime icon in its place, prompting to install the app if you use muscle memory to control the TV. I am unable to remove this annoying ad. I really really hate ads and will go to great lengths to avoid seeing any in my private home. So I see this as an invasion of my privacy. Not buying Samsung anymore.
My guess is that most people on HN work for companies that are in some meaningful way doing the same thing. What would be called spying 50 years ago is now the bedrock of how tech either makes money or improves their products.
But I didn't really ask "why do some consumers prefer not to make certain unwanted features illegal"? I asked why some consumers are so wildly positive about being forced to adopt features they hate.
Lemme example. In the weed space, I don't think anybody would take this seriously: "well it's illegal and there's nothing we can do about that so it's pointless to discuss dissenting views." Or "it's going to be legalized and there's nothing anybody can do about that, so there is no possibility of debate." People would just laugh at that.
But when it's normal consumer activity, those same arguments seem to cut ice. Why?
I feel this is a generally strange situation. TVs seem to be pretty much the only tech that is somehow inflation proof, and that is largely due to the surveillance capitalist approach they come with.
I am a strong privacy advocate, but I also believe in customers choice. Hence, the primary issue I have with this technology is not its existence, but the lack of transparency in the pricing and the inability to truly properly opt out of this data collection.
At some point in the past year, I‘ve read someone suggest a „privacy label“ for electronics, akin to the energy efficiency labels that exist around the world. The manufacturers should be forced to disclose the extend of the data collection as well as the purpose and the ability to opt out on the product packaging, before the customer makes the purchase
Sadly, it seems like the contingent of people who have a problem with Smart TVs is small but noisy, and has no real market power. If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
Sort of reminds me how we complain loudly about how shitty airline service is, and then when we buy tickets we reliably pick whichever one is a dollar cheaper.
The problem is that consumers are not savvy. They go to the store, and compare TVs based on features presented. Colors, refresh rate, size, etc.
Its only when they get home (and likely not even right away) that they discover their TV is spying on them and serving ads.
This is a perfect situation where government regulation is required. Ideally, something that protects our privacy. But, minimally something like a required 'nutrition label' on any product that sends our data off device.
As far as I know, there is nothing to prevent Samsung from selling you a TV, then sending out a software update in two years which forces you to accept a new terms of service that allows them to serve you ads. If you do not accept, they brick your TV.
So it’s not a question of being savvy. As a consumer you can’t know what a company will choose to do in the future.
The lawsuit seems to be about using ACR, not the presence of ads.
> As far as I know, there is nothing to prevent Samsung from selling you a TV, then sending out a software update in two years which forces you to accept a new terms of service that allows them to serve you ads. If you do not accept, they brick your TV.
To the parent commenters' point, this is a perfect example of a situation where governments should be stepping in.
The thing that prevents a TV mfg from bricking your device is that they'd be instantly (and successfully) sued. In fact, there have already been many such class actions, ie with printer inks.
The downside is that it's sometimes easier and cheaper to just pay off the class and keep doing it.
That ought to be a slam dunk win in court. Especially since they probably won't show up to my local small claims court and I'll just send them the judgement.
I wouldn't say they aren't savvy. Many aren't, but also I don't blame them. Often you can buy a perfectly reasonable device and then they ad spying and adverts after you bought it. Most reviewers also don't talk about this stuff, and there are no standards for any of it (unlike e.g. energy consumption).
I went with Philips Hue smart lighting specifically because it could work without an account or any internet access for the bulbs or hub.
Guess what became required this year? At least it seems I can still use them offline if I don't use the official app. But the official app is now just a popup requiring me to create an account. I'm not sure if I could add new lights using third party apps. Not like I'm ever buying a Hue product again though.
True. But it does work for food safety, and to help curb underage drinking and smoking, to stop lousy restaurants from serving unsafe food and for lots of other stuff we take for granted.
Top down governance isn't a silver bullet, but it has its place in a functioning society.
If no one manufactures such a product, how does the "market" express this desire?
Buying one toaster, that would last your lifetime, is easily manufactured today, and yet no company makes such a thing. This is true across hundreds of products.
The fact is, manufacturing something that isn't shit, is less profitable, so what we're gonna get is shit. It doesn't really matter what people "want".
Not the person you're asking, but about as frequently as I replace washing machines. The fact that I'm doing it at all is the problem, especially since both machines had been "solved" by the late 1970s.
The non-electric office tools I have from that era are perpetual. Eternal.
How often are you replacing washing machines? As we had more kids, we upgraded our toaster from a 2-slice to a 4-slice, somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 years ago. Can't imagine we paid more than ~$20 for it. Still going strong today. If it lasts 10 more years, all my kids will be moved out of the house, and I suppose we could downgrade to a 2-slice model again. Unless the grandkids like toast.
A situation in which many people care a little,but a few people care a lot in the other direction,is almost exactly what government is for. Ken Paxton has issues, for sure, but good on him in this case.
There is a market and people pay for it. However they are mostly not TVs, but monitors and those paying for it have the budget to pay far more. However this market will always exist because some of those are showing safety messages in a factory and if the monitor in any way messes those up there will be large lawsuits.
I don’t agree with this. The only way this would make sense is if consumers were made aware of spying vs not spying prior to purchase.
But TV manufacturers can change the TV’s behavior long after it is purchased. They can force you to agree to new terms of service which can effectively make the TV a worse product. You cannot conclude the consumer didn’t care.
This 'Wild West' is easily solved with decent consumer law. Spying could be shut down over night if laws levied fines on TV manufacturers pro rata—ie fines would multiply by the number of TV sets in service.
If each TV attracted a fine two to three times the amount manufacturers received from selling its data the practice would drop stone dead.
All it takes is proper legislation. Consumers just lobby your politicians.
We're past the point when most people can claim ignorance. And surely we have enough protection to at least defend against the "changed the terms and conditions after purchase" situation? They can't force me to do anything, and then stop working if I refuse.
For now maybe? Consumer protections are at an all time low at the moment. Your exact argument about “we all know this just nobody cares and stop whining” is exactly what will be cited if you attempt to take action if they brick your device.
The problem is lack of information at time of purchase, in both cases. It's so onerous to figure out what these products are doing that people give up. Same in the airline case. If any of the airlines actually provided better service at a higher price, they'd have a market, but it's impossible to assess that as an end user with all the fake review bullshit that's all over the Internet these days.
The only cases where it's clearcut are a few overseas airlines like Singapore Airline who have such a rock solid reputation for great service that people will book them even if the price is 2x.
I've been shopping around specifically for this type of thing. There's two options: one is to buy a monitor display similar to what's in restaurants and retail stores and the other is to switch to a projector without smart features. The monitor displays, like your computer monitor, is even more expensive than regular TV's because they have special features that make them better to have on all the time at retail stores. They don't even have sound systems. The other option is projector displays which are generally the more sane option but they are not as easily installed. I suspect that privacy conscious consumers will go for projector displays as they aren't bundled with spyware. There's still risks like with the Roku TV box but it's much easier to replace the streaming unit. Apple TV claims that it doesn't utilize ACR so that's a solid choice but I would personally go for a Linux box with an HDMI out.
> Sadly, it seems like the contingent of people who have a problem with Smart TVs is small but noisy, and has no real market power.
No one cares. Smart TVs are super awesome to non tech people who love them. Plug it in, connect to WiFi - Netflix and chill ready. I have a friend who just bought yet another smart TV so he can watch the Hockey game from his bar.
> If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
What happened to that Jumbo (dumbo?) TV person who was on here wanting to build these things? My guess is they saw the economics and the demand and gave up. I applaud them for trying though. I still cling to my two dumb 1080 Sony TVs that have Linux PC's hooked to them.
Wouldn’t smart TVs that didn’t spy on you also be awesome? Seems like a knowledge gap to me. This gets solved as soon as people realize what’s happening. Right now they don’t realize TVs are cheap because of the ad subsidy.
"If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one."
The problem is easily solved and I'm surpised more people don't do it. For years I've just connected a PVR/STB (set top box) to a computer monitor. It's simple and straightforward, just connect the box's HDMI output into a computer monitor.
Moreover, PVR/STBs are very cheap—less than $50 at most, I've three running in my household.
If one wants the internet on the same screen just connect a PC to another input on your monitor. This way you've total isolation, spying just isn't possible.
Do you have a nice 65” OLED monitor option with solid display settings supporting Dolby modes, etc I can examine? I tried to find one and nobody is selling.
Not 65" but for a really large picture I just use the HDMI input on the smart TV sans internet and it's fine (also the TV makes a good large monitor). Works well on the projection monitor too.
Just put the HDMI into the TV set input and forget connecting the internet. That's the situation with one of my TVs and it gives a great picture. Also it works fine with my projection monitor.
..and constant notifications that the network is not connected, that there are wifi APs nearby, do you want to configure one(?), and that it's been 157 days since the last software update, and that you should connect your tv to the internet to get newest bestest firmware with 'new features'.
I think government is the only way to regulate below pain threshold nonsense that weighs down society.
but I think small issues in society might translate to small issues for government action, and regulatory capture has a super-high roi overturning "minor" stuff.
I suspect only showing real harm for something is the only way to get these things high-enough priority for action.
I kind of wonder if the pager attacks, or the phone nonsense in ukraine/russia might make privacy a priority?
This isn't really an accurate analysis because it assumes the only parties involved are the TV manufacturers and the purchasing consumers. In fact the third party is ad brokers and so the calculus to alienate some users in pursuit of ad dollars is different.
If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
I don't think they would. There are some TV manufacturers that are better about not nagging you (which is one of the reasons why I bought a Sony last year), but as time moves forward, companies have been less likely to leave money on the table. This is just the logical result of capitalism. Regulation will be the only way to protect consumer privacy.
Similarly, air travel gets worse as consumer protection regulations gets rolled back
This sounds like victim blaming to me. "What do you mean you don't understand how software and the internet works and thought this was just a TV?!"
If you want to make a free market argument you need to look up what a free market is. In particular, consumers need to have perfect information. Do you really think if manufacturers were obligated to make these "features" clear that most people wouldn't care?
I skimmed through what the TX governor/attorney general/whatever it's called said, and I don't think he even understands "privacy". All he's bothered about is that the data is going to China instead of American companies.
Of course they don’t understand privacy, they’re the same ones also trying to verify gender to use a restroom.
I appreciate them caring about what you watch being recorded but it’s pretty clear too they only care because the tv manufacturers are not “American Companies”. Walmart is getting special treatment and will be allowed to operate
But they named companies that are not Chinese eg Samsung. I think the claims are well spirited and the China argument is an aggravating factor for many, so no harm in having it. Will likely lead to higher interest in the case, so that's good.
What American TV manufacturers is there? LG is from Korea as well, Sony is originally from Japan and there two smaller (I assume, since Koreans dominate display market) Chinese manufacturers. But together those five are most of the units manufactured globally, so makes sense to sue them to have the biggest impact.
“Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans’ devices inside their own homes,” Paxton said. “This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries.”
Fundamentally how is this any different from what Google or Meta or Comcast or AT&T do? Comcast knows everything that goes to the TV and sells that data.
At&T sells your browsing data…
Those are services you pay for monthly.
Sure the method is different but it’s the same goal. Company x learns your interests so It can monetize you by selling to advertisers
AT&T sounds like the same thing, Google sounds different because they theoretically claim to not sell your data, and instead sell ads, and Google can show you an ad you want to see because Google knows you so well. It doesn’t precisely sell you to advertisers in the same way.
Anyways, the whole thing sucks for consumer privacy and needs to be outlawed. The problem is that companies come up with unique, tricky ways of exploiting you, and people can never fully understand it without a lot of effort. Someone might be ok using Google and seeing contextual ads, but wouldn’t be ok if they knew Google was saving a screenshot of their browser every second and uploading and reselling it. The first can feel innocuous, the second feels evil.
"The TVs “are effectively Chinese-sponsored surveillance devices, recording the viewing habits of Texans at every turn without their knowledge or consent,” the lawsuits said."
This explains why Vizio, who is owned by Walmart, was not sued.
Sony, Samsung, and LG are not Chinese companies but they are being sued. It's more likely that Vizio is not included because they already got hit by the FTC (but not hard enough to disable ACR).
No, that's the problem - it's not good advocacy. The destructionist movement is more appropriately seen as arbitraging away existing concern about the issues they claim to take up. Their politicians' main use for reformist political causes are as cudgels for threatening businesses with, after which they back off once their own pockets get lined. As a libertarian who cares about many of the causes of individual freedom they dishonestly champion, I'm well acquainted with their abuse of ideals.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.
The lack of a capital L is because I'm not whole hog on the "Libertarian" party's kool-aid. In fact, I often argue against much of it as it runs contrary to individual liberty.
On this topic specifically, privacy is an integral part of individual liberty. So claiming to care about privacy, only to simplistically dunk on the more general subject is just odd.
Furthermore, elsewhere in this thread you've espoused the idea of examining arguments on their merits and not who is making them. So it's directly hypocritical to be dismissing my argument based on a quick self-description that I only threw out to mitigate the dynamic of destructionist/fascist cheerleaders writing off all dissent like it's only coming from progressive democrats with blue hair.
Also do you have anything to say about my other points? Your other comments were seemingly substantive, but now you're just being combative for combativeness's sake.
>The destructionist movement is more appropriately seen as arbitraging away existing concern about the issues they claim to take up. Their politicians' main use for reformist political causes are as cudgels for threatening businesses with, after which they back off once their own pockets get lined. As a libertarian who cares about many of the causes of individual freedom they dishonestly champion, I'm well acquainted with their abuse of ideals.
You are making points about their "movement" and generalities about what those politicians do. I don't care about their movement or their general behavior, because I will take this win for privacy to the extent that it is successful at getting devices like this more regulated or (unlikely) eliminated.
Do you think that Trump's coalition is internally values-consistent? I sure don't; but they effectively made abortion illegal in a lot of places, and it seemed to make them happy like it had been a long term goal of theirs or something.
The thing is that I do not see this ending up as a win for privacy. At best it's political grandstanding that will end up in a quid-pro-quo settlement and get dropped by the following news cycle. But there are worse possibilities like it's used as a cudgel to force the manufacturers to add "age verification" (eg sign into an account on the TV to be able to use it at all), or other creeping digital authoritarian dynamic which will then be sold as a "win".
A fundamental difficulty is that there is very little legal basis for a right to privacy. An AG is incapable of changing that, especially after commercial surveillance practices have been around for decades (precluding common-law approaches to novel behavior). Legislatures are where we need constructive action on this topic.
Which is why the generally performative behavior of the destructionists on the vast majority of causes they claim to champion is highly relevant. I'd say the few "successful goals" of the destructionist movement (criminalizing abortion, jackboots attacking minorities, appointing destructionist judges) are exceptions that prove the rule on how generally non-constructive their pushes are.
Yeah pretty much. No regulators are batting an eye at the industrial data gathering schemes of Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. and they never have. And the only major social network under real legal scrutiny is TikTok.
The American Government wants to have the cake and eat it too, as per usual. They want to leave the massive column of the economy that is surveillance capitalism intact and operating, and making them money, and they want to make sure those scary communists can't do the same. Unfortunately there isn't really a way to take down one without taking down the other, unless you legally enshrine that only American corporations have a right to spy on Americans. And (at time of comment anyway) they seem to not want to openly say the reason is just naked nationalism/racism.
And of course: casual reminder that Vizio does extensive ACR and ad targeting, and even bought a company doing it to facilitate that:
> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]
But I'm sure Texans are fully aware and consented to this, right?
This is exactly why the current ad model is broken.
Users are tracked without real consent, advertisers still waste budgets, and everyone loses except the platforms collecting the data.
What’s interesting is that you can actually build effective ads without spying at all — by targeting intent signals instead of identities, and rewarding users transparently for engagement.
The tech is already there, but the incentives are still backwards.
As long as the firmware is proprietary and cannot be inspected or modified, the only reliable way to avoid snooping by tech industry is not to connect any "smart" device to the Internet. Use the TV as a dumb monitor for a PC under your control (running Linux). If streaming service X will not run on Linux because DRM is not implemented or enforceable on a free device, do without it, or find alternative sources for the content (hint: Linux ISOs).
You say "only", but if it is illegal, optional, and can be detected freely, it is very likely to not happen. For all the snark one can muster about DOJ, with those three things in place, it could get expensive very quickly to try to circumvent the law.
I've been using my pi-hole as my DNS and then also firewall blocking the TV from phoning out on port 53 in case the manufacturer has hardcoded DNS. Though I agree with the point and I shouldn't have to do this. This is just mitigation.
It wouldn't even need to use any sort of standards-based DNS-like thing at all, if they control the server (on a stable IP address in the TV's firmware) and the client (the TV). It could be any data scheme (probably https for simplicity and blending in) along the lines of "give me all the other IP addresses I'll need, which aren't as stable as the one in my firmware."
Regardless, what is the benefit of putting the TV on the network but preventing it from doing DNS lookups anyway, even if you could be sure you succeed?
Absolutely yes. My prescribed CPAP came with 5G that uploads data for their app and for your physician to monitor your progress. You basically wouldn’t even know it had one, the plan must be managed by the company and automatically connects where ever you take it.
Maybe not yet - but 5g was built with the idea of making them cheap. It takes a couple years to design the cheap modems and then a few more years to get them in TVs, so they could well be coming in the near future yet - only time will tell. And the modem will also be your wifi so you can't really rip it off without losing other useful things.
>but 5g was built with the idea of making them cheap
For bandwidth, maybe. It's still going to add cost to the BOM. They'll have to recoup that somehow. Say a 5G modem costs $20 (random number). For it to actually make money, it'll need to be otherwise not connected to the internet, otherwise it can just use wifi instead. Out of 100 people, how many do you think won't connect it to the internet for privacy reasons? 1? 5? 10? Keep in mind, if they don't connect to the internet, they'll need to go out and get another device to watch netflix or whatever, so they're highly incentivized to. Say 10 out of 100 don't, and with this sneaky backdoor you now can sell ads to them. For that privilege, you paid $200 per disconnected TV, because for every disconnected TV with a 5G module, you need to have a 5G module in 9 other TVs that were already connected to the internet. How could you ever hope to recoup that expense?
assume they are aiming for $1 in large quantites. I don't know thier number but that is closer. And the cost will be low because they are bulk buying excess data. They can send this at 3am when everyone is asleep so cell companies can give a deep discount.
again the above is the plan, reality often changes.
Adafruit sells ESP32 for less than $3. Any manufacturer can get quantity pricing to lower the cost. ESP32 doesn't have cell (AFAIK), but it wouldn't be technically that hard to add if they wanted. While $1 might be a bit on the low side, it is reasonable.
If you're planning on using the TV as a dumb display for another device, and are determined enough to physically remove a cellular modem, then the TV's own WiFi is not a useful thing either, even if integrated into the same chip.
If you want the TV to be on your network (for casting or streaming or whatever) and you also want to filter that traffic (allowing connections only to the services you want to use) then you need it to be on your own network (wifi, if there's no ethernet port) and not on someone else's network (cellular).
The CPU, wifi, and modem are all in one in this future (think ESP32). That is the direction this is likely to move. You can't remove one without the rest. I suppose you could put your own CPU in and write software, but otherwise you are stuck.
I have not purchased a TV or car with these misfeatures, but I expect I will have to at some point in the future.
The most vulnerable part might be the antenna? Required by laws of physics to be a certain size and shape, and is not easily integrated into another more essential component?
If found, it can be removed entirely, or replaced with a dummy load to satisfy any presence detection circuits. But radiation can be minimized or eliminated.
Now obviously a device can choose not to function (or to be especially annoying in its UI) if it doesn't find a network. But people take cars (and TVs) to places with no WiFi or mobile coverage, and I don't know how the device manufacturers deal with that.
Nevada has a gaming dept that certifies the firmware in "slot" machines. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for TVs. Maybe include cars too... they like to phone home more than they should.
Perhaps. But you also need to ask why Paxton is doing this as this case will vaporize as soon as that is accomplished. I would be much more optimistic if California were also signed onto this.
Paxton, however, doesn't give one iota of damn about individual freedom. So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge.
Unfortunately, we don't have Molly Ivins around anymore to tell us what is really going on here in the Texas Laboratory for Bad Government.
> So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge
This is about being in the news as much as possible. He is in a close 3 way race for the 2026 Republican spot for US Senate. The other two are current old-school conservative senator John Cornyn, and new comer MAGA Wesley Hunt (but not as MAGA as Paxton). Lots of in-fighting over funding, so Paxton is making sure to get in the news as much as possible.
Throughout the year he has been in the news for things that are useful like this and another suit against a utility company for causing a fire and others for typical maga things like lawsuit to stop harris county (Houston) funding legal services for immigrants facing deportation or immigrant-serving nonprofits or a "tip-line" for bathroom enforcement or lawsuits against doctors...it goes on and on and on. It's a page out of the Trump playblook, its like watching a trump clone. And thats the point.
While I agree (and I agree with the upstream comments, too), there's often deeper reasons why we can short circuit fully evaluating an argument made on its merits: often the "merits", or lack thereof, are derived from the party's values and beliefs, and if we know those values to be corrupt, it's likely that subsequent arguments are going to be similarly corrupt.
There's only so much time in the day, only so much life to live. Could a blog post written by the worst person you know have a good point, even though it's titled something like "An argument in favor of kicking puppies" by Satan himself? I mean, true, I haven't read it, yet. There could be a sound, logical argument buried within.
This is also what "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" teaches, essentially. Trust is hard-won, and easily squandered.
"A lie is around the world before the truth has finished tying its shoes."
"Flood the Zone" is why some of us are so exhausted, though.
In these instances, the argument has to come from someone who is self-aware enough of the short-circuit to say "okay, look, I am going to address that elephant" — but mostly, that's not what happens.
Thankfully in this case, all we need get through is the title.
I don't care about people's values, unless I am evaluating them; that's their own business, and I am not the value police or thought police. Goodness knows there are people (hi, mom!) who are appalled by some of my values.
Roman Polanski and Woody Allen: terrible humans, but they have still made some of the best films that exist.
Everyone is the value police, though, at some level. It is either cowardice or willful ignorance to pretend you don't have judgements about how other people behave, some of which might compel you to act in some way.
It's always important to read the fine print. That would be part of evaluating an argument on its merits. His lawsuit over Tylenol + autism is easily rejected on its merits. That means nothing about this issue.
I have this article growing in the back of my head that is currently mostly a rant about how impractical technology turned out by comparing the current state with the old days. It's hard as there are countless examples and I want to address only the most embarrassing ones. Dumb vs smart TV alone could fill a tomb worth of downgrades. Do you remember the variable resistor, the rotary knob that provided volume control? The ease of use, the granularity, the response time!
I currently have volume control on my TV, one on the OS on the computer that drives it and one on the application that makes the picture. That is only half the problem
The thing is, I want smart features, I just don't want those smart features to be tied to the display. A separate box allows more consumer choice, which is generally a better experience. Easily flashable firmware would be an acceptable alternative for the same reason.
I'd be happy with a setup box giving me the ability to add apps for streaming services or whatever, but I don't want that STB spying on my either. I feel like even if all TVs were dumb monitors we'd just be moving the real problem of insane levels of data collection and spying to another device. We need strong regulation with real teeth to prevent the spying at which point all of our devices should be protected.
Hi-fi and AV enthusiasts have known that "separates" is where it's at since the beginning. Unfortunately it's such a small segment compared to mass market junk "content" devices and it's only shrinking as more people are seduced by the convenience of the shit stuff.
A separate box allows more consumer choice, which is generally a better experience.
In the life of my last TV (10+ yrs), I've had to switch out that separate box three times. It would have sucked & been way more expensive to have had to replace the TV each time.
Firmware can be updated, sure, but there's the risk of some internal component failing. There's the risk of the services I want to use not being compatible. I'd also prefer to use an operating system I'm familiar with, because, well, I'm familiar with it, rather than some custom firmware from a TV company whose goal is to sell your data, not make a good user experience...
Of course, this ties back to the enshittification of the Internet. Every company is trying to be a data broker now though, because they see it as free passive income.
Regarding the failure of internal components--there are some 'failure' modes which I had not even contemplated previously.
I have a TV that's only about 5-6 years old and has a built in Roku. It mostly works fine, but the built in hardware is simply not fast enough to play some streaming services, specifically some stuff on F1TV. And before anyone asks, it's not a bandwidth problem--I have gigabit fiber and the TV is using ethernet.
Anyway, between that, general UI sluggishness and the proliferation of ads in the Roku interface, I switched to an Apple TV and haven't looked back.
We've already had TVs which only started serving ads after a few months of use. What's stopping them from selling TVs which stop working if it hasn't been able to connect to the mothership for a few weeks?
And instead of a full brick, let's just downgrade to 360p and call it an "expiration of your complementary free Enhanced Video trial".
>We've already had TVs which only started serving ads after a few months of use. What's stopping them from selling TVs which stop working if it hasn't been able to connect to the mothership for a few weeks?
Same thing that prevents your phone manufacturer from adding a firmware level backdoor that uploads all your nudes to the mothership 1 day after the warranty expires. At some point you just have to assume they're not going to screw you over.
That's not a good answer, unless you just want cable. YouTube, Netflix, etc won't work. Buying hardware is paying extra which is already a deterrent, but anyway just shifts the problem to that piece of hardware - is the stick vetted to not do any harm? Other solutions are often impractical or overly complex for non-technical people. I haven't seen any good answers to date. I guess your TV just shouldn't spy on everything you watch? Seems like a reasonable expectation.
My TCL/Roku TV recently started showing popups during streams with services like YouTubeTV and PlutoTV, that basically say, "Click here to watch this same program on the Roku Network". I poked around the settings on the TV, and sure enough, there were some new "smart" settings added and enabled by default. I disabled the settings, and the popups stopped. But it's only a matter of time before something else appears.
Because with a stick, I can easily decide to chuck it and replace with another. Over and over again. Hard to do with a TV. Even if I had the money, disposing of one is a royal pain.
For now. They’re about to undergo a CEO change, again. Who knows what will happen in the future, particularly if the shareholders expect the perceived value provided by enshittification.
John Ternus, SVP of Hardware Engineering, is considered the front runner for CEO right now. The board wants a more product oriented CEO this time. Things could change but makes me optimistic.
I do the same thing. My PC is hooked up via HDMI to a receiver which goes to the TV via HDMI. I use VNC on my phone to remote control it. It works well. The phone’s touch screen functions as a mouse and you can pull up the phone’s on screen keyboard to type. My wife is extremely non technical and does fine with it. Usually we just use the browser to watch ad-blocked YouTube or unofficial sports streams.
We just switched to a laptops and USB-HDMI cable that always dangles near our TV. Someone wants to see F1, sports or a movie, they just plug it and watch like it's a big computer screen. If 9yo can do it, anyone can do it.
And a guest wifi that is password free on by default. All it takes is a neighbor to get a new router from the ISP. I just had to turn my guest wifi off because I noticed a lot of bandwidth on it (likely coming from our neighbor who was bragging about cord cutting).
My Wi-Fi isn't. I live about 2 miles away from my closest neighbor, so it was an inconvenience.
The trick was finding TV's and what not that don't need an Internet connection. Vizio was the only brand I could find that still had just dumb tv flat screens, believe it or not.
I would much rather buy a dumb TV. I feel that the smart TV experience is an opportunity it eventually make TVs feel dated and slow. I would rather buy a standalone streamer that I can plug in. Buying a new $100 dollar streamer every couple years is cheaper and produces less e-waste than buying a new giant TV.
I isolate smart TVs and other IOT devices to a separate network/subnet, and usually block their network access unless they need an update.
A related alternative would be that the listed tv price included the price of time spent viewing ads, and the sale price of your usage data (and that changing the price, say by showing more ads, required agreement).
A DUMB TV costs $x, while a badly behaved smart TV costs $y up front, plus $z per hour for the next few years, where y is potentially slightly less than x.
Look at "Commercial" TVs. This is what they call dumb TV's nowadays. I guess they're mainly targeted at businesses who want a TV to for things like informational displays, conferences, etc.
I only found this out because I thought my 15 year old plasma TV had died, but it ended up being the power cord.
The exist, for commercial/enterprise use (usually digital signage and meeting rooms). They cost a few times more than consumer-grade, because of the word 'enterprise'
Likely much smaller sales volume as well. Economies of scale are a thing, especially where marketing (largely through dealers / vendors / distributors) is a major expense.
That would again suggest that it's marketing (that is, the process of finding distributors and buyers) rather than production and design that are the principle cost-drivers. A seller of "dumb" devices has far fewer potential buyers (or at least perceives as such), and fewer channels for distribution, so they're going to have to focus more effort, and cost, on sales and marketing. It's not the cost of designing or producing the products, but of matching them to distributors and buyers, which would dominate.
I'm not certain of this, but I'm fairly confident it's a factor.
Ha, we had a company email to all employees saying that we are not allowed to view any company confidential material on any Samsung TVs and appliances because they will take a screenshot of whatever it is you are watching and send it back to Samsung, unless explicitly disabled in settings but that setting is frequently "bugged" and just turns itself back on after some firmware updates.
As long as there are no clear laws this will only get worse. Imagine a TV with an e-sim. There will be no way to turn the connection off unless you pack it in aluminum foil.
Talking about e-sim, Texas should also sue all modern car brands. Most cars today are online and spy on your driving behavior.
After this article I installed AdBlock Home to my HA unit and moved DHCP to it. Filtered LG domains and few thousands others. Apparently LG TV actively uses internet even in switched off state.
The China angle will grab headlines, but the more uncomfortable truth is that the entire smart TV ad model seems to depend on surveillance most users never fully understood they were opting into
Did they sue Google for reading all your emails? Or Meta for seeing all your personal history? Or Walmart for determining someone's very personal relationships based on their buying patterns? Or just every salesman out there whose job is to be nosy about customer's life and work?
Good for Texas. State governments often protect us from the federal government. Many laws that we have now were only passed at the federal level when about 2/3 of states previously passed the same laws (e.g., women's voting rights).
This is the same AG who sued Tylenol over autism. While we can applaud the effort (broken clock theory?), it’s all but guaranteed he’s getting paid for helping another entity. Corruption is on the menu and fully expected these days.
If I had been told I'd an article today with the phrase "Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claims..." and asked to predict the remainder of the sentence, a reasonable pro-consumer stance would probably not have been in my top 20 guesses.
It gives me distinct pleasure to see the little network cable plug from the cable coming from TV be sticking just so half-way out of the network switch enough so that I can easily plug it back in without hunting for it behind all the equipment, but also enough to know it can't talk to anything.
It seems like there is a big business opportunity for someone to create a box you attach to your network to filter outgoing info, and incoming ads. Too much work for a tiny team to research what everything is talking to, and MITM your devices and watch DNS queries, etc, but if there was something dead simple to block a Samsung fridge from getting to its ad server, I have to think it would sell.
A sibling comment says "just use Pi-hole" which kind of works and is also inadequate. A similar system is Ad Guard Home. These work at the DNS level with preset lists of bad domains. They aren't necessarily going to catch your TV calling out to notanadserver.samsung.com because that domain name is not recorded in the list of naughty domains. They are definitely not going to help if your device reaches out via IP.
Another approach is to disallow all DNS or only allow *.netflix.com for the TV. In my experience attempting to only allow certain domains is a game of whackamole where everyone in the house complains their stuff is broken because it needs undocumentedrandomdomain.com.
>Another approach is to disallow all DNS or only allow *.netflix.com for the TV. In my experience attempting to only allow certain domains is a game of whackamole where everyone in the house complains their stuff is broken because it needs undocumentedrandomdomain.com.
...not to mention that apps have random third party SDKs that are required, and might not work if you block those domains. A/B testing/feature flags SDKs, and DRMs (for provisioning keys) come to mind.
I tried using a Pi-hole for this exact reason: prevent bullcrap TV ads. My Roku TV wouldn't stopped working. I had to whitelist so many roku-related domains that it basically became pointless.
I had the same issue, decided to remove Roku instead…
I used to have a Roku TV, plus a a few of the standalone Roku Ultras for my other (non-Roku) TVs. I got a full page advert when I started up the TV one day and started the process of replacing them all (I think it is when Roku were experimenting with that).
Over about a year I replaced them with Apple TVs* and the user experience is far better, plus the amount of tracking domains reported by Pi-hole dropped precipitously! The TVs don't have internet access at all, they are just driven via the HDMI port now.
* I replaced the Ultras first, and when the Roku TV eventually started acting laggy on the apps I replaced the Roku TV as well.
I thought of pi-hole but I’m not sure it is dead simple. I’m thinking a box that your incoming internet connections connects to and an outgoing connection to your wifi router.
The market probably isn’t big enough yet, but I’ll bet it grows. I mean _Texas_ is bringing it up!
Until Samsung builds a fridge that won't cool if it goes more than some period of time (a week?) without pinging their servers. They'd probably get away with it given the friction of getting a large appliance out of your home and back to the store. Bonus evil points for making this feature active only after the return/warranty period expires.
You probably overestimate the market for something like that. Most people don't know or care. Those that do are more likely to hang out on HN or adjacent places and know how to deal with it themselves anyways.
> accusing them of “secretly recording what consumers watch in their own homes.”
Secret? There's T's&C's that people agree to when starting up their TV that tells them.
That doesn't make it right of course and it shouldn't just be opt-in, it should be banned entirely. If you want to analyse my viewing behaviour, pay me.
I would be curious to see a comparison of the T&Cs in these TVs.
I generally agree that reading the T&C is on the user and you cannot blame the lack if transparency onto the company, IF the T&C are sufficiently comprehensible. Some T&Cs I‘ve read are written in obscure enough legalese that it might as well be considered hidden information
So you buy a new TV, unpack and install it, and then when the whole family is gathered around, you suddenly get this confirmation on the TV if you agree with their T&C. Are you supposed to reject them and return the TV at this point? T&C should be part of the purchase agreement, instead of being forced upon the user while using the product after purchase. Any one-sided change of T&C after purchase should be invalid and punishable.
What bugs me is that it is impossible to buy a TV these days that is not "smart". (Of course I know I can just not connect it to the internet, and I don't, but I wish there was a company in the TV market which would make privacy a selling point).
Isn’t this a thing for all providers? YouTube definitely spies on what you look at and Netflix knows as well. Or is this just because a TV actually doesn’t provide the content, just the view? And is there’s a difference if you have a streaming device like Roku?
Content providers knowing when I watch their content is not concerning to me. They're on the other side of a transaction with me; they have as much a right to store the details of the transaction as I do. Even Blockbuster had that information.
What's concerning is when third parties start snooping on transactions that they are not involved in.
Also all the smart people spending a career trying to get other people to buy things that they don’t want or need l, the relentless consumption of which degrades the very environment which supports us. It’d be funny if you didn’t have to play the game too.
They typically use different dns domain and subdomains or subpaths, because the same server cannot ingest analytics and stream data at the same time. So, keep roku.com but block scribe.roku.com
I understand that. It would seem to take a lot of experimentation: Netflix has a lot of servers and domains, and at their scale many could be involved in any interaction.
That still doesn't escape ACR, AFAIK. These "smart" TVs still capture screenshots from HDMI inputs.
That's one of the reasons I only buy Sony for years now. ACR & the like are opt-out at the first terms/privacy screen, and you can even go into Android/Google TV settings and just disable the APK responsible. (Samba something-something)
I googled how to disable ACR on my new Samsung TV. Followed the instructions only to find out that it was disabled already. That, combined with a built-in physical microphone switch (which I noticed in the quick start guide before I'd even attached the wall mount) made me quite impressed with Samsung off the bat.
It does have some weird behaviors, though, like occasionally letting me know it has some kind of AI features or something, or bringing up a pop-up on the screen letting my kid know how to use the volume control on the remote every time he uses the volume control on the remote for the first time since power-on.
It's better not to connect the TV to the Internet at all. This will solve most of your problems. Use a Linux HTPC to stream content (not an Apple box, they collect telemetry and profile users like others).
KODI is terrible for streaming and operating systems built around it are far too limited. For now the best option seems to be a plain Linux desktop, upscaled, and used with an airmouse remote. Keep an eye on this however:
I loathe whenever an older family member ends up at the TV menu, since chances are they will not be able to find their way back to whatever external device they were trying to use the TV as a monitor for. TVs using android seem to be irritated that you even plan on using some external device plugged into the HDMI ports.
You may want to look into an AVR (audio/video receiver), also known as a home theater receiver. Aside from powering speakers, that's their core function: connect a variety of inputs (HDMI, AirPlay, radio, composite, etc. etc.) to one or more outputs.
Pro plaintif not only because of privacy concerns, but if it raises the cost of televisions by introducing a production inefficiency, it is one step against the Baumol Effect.
I'd never thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right, particularly in Germany, by a factor of at least 3-4. 50-55" mid-range TV: plenty under 400 EUR. Double-glazed window about that size, custom-made (because just about all windows in Germany are custom-made): 1200 EUR, and that was about six years ago - I shudder to think what it would be now.
When you consider the differing regulation and applications, it makes a great deal of sense. Just making a window in the US can cost less than $10 if you hand assemble it. Making a window that conforms to all building regulations in your particular area is a huge undertaking that involves highly specialized equipment.
I've said it before and I will probably say it again, this is digital assault and should be thought of and treated that way. Companies, and their officers, should be treated criminally for things like this. Most people do not know/understand this is happening and that is by design. Is this view a little hyperbolic? Possibly, but the privacy scales are so far tipped against the average person right now that we need more extreme views and actions to start fixing things.
It has been increasingly interesting to me how aligned the interests of platforms are with advertisers against the end consumer.
I don't think I have ever heard a person say they enjoy watching ads (except maybe the super bowl and even then it's a pretty short list).
Despite that, it seems like ads continue to multiply and companies get even more annoying and slimy with how they integrate them.
I guess what I'm wondering is where the breaking point is, when people start abandoning ad-filled platforms all together and ads become less profitable to sell/purchase.
The person or company to figure out a way other than ads to monetize eye balls (and its not just data, that's only used to make better ads) will be the next Google.
> Vizio, which is now owned by Walmart, paid $2.2 million to the Federal Trade Commission and New Jersey in 2017 over similar allegations related to ACR.
I personally have a Samsung TV, but this ACR and ad stuff is why ever since the moment I took it out of the box, it has never and will never, be plugged into the internet. I simply use an Google TV plugged into it for my actual streaming, and avoid all of this ACR nonsense (yes Google has their own tracking but I want Tailscale and SmartTube). I think this is the way to do it. Just use your smart TV as a dumb TV, and move on.
As a reminder if you own an LG TV, turn off the sneakily named "Live Plus" thing. This "option" makes your LG TV spy on you, tracking and reporting what you watch based on the image that is shown on the TV.
You need to go to Settings -> All Settings -> General -> System -> Additional Settings to make sure the "Live Plus" option is OFF.
Check it periodically, as it sometimes turns itself back on again after updates.
> "This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries."
But, but, but, you agreed to the TOS didn't you, or else you cannot use your TV.
I have a cheap samsung from 5 years ago that pops up a dialog when it boots. I've never read it or agreed to it. It goes away after about 5 seconds. After that I stream using HDMI and all is well. It's also never been connected to a network.
Can't say what other TVs do, but this one works fine without TOS etc. If there is some feature or other that doesn't work due to this, I can say I've never missed it.
As far as I can tell, I'm doing that right now with a new higher-end Samsung television. The installer showed me how to make it boot directly to the active HDMI source and skip the Samsung smart hub. The TV has never been online and I don't see any reason to change that — what possible improvement could a firmware update bring? I don't use any of the television's software-enabled features.
Next do Smart TVs listening to you. This is the #1 cause of "uncanny" ads that people get on Facebook, etc. when they think their phone is listening to them. It's usually their TV doing the listening.
Walmart owns Vizio. Vizio buys components from other manufacturers and has assembly performed overseas. Not sure where the software comes from, but likely one of those suppliers.
I think this comes from strictly looking at the world in left/right terms. Texas is a pretty libertarian state. This is probably the entire reason the founders ensconced the states into the union the way they did.
This country is a _spectrum_ of ideas. It's not bipolar. Only the moneyed interests behind political parties want you to think this way.
I guess I just don't understand people who face what should be welcome political surprise with extreme and hyperbolic negativity. It's a feature of this forum which honestly bothers me. It's entirely unproductive and strikes me as a bad faith effort to avoid giving credit to "the other side" even when they're enacting a policy which benefits us all.
I was the original commenter you replied to, and I should say I am not negative at all. In fact it’s just extreme skepticism, it’s different. Given the track record and history of the state I still fully expect this to be a met grab opportunity and will be extremely happy and give credit and praise if they actually end up doing anything. My comment is only skepticism but I guess it’s a close cousin of negativity with a nuance
The comment I replied to said Texas has a liberterian streak. There is nothing libertarian about denying free speech, putting religion up in schools, not selling alcohol because of religion, etc.
But if someone want to praise a state that goes out of its way to tell other people how to live because of religion and say they are “libertarian” because they sue a TV manufacturer, I don’t think that tips the scales
It’s impossible to offer any differing opinions or discussion on the differences between the smart TV thing and your whataboutism without triggering a flame war and being downvoted to oblivion.
What does this have to do at all with the posted article about smart TV’s?
https://archive.ph/3MRXv
I'm happy to see it. They should have included Roku in that too!
> Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching.
https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-...
I wouldn't be surprised if my PS5 was doing the same thing when I'm playing a game or watching a streaming service through it.
Most likely case is that the tv is computing hash locally and sending the hash. Judging by my dnstap logs, roku TV maintains a steady ~0.1/second heartbeat to `scribe.logs.roku.com` with occasional pings to `captive.roku.com`. The rest are stragglers that are blocked by `*.roku.com` DNS blackhole. Another thing is `api.rokutime.com`, but as of writing it's a CNAME to one of `roku.com` subdomains.
The block rates seem to correlate with watch time increasing to ~1/second, so it's definitely trying to phone home with something. Too bad it can't since all its traffic going outside LAN is dropped with prejudice.
If your network allows to see stuff like that, look into what PS5 is trying to do.
I do suspect you're right since they would want to reduce bandwidth, especially since residential upload speeds are slow but this is pretty close to verifiable, right?
Also just curious, what happens if you block those requests? I can say Samsung TVs really don't like it... but they will be fine if you take them fully offline.
> If you're tracking packets can't you tell by the data size? A 4k image is a lot more data than a hash.
I admit, I've not gotten around to properly dumping that traffic. For anyone wanting to do this, there's also a spike of DNS requests every hour on the hour, even if tv is off(well, asleep). Would be interesting to see those too. Might be a fun NY holiday project right there. Even without decrypting (hopefully) encrypted traffic, it should be verifiable.
> Also just curious, what happens if you block those requests?
Due to `*.roku.com` DNS black hole, roku showed no ads but things like Netflix and YouTube using standard roku apps("channels") worked fine. I now moved on to playing content using nvidia shield and blocking outside traffic completely. Only odd thing is that the TV occasionally keeps blinking and complains about lack of network if I misclick and start something except HDMI input.
Hashing might not work since the stream itself would be a variable bitrate, meaning the individual pixels would differ and therefore the computed file hash
They're using perceptual hashing, not cryptographic hashing of raw pixels. So it's invariant to variable bitrate, compression, etc.
How does perceptual hashing work?
Have you got any recommendations for further reading on this topic?
These are two articles I liked that are referenced in the Python ImageHash library on PyPi, second article is a follow-up to the first.
Here's paraphrased steps/result from first article for hashing an image:
1. Reduce size. The fastest way to remove high frequencies and detail is to shrink the image. In this case, shrink it to 8x8 so that there are 64 total pixels.
2. Reduce color. The tiny 8x8 picture is converted to a grayscale. This changes the hash from 64 pixels (64 red, 64 green, and 64 blue) to 64 total colors.
3. Average the colors. Compute the mean value of the 64 colors.
4. Compute the bits. Each bit is simply set based on whether the color value is above or below the mean.
5. Construct the hash. Set the 64 bits into a 64-bit integer. The order does not matter, just as long as you are consistent.
The resulting hash won't change if the image is scaled or the aspect ratio changes. Increasing or decreasing the brightness or contrast, or even altering the colors won't dramatically change the hash value.
https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/432-Lo...
https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/529-Ki...
In the same way that Shazam can identify songs despite the audio source being terrible over a phone, mixed with background noise. It doesn't capture the audio as a WAV and then scan its database for an exact matching WAV segment.
I'm sure it is way more complex than this, but shazam does some kind of small windowed FFT and distills it to the dominant few frequencies. It can then find "rhythms" of these frequency patterns, all boiled down to a time stream of signature data. There is some database which can look up these fingerprints. One given fingerprint might match multiple songs, but since they have dozens of fingerprints spread across time, if most of them point to the same musical source, that is what gets ID'd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing
Possibly one of the better known (and widely used?) implementations is Microsoft's PhotoDNA, that may be a suitable starting point.
wouldn't LSH (Locality Sensitive Hashing) make more sense here?
Perceptual hashes are a type of locality sensitive hash.
What system do you use to get that level of visibility?
Main data comes from unbound[1], I use vector[2] to ship and transform logs. Dnstap[3] log format IME works better than the standard logs, especially when it comes to more complex queries and replies. Undesired queries get 0.0.0.0 as a response which I track.
Firewall is based on hand-rolled nftables rules.
[1]: https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/ [2]: https://vector.dev [3]: https://dnstap.info/Examples/
Besides what others have said, another dead simple option is to use Nextdns: https://nextdns.io
Doesn't require running anything locally and supports various block rules and lists and allows you to enable full log retention if you want. I recommend it to non-techies as the easiest way to get something like pi-hole/dnscrypt-proxy. (but of course not being self-hosted has downsides)
edit: For Roku, DNS blocking like this only works if Roku doesn't use its own resolver. If it's like some Google devices it'll use 8.8.8.8 for DNS resolution ignoring your gateway/DHCP provided DNS server.
Seems like you could have a router or firewall mitm queries to e.g. 8.8.8.8 and potentially redirect/rewrite/respond
I would not be surprised if Google TV devices will sooner than later start using DoH to 8.8.8.8
My router owns the IP 8.8.8.8 when seen from inside my network; the Roku literally can't ask Google for DNS via DNS, HTTP, or DNS-over-TLS.. It also answers DNS requests on port 53, and believes that there is no scribe.logs.roku.com, along with many other domains.
The downside is that Google seems to think I'm in a botnet, and wants us to login to see anything on YouTube.
I've explored that! Couldn't figure it out but it certainly sounds possible. And even easier solution is just to block all DNS resolvers except your chosen one. When 8.8.8.8 doesn't work GDevices will fallback to the DHCP assigned resolver (usually your gateway)
I'm a noob at this, but can you do that when it is DoT or DoH? Like I thought the point of them is that you can't forget the DNS request. Even harder with oDoH, right? So does that really get around them?
yea when it's DoH or DoT I don't think you can re-route the DNS request inflight. (where the device thinks it's talking to 8.8.8.8 but it's not).
You can block access to other resolvers though which usually works.
Eventually devices might just start using hardcoded IPs...
Replace your router's DNS with something like pi-hole or a bog standard dnsmasq, turn up the logging, that's it. Ubiquiti devices I think also offer detailed DNS logging but not sure.
I believe unifi offers aggregated dns logs ootb but you could always set up more detailed ones on the gateway itself.
My suggestion would be to configure your own router using a Linux distro. It's not as difficult as it sounds, the kernel already does most of the heavy lifting. All you need to really do is enable packet forwarding and configure the firewall using iptables rules (block all in, allow all out is a reasonable default). I use Unbound as my recursive DNS resolver, together with Hagezi's blacklists to provide DNS filtering. I filter ports 53 and 853, and filter by IP known public DNS servers (Hagezi maintains a list). DHCP is provided by the isc-dhcp-server package on Debian.
That's a more or less complete home router, with plenty on spare resources to run internal or external services like a Wireguard tunnel, file server, or the Docker/Podman runtime.
That being said, I still wouldn't connect a "smart" TV to the Internet. There are better options like a Linux HTPC.
Pfsense firewall. There is a week long learning curve and it’s best to put it on dedicated hardware.
I don’t know why you quoted the addresses.
It's polite to give parsers (human or otherwise) hints that they're about to encounter text which is now intended for a different kind of parser.
I recently forgot to surround my code in ``` and Gemini refused to help with it (I think I tripped a safety guardrail, it thought I was targeting it with an injection attack). Amusingly, the two ways to work around it were to fence off my code with backticks or to just respond to:
> I can't help you with that
With
> Why not?
After which it was then willing to help with the unquoted code. Presumably it then perceived it as some kind of philosophical puzzle rather than an attack.
It's disappointing to see people here use language like "perceived" for an LLM.
As a panpsychist I have no special esteem for an LLM's perceptive powers. I also anticipate that the planet perceives us as nuisance.
Fair question, it does look a bit jarring when not rendered. I write a lot of markdown and it's a very strong force of habit to use backticks to sort of highlight a technical term and turn it into a noun. Similar to writing endash as a double hyphen.
When I read what I write, my eyes glance through backticks and maybe come back if I need to parse the inner term in more detail.
Markdown habit.
Tell me you don't Markdown, without telling me you don't Markdown.
It's a developer thing, using backticks means the enclosed text is emphasised when rendered from Markdown.
Backticks mark fixed width inline code, not emphasis.
I know what they do, it doesn't change the fact that we use them for emphasis.
Chuckled when I saw the reasonable correct informative and perfectly polite answer…is the one in gray. Cheers.
Backticks long predate markdown.
How dare someone not be a developer!
That sounds so expensive it's hard to see it making money. You'd processing a 2fps video stream for each customer. That's a huge amount of data.
And all that is for the chance to occasionally detect that someone's seen an ad in the background of a stream? Do any platforms even let a streamer broadcast an NFL game like the example given?
I used to work for an OTT DSP adtech company i.e. a company that bid on TV ad spots in real time. The bidding platform was handling millions of requests per second, and we were one of the smaller fish in the sea. This system is very real. Your tv is watching what you’re watching. I built the attribution pipeline, which is what this is. If you go buy a product from one of these ads, this is how they track (attribute) it. Not to be alarmist butttt you have zero privacy.
The TV thing isn't a new story, this was public. Everyone should have known about it and no one cared. (I could inset a boilerplate rant about Snowden here)
Those datacenters are not being built so that you can talk to ChatGPT all day, they are being built to generate and optimize ads. People who were not previously very suggestible are going to be. People who are suggestible will have their agency sold off to the highest bidder.
Avoid owning a TV? Your friends will. Maybe you can not have a FB/IG/WhatsApp account, only use cash, not have a mobile phone, but Meta (or Google, or Apple) can still detect your face in the background of photos/videos and know where you shop, travel and when.
This is really interesting. Can you expand on this? What are OTT and DSP in this context?
Do you have a sense for what data is tracked and how it's used? Or if this sort of system is blind in certain cases? (eg: I hook up an N64 to the a/v ports -- will I get retro game ads on the TV?)
OTT = over the top = ads that aren't shown on cable ("linear") DSP = demand-side platform = real-time bidding on ad space on behalf of advertisers
What data is tracked? Don't think we can see what's plugged into the TV if it's not connected to the internet but besides that... all of it... If we have your TV we know where you live. We know what you're watching (hopefully our customers' ads!). We know all the devices that connect to your home network. We know where those devices go when you leave the house. We know you were driving down this stretch of road when you saw that ad on that billboard or on the side of that truck ("out-of-home" advertising). We know if you saw that ad and then bought something ("conversion" + "attribution"). We know what apps you have downloaded. Did you know Candy Crush is spying on you, too? Did you know Grindr sells your IP address? We likely know your age and your race and how much your home cost and where you went to college and how many kids you have ("segmentation"). Privacy laws have gotten in the way a little bit, but not much - it's less "we can't get this data anymore" and more "here's the hoop(s) we now have to jump through but we still get it".
I don't want to freak anyone out. In my time in adtech I never felt like anyone was using this data for anything besides "Please buy more coca-cola..." but you never know. Privacy _can_ exist it's just insanely hard because there's so much money hell-bent on tracking you down.
So, you helped with this... Why?
> you have zero privacy
Is this data linked to me personally in some way (e.g. though an account) or is it anonymous data?
They can definitely work out who you are from your IP address. (or get close enough that the advertisers don't care) Not too many people are putting a VPN on their router and using throwaway accounts for their smart TVs. This might be difficult anyhow if your log into major services such as Amazon, etc, who will know who you are.
I'm not saying this is impossible to avoid, but it ends up being a LOT of work when the alternative is just not connecting the TV to the internet and using a laptop / Apple TV / etc. instead.
Personally identifiable. Most smart TVs force a login to connect to the Internet or even use at all.
>Not to be alarmist butttt you have zero privacy.
Hence why I will never connect my TV to the internet
I understand the perils of a capitalist system but whyyy would you agree to build this
The perils of the capitalist system man. For what’s its worth, I left adtech many moons ago specifically because it is a horrifyingly depressing industry and very very not fun to talk about at parties.
I'm glad you got out, but given your vantage point what would you say to those who feel pressured to do these types of jobs? Would you say more "it isn't worth it" or "if you have to... but get out as fast as possible" or something else?
Money pays the bills. It’s probably not deeply rooted.
Forgive me, but I'd actually like to hear vrosas's response or someone else with a similar background. I appreciate you trying to answer my question and help try to make me informed, but I don't want to hear speculation, especially the rather obvious ones. That's not helping, it just adds more noise to the conversation and discourages a response by them. We all know money pays the bills, no one needs to hear that. But hey, if that's what they say, then you'll be proven right. So let's wait and find out. I really do want to understand their mentality. I hope you do too because how else do we break the cycle?
My man’s not wrong. Adtech has some seriously cool engineering problems and scale. It’s its own form of high frequency trading mixed with everyone you’d imagine from a modern day Mad Men. Plus tons and tons and tons of money.
But that's different from money pays by bills. And I think it's also important to recognize that there can be some fun in this due to the challenge.
I started on another side of engineering and I get that. Building rockets is exciting and fun. But while you build those things it's easy to forget you're building something much more destructive.
It’s not different. I take jobs to pay bills and in the selection process pick opportunities that offer career growth and interesting problems. Money pays the bills.
I've talked to a lot of engineers building DRM technology, and most of them are just a combination of swept up in the fun of the challenge, and also deeply bought into the idea of protecting intellectual property. I would say probably 90% don't see any philosophical issues with what they're building at all. If you can convince them of that, quite a few of them would probably try to get out, but it's quite an uphill battle. I forget who said the quote and the exact words, but something along the lines of it's very difficult to disabuse somebody of a belief when their livelihood depends on believing it.
As someone who was in an industry that I later discovered was doing things I wasn't personally ethically okay with, I would advise them to do similar to me. Start looking for a new gig and just get out as soon as you can.
Unfortunately as an individual there just isn't much you can do. There will always be someone willing to do the job that you aren't willing to do. Just get out and find something you can sleep at night doing
This is incredibly close-minded of you. It’s important creative work can be compensated for. This debate was tired in 2002. You should at least understand the other side instead of treating it with the moral simplicity that’d apply equally to Nazis.
Heh, I love that you accuse me of being closed-minded on this, while simultaneously claiming that nothing relevant has happened since 2002 because you're "tired" of the debate.
I'd also recommend you actually find out about somebody's background before making such a giant assumption about how much they know about the issue.
And if you don't think DRM has been used to abuse legitimate users, you yourself have a significant amount of understanding the other side to do. A great start might be just reviewing some of the anecdotes in this comment section or any of the other many threads that continually happen on HN. It turns out that DRM technology has actually changed a bit in the last 24 years, and it's not just about "protecting" IP
If I read a full biography of you, does it change anything about my perception that you're close-minded for saying working on DRM is obviously 100% morally wrong and it's beyond you to understand why anyone would?
It makes its creator the money they can spend buying the products they see in TV ads.
If someone is going to get paid to build it anyway, I might as well be the one getting paid for it.
This attitude is the reason “someone is going to get paid”.
If you see a unattended laptop in a coffeeshop, do you steal it because “someone will steal it, so it might as well be me”?
Why stop here? We can also blame the people, who implemented such features on the TVs, the people who worked at companies, who used data acquired by these devices for advertisement, the people who worked on the mentioned ads for such devices and the people who bought products from companies, that spend money on such marketing techniques.
At this point you might as well blame the average guy for global warming...
The average guy is exactly the person responsible for global warming. The evil of the world is just the meta accumulation of the average person following their mirco incentives.
Where I'm from, it probably would not be stolen by anyone.
Where do you draw the line?
Ready to do anything for money as long as it seems legal-ish or your ass is covered by hierarchy?
If something should not be done: make it illegal. Trying to have a gentlemen's agreement not to do something seems like a futile position.
Having you own morale and ethics is far from futile. Each individual should be able to question the law and object taking part in something they don't agree, as long as it doesn't break the law.
Killing someone is legal in certain countries for different reasons (I'm not talking about war). Not sure I would like to get involved in that business, for instance if I don't agree on how and why people are sentenced to death in my country.
Some people are built with low ethics. Sure, if it's not made illegal, they'll always find someone to do it. Looks like in that case it might be illegal, as TV makers are sued.
Yeah, there are reasons why "someone is going to do it anyway" is a classic example of an ethically unsound argument.
It isn't ethically unsound. It's a commons/coordination problem. What is the optimal strategy in infinite-round prisoners dilemma with randomized opponents? The randomization effectively makes it an infinite series of one-round prisoners dilemma. So the best strategy is always to defect.
The only way you can change this is very high social trust, and all of society condemning anyone who ever defects.
If morality never factors into your own decisions, you don't get to be upset when it doesn't factor into other peoples'. In other words, society just sucks when everyone thinks this way, even if it true that resolving it is hard.
This is called a “replacement excuse”. It’s a hallmark of nihilists and utilitarians, but I tend to prefer the more prosaic group noun, “jerks”.
This is an intellectually and morally deficient position to take. There is no moral principle in any system anywhere in the history of the universe that requires me to bind myself to a contract that nobody else is bound to.
We can all agree, as a society, "hey, no individual person will graze more than ten cows on the commons," and that's fine. And if we all agree and someone breaks their vow, then that is immoral. "Society just sucks when everyone thinks this way" indeed.
But if nobody ever agreed to it, and you're out there grazing all you're cattle, and Ezekiel is out there grazing all his cattle, and Josiah is out there grazing all his cattle, there is no reasonable ethical principle you could propose that would prevent me from grazing all my cattle too.
> There is no moral principle in any system anywhere in the history of the universe that requires me to bind myself to a contract that nobody else is bound to.
Is there not? I don't feel this makes sense to me, as the conclusion seems to be "if everyone (or perhaps a large amount of people) do it, then it's not immoral". My immediate thought goes to moral systems that universalise an action, such that if everyone did it and it makes the world worse, then it's something that you should not do. That would be an example of a system that goes counter to what you say. Since morals are personal, you can still have that conclusion even if other people do not subscribe to the same set of moral beliefs that you have. Something can be immoral to you, and you will refuse to do it even if everyone else does.
> But if nobody ever agreed to it [...] there is no reasonable ethical principle you could propose that would prevent me from grazing all my cattle too.
Why not? I don't quite understand your conclusion. Why could the conclusion not be "I feel what everyone else is doing is wrong, and I will not do it myself"? Is it because it puts you at a disadvantage, and you believe that is unfair? Perhaps this is the "reasonable" aspect?
Your confusion is understandable. The way the terms "moral" and "ethical" are thrown around is sloppy in most vernacular. Generally, ethics refers to system-wide morality. E.g., I may feel that personal morality compels me to offer lower rates to clients, even though a higher rate may be acceptable under legal ethics. I tried to make that distinction clear in my post ("moral principle in any system") but perhaps I didn't do a good enough job.
The original poster was not referring to individual moral feelings, but to formal ethical systems subject to systematized logical thinking: "classic example of an ethically unsound argument."
There is no religious tradition, no system of ethics, no school of thought in moral philosophy, that is consistent with that position. The closest you might come is Aristotelian virtue ethics. But it would be a really strained reading that would result in the position that opting out of commons mismanagement is required. Aristotle specifically said that being a fool is not a virtue. If anything, a virtue ethics lens would compel someone to try to establish formal community rules to prevent the tragedy of the commons.
I think this argument would justify slavery: no one (white people) has decided that holding others as slaves is bad, therefore I can hold slaves.
But let me entertain it for a moment: prior to knowing, e.g., that plastics or CO2 are bad for the environment, how should one know that they are bad for the environment. Fred, the first person to realize this would run around saying "hey guys, this is bad".
And here is where I think it gets interesting: the folks making all the $ producing the CO2 and plastics are highly motivated to say "sorry Fred, your science is wrong". So when it finally turns out that Fred was right, were the plastics/CO2 companies morally wrong in hindsight?
You are arguing that morality is entirely socially determined. This may be partially true, but IMO, only economically. If I must choose between hurting someone else and dying, I do not think there is a categorically moral choice there. (Though Mengzi/ Mencius would say that you should prefer death -- see fish and the bear's paw in 告子上). So, to the extent that your life or life-preserving business (i.e. source of food/housing) demands hurting others (producing plastics, CO2), then perhaps it is moral to do so. But to the extent that your desire for fancy cars and first class plane tickets demands producing CO2...well (ibid.).
The issue is that the people who benefit economically are highly incentivized to object to any new moral reckoning (i.e. tracking people is bad; privacy is good; selling drugs is bad; building casinos is bad). To the extent that we care about morality (and we seem to), those folks benefitting from these actions can effectively lobby against moral change with propaganda. And this is, in fact, exactly what happens politically. Politics is, after all, an attempt to produce a kind of morality. It may depend on whom you follow, but my view would be that politics should be an approach to utilitarian management of resources, in service of the people. But others might say we need to be concerned for the well-being of animals. And still others, would say that we must be concerned with the well-being of capital, or even AIs! In any case, large corporations effectively lobby against any moral reckoning against their activities and thus avoid regulation.
The problem with your "socially determined morality" (though admittedly, I increasingly struggle to see a practical way around this) is that, though in some ways true (since society is economics and therefore impacts one's capacity to live) is that you end up in a world in which everyone can exploit everyone else maximally. There is no inherent truth in what the crowd believes (though again, crowd beliefs do affect short-term and even intermediate-term economics, especially in a hyper-connected world). The fact that most white people in the 1700s believed that it was not wrong to enslave black people does not make that right. The fact that many people believed tulips were worth millions of dollars does not make it true in the long run.
Are we running up against truth vs practicality? I think so. It may be impractical to enforce morality, but that doesn't make Google moral.
Overall, your arguments are compatible with a kind of nihilism: there is no universal morality; I can adopt whatever morality is most suitable to my ends.
I make one final point: how should slavery and plastics be handled? It takes a truly unfeeling sort of human to enslave another human being. It is hard to imagine that none of these people felt that something was wrong. Though google is not enslaving people nor are its actions tantamount to Nazism, there is plenty of recent writing about the rise of technofascism. The EAs would certainly sacrifice the "few" of today's people for the nebulous "many" of the future over which they will rule. But they have constructed a narrative in which the future's many need protection. There are moral philosophies (e.g. utilitarianism) that would justify this. And this is partially because we have insufficient knowledge of the future, and also because the technologies of today make highly variable the possible futures of tomorrow.
I propose instead that---especially in this era of extreme individual power (i.e. the capacity to be "loud" -- see below)---a different kind of morality is useful: the wielding of power is bad. As your power grows, so to does the responsibility to consider its impact on others and to more aggressively judge every action one takes under the Veil of Ignorance. Any time we affect the lives of others around us, we are at greater risk of violating this morality. See eg., Tools for Conviviality or Silence is a Commons (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609969). Google and the tech companies are being extremely loud, and you'd have to be an idiot to see that it's not harmful. If your mental contortions allow you to say "harm is moral because the majority don't object," well, that looks like nihilism and certainly doesn't get us anywhere "good". But my "good" cannot be measured, and your good is GDP, so I suppose I will lose.
It is definitely ethically unsound and it is definitely a common example even related to Nazis. Similar to "just following orders". Which I'll remind everyone, will not save you in a court of law[0]...
You are abdicating your own moral responsibility on the assumption of a deterministic reality.
The literal textbook version of this ethical issue, one you'll find in literally any intro to ethics class is
Sometimes a variant will be introduced with a direct acknowledgement of like donating 10% of your earnings to charity to "offset" your misgivings (ᶜᵒᵘᵍʰ ᴱᶠᶠᵉᶜᵗᶦᵛᵉ ᴬˡᵗʳᵘᶦˢᵐ ᶜᵒᵘᵍʰ).But either way, it is you abdicating your personal responsibility and making the assumption that the job will be done regardless. But think about the logic here. If people do not think like you then the employer must then start offering higher wages in order to entice others. As there is some function describing people's individual moral lines and their desire for money. Even if the employer must pay more you are then helping deter that behavior because you are making it harder to implement. Alternatively the other person that does the job might not be as good at the job as you, making the damage done less than had you done the job. It's not hard to see that often this will result in the job not even existing as truthfully these immoral jobs are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Even if you are making the assumption that the job will be done it would be more naive to assume the job is done to the same quality. (But kudos on you for the lack of ego and thinking you aren't better than other devs)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
Most of those convicted at the Nuremberg trials eventually had their sentences commuted and only served a fraction of their time. Only a few were convicted and executed. Justice rarely prevails.
[dead]
Objectively incorrect. There is no reasonable argument that it's ethically unsound. The fact that you immediately Godwin'd should have been your first clue.
Considering you're a military lawyer I'm absolutely certain you've heard this example before and its connection to Nazi Germany. I'm not dating anyone is a Nazi for making that argument, but it is a classic example when pointing to how Ordinary Men can do atrocities. And no, I didn't make a grammatical mistake there.
> will not save you in a court of law
Not in the USA. LEO or ICE - or even some judges misuse and never are punished. Qualified immunity.
Moral is different story. Too many people in HN work in Google or Apple. That by itself if immoral.
Some doesn't change the law.
You're right to push back in case I intended something different. But I'll state this clearly: those LEO, ICE agents, and judges are committing crimes.
But the fact that not all criminals are punished or prosecuted does not change the laws either.
What I'm concerned about is people becoming disenfranchised and apathetic. Dismissing the laws we have that does punish LEO, ICE agents, and judges for breaking the laws. To take a defeatist attitude. Especially in this more difficult time where that power is being abused more than ever. But a big reason it is being able to be abused is because a growing apathetic attitude by people. By people giving up.
So I don't know about you and your positions. I don't know if you're apathetic or invested. All I know is a random comment from a random person. It isn't much to go on. But I hope you aren't and I hope you don't spread apathy, intentionally or not.
Care to articulate them?
If you want a consequentialist answer:
If, for ethical reasons, fewer people were willing to take these jobs, then either salaries would have to rise or the work would be done less effectively.
If salaries rise, the business becomes more expensive and harder to scale. If effectiveness drops, the systems are less capable of extracting/using people’s data.
Either way, refusing these jobs imposes real friction on the surveillance model.
If you want a deontological answer:
You have a responsibility not to participate in unethical behavior, even if someone else would.
The fact that it can be used to "justify" almost anything. It obviously doesn't work as a defense in the court, and neither does it work as a justification for doing legal but unethical things.
Soooo.... Why did you build it for them? You didn't have to further enable it. Despise people who just drop this kind of thing without any hint of repentance or contrition.
Would love to know what are the best things we can do to prevent this sort of tracking in general. PiHole? Don't re-use emails? On a scale of 1 to fucked are we cooked?
I don't think they mean that kinda streamer - the idea is the roku tv can tell you're watching an ad even if it's on amazon prime, apple tv, youtube, twitch, wherever, and associate the ad watching with your roku account to potentially sell that data somehow?
That way they aren't cut out of the loop by you using a different service to watch something and still have a 'cut'.
It'd make sense if they're using streamer in a different sense than I'm used to. I see that's at the bottom of the definitions Google will produce.
Yeah I think they mean "user of a streaming service" here, which would more conventionally be user or watcher or so on.
The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity.
Not super tough to pull off. I was experimenting with FAISS a while back and indexed screenshots of the entire Seinfeld series. I was able take an input screenshot (or Seinfeld meme, etc) and pinpoint the specific episode and approx timestamp it was from.
> The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity.
this is most likely the case, although there's nothing stopping them from uploading the original 4K screengrab in cases where there's no match to something in their database which would allow them to manually ID the content and add a hash or just scrape it for whatever info they can add to your dossier.
I thought that similar inputs do not give similar hashes..but apparently that is cryptographic hashing. Locality-Sensitive Hashing methods (e.g. Perceptual hashing[1]) makes similar inputs have similar hashes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing
Ah, bingo, yes!
I should have been more specific in my comment. Perceptual hashing allowsfor higher similarity scores between similar looking images.
Lots of cool techniques to experiment with. Highly recommend playing around if you’re interested.
I immediately did a little exploration for potential utility in neuroimaging analyses...not that anything was immediately obvious to me, but I love learning about things like this.
I assume these systems are calculating an on device perceptual hash. So not that much data needs get flown back to the mothership.
That's the thing about scaling; you offload the work to the "client" (the TV in this case) and make it do the work, it need not send back more than a simple identifier or string in an API call (of course they'll send more), so they get to use a little bit of your electricity and your TVs processing power to collect data on you and make money, with relatively little required from them, other than some infra to handle the requests, which they would have had anyway to collect the telemetry that makes them money.
Client side processing like this is legitimate and an excellent way to scale, it just hits a little different when it's being used for something that isn't serving you, the user.
source: backend developer
Confirming how many people actually seen the ad is worth big bucks. No one wants to pay for ads they cannot confirm and publisher can make up impressions - if you can catch publisher making up numbers you might get a huge discount or loads of money back.
Not necessarily, it can be done on-device, the screenshot hashed, and the results deduplicated and accumulated over time, then compressed and sent off in a neat package. It'd still be a huge amount of data when you add it all up, but not too different from the volume that e.g. web analytics produces.
Then server-side the hash is matched to a program or ad and the data accumulated and reduced even further before ending up in someone's analytics dashboard.
Are there video "thumbprints" like exists for audio (used by soundhound/etc) - IE a compressed set of features that can reliably be linked in unique content? I would expect that is possible and a lot faster lookup for 2 frames a second. If this is the case, the "your device is taking a snapshot every 30 seconds" sounds a lot worse (not defending it - it's still something I hope can be legislated away - something can be bad and still exaggerated by media)
There are perceptual hashing algorithms for images/video/audio (dsp and ML based) that could work for that.
Given that the TV is trying to match one digital frame against another digital frame, you could probably get decent results even with something super naive like downsampling to a very low resolution, quantizing the color palette, then looking for a pixel for pixel match.
All this could be done long before any sort of TV-specific image processing, so the only source of "noise" I can think of would be from the various encodings offered by the streaming service (e.g. different resolutions and bitrates). With the right choice of downsample resolution and color quantization I have to imagine you could get acceptable results.
That's basically what phash does
I've been led to believe those video thumbprints exist, but I know the hash of the perceived audio is often all that is needed for a match of what is currently being presented (movie, commercial advert, music-as-music-not-background, ...).
This is why a lot of series uploaded to YouTube will be sped up, slowed down, or have their audio’s pitch changed; if the uploader doesn’t do this, it gets recognized by YouTube as infringing content.
You only need to grab a few pixels or regions of the screen to fingerprint it. They know what the stream is and can process it once centrally if needed.
Is this what these sort of companies are doing?
In a word yes. Here is a starting point.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
Attribution is very painful and advertisers will pay lots of money to close that loop.
Is it? I don’t think you need particularly high fidelity to fingerprint ads/programs.
it's hashed on the tv then they compare hashes in aggregate
[dead]
This is especially annoying and just incredibly creepy -- I was watching a clip of Smiling Friends on YouTube (via my Apple TV), and I suddenly got a banner telling me to watch this on HBO Max.
I never felt more motivated to pi-hole the TV.
>I never felt more motivated to pi-hole the TV.
Or just disconnect from the internet entirely? You already have an apple tv. Why does your tv need internet access?
TVs tend to incessantly ask for internet access, especially android ones.
Then don’t buy an Android tv?
The problem with 'well just don't buy it' is that in many product categories, enshittification has become so entrenched that there are no longer options to avoid it. The availablity of product features is driven by market forces, if it's no longer profitable to sell a TV that doesn't require online connectivity for the purposes of ads, then such TVs will no longer be sold.
Alternatives like using monitors designed for digital signage come with drawbacks. Expense, they don't have desirable features like VRR, HDR or high refresh rates, since they aren't needed for those use cases. Older TV models will break and supply will dry up.
In the long term, this problem, not just TVs but the commercial exploitation of user data across virtually all electronic devices sold, isn't something that can be solved with a boycott, or by consumers buying more selectively. The practice needs to be killed with legislation.
Good point. I’ll just argue about HDR and high frame rates being desirable features :) I don’t even know what VRR is.
VRR is Variable refresh rates, so if there is nothing going on in the content, they can bring the refresh rate down and save processing, thermal issues and energy. If there is a lot going on(say a game), they can ramp the refresh rate back up super high.
There are a few different "standards" around VRR, not every device supports all of them.
Meh, I wonder why I care about saving energy or processing on a tv that’s plugged in anyway but hey. Thanks for explaining!
Their explanation of the reason for VRR is bad. The primary reason people want it is gaming where the game is not locked to a specific frame rate. Without VRR, the timing of a frame being delivered isn't necessarily going to match when the display is expecting a new frame. This leads to one of two effects. Either the display is forced to hold an old frame for longer and pick up the new frame on the next refresh cycle, which creates stutter. Or the display switches which frame its using partway through the refresh cycle, which creates a visual tear in the image.
Some TVs have a dedicated mobile connection, there is a SIM card and baseband radio inside. Of course only they can use it, not you.
You mean they pay for data charges? Don't be stupid.
Data doesn't cost that much. They are buying in bulk for lower priority access. That is a very different cost from what you pay for your phone data.
Source? This sort of conspiracy started with "smart tvs will connect to open wifi networks", then evolved to "it uses amazon sidewalk", and apparently now morphed into "tvs have 5g modems". Given how poorly supported the prior claims were, that does not bode well for the 5G claim.
Isn't that one of the marketed advantages of 5G. Lot of smart IoT devices including TVs being able to connect independently.
What we are lacking is implementation but the tech and probably the intent was always there. If HDMI ethernet connectivity(HEC) had gained traction, we would have seen a fire stick, apple tv or roku providing internet to your tv without asking for explicit consent.
Sounds obvious for TV manufacturers to do this if they plan to spy on you and sell ads you can't hide. Same with locking down firmware.
Cheaper to just use the wifi access that 99% of TVs will be given.
You said 5G, not me
I agree that I misquoted you, but that's a distinction without a difference in this context. "SIM card and baseband radio inside" means 5G, 4G, 3G, whatever. I still demand that you produce proof that there are TVs with "SIM card and baseband radio inside".
I was curious so I did some research. These devices do seem to be being produced, currently mostly overseas. The inclusion of 5G support does not seem to be hidden or nefarious. They provide a SIM card slot just like your phone would. Some models are incorporating a built-in router to provide connectivity to other devices. It seems like the cellular companies are promoting these TV's too, with built in service.
My opinion is this is just a consolidation of devices. I have many friends who live off their phone data plan giving hotspot to the TV and other devices. Now being moved into a common device format, the TV. I don't think they can spy any more effectively this way. Eexcept via the router integration that gives them way more access, but I'm sure this exists already as a wifi feature on tvs. Just technology trudging along. Perhaps they have a secret sim card or esim embedded, that might be a risk as the hardware is already there for a valid reason.
Every time the topic is TV on HN someone repeats this conspiracy or that "it'll happen soon!"...
This place like a flat-earther gathering sometimes.
You could try getting an European TV, at least then it will ask and you can say no.
A banner from Apple or your TV trying to navigate you back to its own HBO app?
The latter. In addition to being creepy, it’s such a horrible “feature”. I can’t imagine who thought it was a good idea.
It’s far less important for ad-free content. They mainly want to connect your ad watching behaviour to an email and then have loyalty program data connected to the same email so that they can identify which ads convert vs not.
It’s still a privacy violation a lot of people would be outraged by if they knew it. Tracking what shows you are watching is a valuable data set.
I'm surprised to see how few of my non-technical friends and family actually care about privacy.
It’s right there in your TV’s settings though. Personally, I don’t trust them to obey the setting so my TV has no internet and I use an Apple TV.
In your settings under how many nested menus under which deceptively named option?
And how many options do you need to toggle to actually opt out?
For my LG TV, it is as deep as you can possibly go! And I think it took two options to fully opt out (including turning off the microphone).
So potentially completely noncompliant if used in a business. E.g. it may have HIPAA, top secret etc.
Boardroom presentation TVs in publicly traded companies would yield insider information.
Sending 4k screenshots twice a second to a server would be tremendously bandwidth hungry. My guess is that it's all done locally.
There's probably compact signatures extracted from the screenshots (color profiles, OCR, etc) which are then uploaded later in bulk. You don't need the full original image to be able to reliably uniquely identify the content if you have an index of it already.
I'm wondering if there is some sort of steganographic watermark that broadcasters are including in media, to enable stuff like this. Probably would need to be robust in the presence of re-encoding, more compression, etc..
This has been long solved by YouTube for detecting CP and other non-compliant videos.
For example, check out https://github.com/akamhy/videohash
It is a violation of the VPPA to collect this for streaming services and prerecorded media. Scheduled broadcast and cable TV aren't covered.
I thought the 2013 amendment to the VPPA largely defanged it by allowing sharing with customer consent (which is probably one of the clauses in the million-word customer agreement nobody reads).
Pretty sure that’s why this lawsuit will have some legs - the deceptive way folks are opted in without really understanding what is happening.
I’m shocked to be agreeing with Ken Paxton but he’s right on this one.
Yeah that’s why Webex is still in business. TVs are a great entry point to LANs.
> HIPAA
Are health providers using PS5s in a context where information may be leaked to other providers? What kind of information would you expect to be displayed that might violate HIPAA?
Patient xray for example, blown up on big tv
As other users mentioned, these screenshots are almost certainly not being transmitted as screenshots as the bandwidth costs would be enormous. The screenshots are converted to a hash on the user’s device before being sent to a server where the hash is compared to a database of known hashes. A user’s x-ray would just appear as a hash. This might still constitute a HIPAA violation, but I doubt it.
One cannot unscramble hash and tell what does it present
This seems like an extremely unrealistic scenario for a given ps5
Also how would other providers be privvy to this view of this xray?
I’m not sure what relevance there is to other providers?
I work with a lot of small medical offices, and they do use consumer Smart TVs in some contexts. I typically limit their network access for other reasons, and displaying X-rays isn’t something I’ve personally facilitated, but it wouldn’t shock me to discover it’s being done in other clinics, and the popularity of cloud-based ePHR software has left a lot of smaller clinics with very limited internal I.T. services.
The destination isn’t relevant, if the image leaves the clinic at all without consent, that’s a HIPAA violation. Fortunately, I think it’s more likely that the images are sampled and/or hashed in a way that means the full image isn’t technically transmitted, but considering the consequences and costs of a data breach, I’d definitely be wary of it.
> I’m not sure what relevance there is to other providers?
The point of HIPAA is to prevent providers from colluding against you.
The PS5 doesn't need to, they get it all in metadata because they control the full stack — TVs do it because they have less control over sources.
The PS5 does actually record video all the time in a ring buffer. That’s how when you press the share button, it includes a video of the recent past.
right that's the purpose though, they don't need to ship screenshots for monitoring
Is the PS5 not jailbroken?
I'm sure somebody's done it, but mine isn't. I do make sure to pull the microphones out of the controllers at least so while they can watch everything I'm doing on my screen they can't listen to the entire house.
I'd like to weaponize all this scanning into a force for good. Instead of phoning home to Roku, send the fingerprints up to an ADID database registering every ad on the planet. Open up an API so that any video stream can detect an ad and inject Max Headroom replacement clips.
Come on hackers. We could murder the global economy with this shit.
I've been thinking about this as well - make a small device that in real time detects ads and turns off audio an video while it's playing. I'd rather see a blank screen than an ad. That way, the whole ad pyramid scheme stays intact while the conversion rates plummet.
> while the conversion rates plummet.
Isn't the segment who will set this up also likely to have a low conversion rate to begin with?
You'd need to make it so easy that it becomes fully mainstream. I suspect that's what happened to adblockers, it got a bit too "standard" for (Google's) comfort.
Same here. I've done this for podcasts (not in real time) and it works great. TV should be easier in some ways since the video stream and captions can also indicate an ad.
I used to find when listening to a good many podcasts with VLC there would be:
> ... See you after the break.
brief pause
> And we're back ...
Unfortunately, most ads are now burnt in. The 10 second advance will skip through them, but as it's usually the host parroting the ad text and it's easy to over shoot.
The only real question is whether they're doing screen-level analysis or just relying on app telemetry
They're definitely doing screen level analysis.
I work for a company that does some work on Internet advertising and one of the main issues that came up when we discussed supporting smart TV platforms was how we could protect our proprietary advertising audience data while still showing ads on these devices. Knowing what ads we show the user tells them what the user is interested in, which is valuable information for our competitors.
Unfortunately, we were not able to solve that problem, and instead to just use lower fidelity user models for advertising on smart TVs. That makes smart TV ads less valuable, but allows us to keep our competitive advantage on desktop and mobile.
If I’m understanding you right, I’m confident it’s screen analysis. I have a Hisense Roku TV I exclusively use with an AppleTV. I get creepy intrusive popups telling me: “you could be watching this on other streaming providers!” all the time. So it “knows” what’s being displayed on the screen regardless of what app (or HDMI input) is being used.
I'm fairly puzzled by my own reaction to this.
I'm indifferent to YouTube have frame-by-frame nanodata about me.
But as a Roku user, this snap shotting makes me very angry.
Maybe because much of what I watch on my TV via my Roku is content I own and stream from my personal server?
For me, I despise having different abstractions get crossed.
I expect my media app, ie. YouTube, to know what I watch from the media app. YouTube knows about YouTube.
My operating system, ie. Roku, should not know about what's happening inside a given app. ie. Roku does not know about YouTube.
When they start crossing layers, that greatly upsets me.
Time for me to get Apple TV.
This is not sufficient because the TV you are showing the video on can (does/will) take the screencaps.
If you have a plugged-in device, then you can just disconnect the TV from the network.
As if it didn’t track your habits as well.
...it doesn't.
Like, Apple knows what you're watching within the Apple TV app obviously.
But it's certainly not taking screenshots every second of what it displaying when you use other apps -- which shows and ads you're seeing. Nor does Apple sell personal data.
Other video apps do register what shows you're in the middle of, so they can appear on the top row of your home screen. But again, Apple's not selling that info.
Having each app report what is going on vs figuring it out from a screenshot locally is the same from a privacy POV.
But I do trust apple more
A lot of this stuff is actually being used to track which ads are being watched. Apps definitely aren't reporting those.
Like all data collection you can bet that the data our smart TVs and devices take from us is (or one day will be) used for a lot more than just ads.
Does this apply for external video inputs, outside of the smart TV OS?
I guess I can always just refuse the TV OS access to the wifi, assuming they're not using 4G modems.
> > Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution.
Isn't that too much data to even begin to analyze? The only winner here seems like S3.
It runs a hashing algorithm locally, I believe, rather than transmitting the entire image. pHash or something similar would work.
ACR needs to die. It’s an absurd abuse of the privileged position that a TV has - a gross violation of privacy just to make a few bucks. It should be absolutely nobody’s business to know what you watch except your own; the motivation behind the VPPA was to kill exactly this type of abuse.
The greatest irony is that HDCP goes to great lengths to try and prevent people from screenshotting copyrighted content, and here we have the smart TVs at the end just scraping the content willy-nilly. If someone manages to figure out how to use ACR to break DRM, maybe the MPAA will be motivated to kill ACR :)
ACR — Automatic Content Recognition: tech in some smart TVs/apps that identifies what’s on-screen (often via audio/video “fingerprints”) and can report viewing data back to vendors/partners.
VPPA — Video Privacy Protection Act: a U.S. law aimed at limiting disclosure of people’s video-viewing/rental history.
HDCP — High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection: an anti-copy protocol used on HDMI/DisplayPort links to prevent interception/recording of protected video.
DRM — Digital Rights Management: a broad term for technical restrictions controlling how digital media can be accessed, copied, or shared.
MPAA — Motion Picture Association of America: the former name of the main U.S. film-industry trade group (now typically called the MPA, Motion Picture Association).
TV / TVs — Television(s).
Appreciate this breakdown
U.S. — United States (of America)
Thank you
Enormous effort goes into stopping users from capturing a single frame, while manufacturers quietly sample the screen multiple times a second by design
Next stop: auto manufacturers and location data.
The ship has sailed on that one. The telematics from the car can also be sent back to the mothership, i.e. if you’re driving like a lunatic, pulling donuts, harsh acceleration and so on.
Which is even more absurd. You can watch illegal things on TV too. Both are a gross breach of monopolistic power.
you can directly hurt more people with a car than a TV though
A car phoning your analytics home is not an immediate preventative measure though. It’s a grotesque overstep.
On flip side not having telematics on your most expensive assets (house, car and health) is negligence.
‘Telematics’ is not how the word ‘insurance’ is spelled. Anyone that owns an uninsured car or home that cannot afford to replace a total loss or hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills in the case of a major accident is negligent. Anyone without wealth lacking health insurance is negligent.
Having sensor logs of the space temp and CO2 ppm in your house when it’s burning down isn’t going to help you at all.
Car telemetry might help diagnose car issues, but I’m not aware of manufacturers using it that way, I’ve heard plenty about selling location data and driving habits.
Constantly monitoring your heart rate and blood pressure sounds like a good way to develop hypochondria.
Majority of population is wearing some sort of smartwatch tho.
Absence of PM2.5 is exactly how I debunked a false smoke alarm while I was overseas. Or I flagged excessive power use after friends left appliance on while I was away. Or water leak sensors flagged one toiled cistern dripping.
There’s a difference between the owner having telemetry on their own car, and the manufacturer having telemetry on the cars they’ve sold. One is taking care of your assets, and the other is spying on customers.
Tell me, how does Tesla spy on customers? Do pass mcdonalds more often when on FSD?
Have they resolved the class-action lawsuit about workers sharing and making memes from pictures and videos of people inside their homes, garages, naked, with their pets, their kids, their laundry, their sex toys, etc? Mozilla said they're the least bad but they're definitely not good.
Not spying, part of classifying FSD footage that you opt-in to share.
Not nice, but kinda healthy team culture to share hilarious accidents. Happens everyday, everywhere.
It's not just FSD footage. Footage was recorded while the cars were charging. From Reuters:
As an example, this person recalled seeing “embarrassing objects,” such as “certain pieces of laundry, certain sexual wellness items … and just private scenes of life that we really were privy to because the car was charging.”
To be clear, looking at video surreptitiously recorded inside peoples' homes is absolutely spying. And saying you get actual consent from click-through "opt-in" forms which opting out would kill huge swaths of their car's functionality, and not deliberately and loudly informing them of how invasive the videos were is frankly, ridiculous. Those forms are obviously pretext for tech companies to do things with people's data that they'd never consent to if they really understood the implications.
Spying is actively seeking for certain information. Comparing this to sharing with your colleagues some useless images for lulz is disingenuous.
Go read the dictionary entry for spying. You can’t just make up definitions for words.
Are you saying that not monitoring e.g. heart rate constantly through some electronic device that sends the data somewhere (let’s assume somewhere under my control) is negligence?
Going to doctors office is telemetry too, but very sparse. Smart watches are ubiquitous. Lives have been saved.
From Wikipedia: “Telemetry is the in situ collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment (telecommunication) for monitoring.”
There is nothing “tele” about going to the doctor, and nothing automatic about the information they gather. You’re conflating telemetry and simple examination or observation. Most types of examination are not telemetry, and many types of telemetry are not as benign as simple observation/examination. There is telemetry on my car but I can’t access the data. It’s not for my benefit— it’s for Jeep’s benefit. I don’t need it and I don’t want it.
Laws can change, but I’m not hopeful, tbh. Digital privacy problems are just too abstract to viscerally anger most people. That may change as people that grew up in surveillance capitalism mature, but being so used to invasive data grabs might replace ignorant complacency with aware complacency.
It's faar worse. Automotive manufacturers and live IP camera feed. (See also tesla motors)
Yeah. At least you can opt out of flock. Definitely can’t opt out of ring.
Tesla is the least bad here according to Mozilla
Mostly only because Tesla doesn't share this data outside of Tesla, unless they leak it to news outlets to make it look like the accident was all your fault and not Tesla's.
Isn't that the definition of slander? Which is illegal in most places.
Maybe? But good luck proving it.
Tesla tends to only leak that stuff when they look bad. It's not like they are necessarily outright lying, they are just telling their version of the truth....
For the record, I'm not condoning this behaviour.
Source?
Post crash videos (IIRC published once to defend slander) extracted from black box isn’t the same as your claim.
I point out tesla specifically because they had headlines about sharing camera feeds as memes. The Mozilla report clearly shows tesla is not an outlier, more like "middle of the pack".
Source for your lies?
They're probably referring to this 2023 Reuters article.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...
"...pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees."
Two-second Google search. It's not very charitable to accuse someone of lying without even looking. It's even mentioned in that mozilla breakdown.
The way op worded seems they shared it publicly. You say they internally shared pics of dogs and signs..? Are you serious?
> I point out tesla specifically because they had headlines about sharing camera feeds as memes.
Your baseless assumptions are your own fault.
I gave citations for your specific questions. There’s multiple articles about the odious things that happened that you clearly have no interest in acknowledging. I’m not your research assistant. Go read them. You’re clearly more interested in defending Tesla than understanding people’s complaints. Cope? Shill? I’ll never know, and I’ll definitely never care.
Gotcha bitch. Account created 2022. Comments heavy in em dashes. Who you botting for?
lol, cringe. Great way to protect your ego when someone is serially pointing out how baseless your glib snapbacks are. I use em dashes because I learned to write at a competent university, instead of, say, Breaking Bad. In fact, it played a large role in early LLM development, so if they ever used student writing in their data sets, I might be a tiny part of the reason these models use so many em dashed to begin with. Hell, I don’t even use grammarly anymore. And I made this alt when I switched from dev to design, before the shitty job market switched me from design to manufacturing. And exactly who would I be “botting for?” The only person in this thread that started championing a particular company is you. The thread itself started with me bemoaning data collection among the auto industry, and mentioned that Tesla is the least bad at even if they’re still bad. So… am I botting for “big bicycle?” Part of the large Schwinn-backed anti-car virtual astroturfing brigade? Maybe an extremely aggressive public transit advocacy group? Exactly who cares enough about people stanning Tesla to point some robot propaganda machination at it? And since you were enough of a creep to go through my comment history looking for excuses to ignore what I was saying rather than actually engage with it, did you see ANY other indication that was a theme? Lol. So keep trying to scrounge up some cope, “bitch.”
You've been following my comments for a while, especially trying to dunk on Tesla with falsehoods and lies. Argue with Mozilla about their results, not me.
I’ve provided citations. You were commenting in a thread that branched off of my comment. I got my criticism from the Mozilla article, and most of my citations were linked to in the Mozilla article. I’d say you should actually read the subsection on Tesla, but you clearly can’t accept reality and have some weird Tesla obsession. Get help.
Tesla is not the least bad. Do you have that footage sitting in your car SD card or in cloud without access? Tesla is middle, if not worse
Argue with Mozilla on this. It's their list.
Next stop google analytics.
This is an excellent idea.
another POV is, stop using a TV
I've had the advertising settings disabled on my LG C2 for a while and yesterday I decided to browse the settings menu again and found that a couple new ones had been added and turned on by default.
Good times.
This is what seemingly every app does. They add 15 different categories for notifications / emails / whatever, and then make you turn off each one individually. Then they periodically remove / add new categories, enabled by default. Completely abusive behavior.
Want to unsubscribe from this email? Ok, you can do it in one click, but we have 16 categories of emails we send you, so you'll still get the other 15! It's a dark pattern for sure.
And by unsubscribing, you just gave us a signal that you are active.
They’re sad they can’t point that particular marketing hose at you, anymore, but appreciate confirming your validity as a lead they’ll sell to data brokers.
1.3076744e+12 -1 is a lot of categories to click.
1,307,674,368,000
[ ] 231,846,239,211 “Messages related to wetland fauna migratory patterns and their impact on commodity spice markets, also Pepsi advertising”
e+ is such an unintuitive decimal representation system. going in blindly, it's completely non-obvious what "e" stands for, surely "d" would make far more sense. also, the namespace for e is plenty filled up as is, and, most of all, +12 implies 12 additional digits, not digits after the point
Google's choice to use it for calculation results despite having essentially no restriction on text space always annoyed me. I think this is the first time I've seen a human using it
Nothing to do with Google.
(Apologies if this is pedantic, but:)
The letter "e" (for "exponent") has meant "multiplied by ten to the power of", since the dawn of computing (Fortran!), when it was impossible to display or type a superscripted exponent.
In computing, we all got used to it because there was no other available notation (this is also why we use * for multiplication, / for division, etc). And it's intuitive enough, if you already know scientific notation, which Fortran programmers did.
Scientific notation goes back even further, and is used when the magnitude of the number exceeds the available significant digits.
E.g., Avogadro's number is 6.02214076 × 10⁻²³. In school we usually used it as 6.022 × 10⁻²³, which is easier to work with and was more appropriate for our classroom precision. In E notation, that'd be 6.022E-23.
1.3076744e+12 is 1.3076744 × 10¹². The plus sign is for the positive exponent, not addition. You could argue that the plus sign is redundant, but the clear notation can be helpful when working with numbers that can swing from one to the other.
The use of E notation for scientific notation dates back to 1956: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation#:~:text=wh...
It’s also pretty common on scientific and graphing calculators; the first time I saw it was in junior school in maths.
And if you just add them to your spam filter, it won't even work easily, because they deliberately shift around the domains and subdomains they send from every so often.
I just use a unique address for each service. Any email that gets leaked or is getting unsubscribe resistant spam is added to /etc/postfix/denied_recipients :)
Appending "+label" to the username part of an email address is legal and will be delivered to the username mailbox.
Doesn’t sound like a very fun hobby, TBH.
no the op, but I find great joy in looking though who sends me spam (based on the unique email used to sign up for each service)
I think it scratches a similar itch to putting up a game camera to see what sort of vermin are running around in your back yard.
You inevitably catch LexisNexis shitting in your herb garden and leaving squirrel carcasses lying about…
Luckly they don't seem to shift the addresses they send to, so if you own the domain you use for email you can make dedicated addresses for each service you sign up for. Then filter based on the `to:` field.
this is where LLMs could actually help. create spam filters that an LLM can parse and deny if it looks close enough. but then again, hallucinations would be kind of terrible.
I agree this would be a good use of an LLM (assuming that it was running locally). I wouldn't put one in charge of deleting my messages, but I could see one being used to assign a score to messages and based on that score moving them out of my inbox into various folders for review.
I'd be really interested to see a comparison between LLM spam scoring and a traditional spam scoring algorithm because an LLM is essentially a spam generator. Can that be used to make a better spam detector?
Same can be achieved with a catch all domain and a sub for every service you use. Cost $13/year. Extra protection: now if you lose access to your email provider, you still have access to future emails.
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Yep. Had that happen with the United app a few weeks ago. Unsolicited spam sent via push notification to my phone. Turns out that they added a bunch of notification settings - of course all default to on.
Turned them all off except for trip updates that day.
Best part is- yesterday I received yet another unsolicited spam push message. With all the settings turned off.
So these companies will effective require you to use their app to use their service, then refuse to respect their own settings for privacy.
I've taken to "Archiving" apps like this on my Android phone. When I need it, I can un-archive it to use it. Keeps the list of things trying to get my attention a little bit smaller.
I just hellban every app from sending any notifications, except for a select few. Apps get like a one strike policy on notification spam. If they send a single notification I didn't want, I disable their ability to send notifications at all.
Also all notifications/etc are silent, except for alarms, pages, phone calls, and specific named people's texts.
Everything else... no. YouTube was the worst offender before for me.
Another technique for me is to avoid apps like Instagram, Facebook and Youtube. I run them all through mobile Firefox with uBlock origin and custom block scripts that block sponsored posts and shorts. This combines well with having Youtube's history turned off which prevents the algorithmic suggestions.
> YouTube was the worst offender before for me.
Uber. Hands down. I'm using it a lot less since they started sending ads on the same notification channel as my ride updates.
I give apps a one strike policy on notification spam. If they do it at all, I'm uninstalling it until I actually need to use it next (if I can't find an alternative). And the same goes for getting in my way to beg for a review on the app store: that's a shortcut to getting a one-star rating.
The main exception to this is the notification spam from Google asking me to rate call quality after every damn call. I don't have my phone rooted, so I can't turn off that category of notification.
This is the way. You get one chance, app. If you send me an unwanted notification, you're done. You have to almost treat these apps as attackers.
Why even give most apps even one chance? For almost every app I have zero interest in ever getting a notification from. I see no reason to give them an opportunity to annoy me even once.
Honestly because I won't remember to go into the settings page and disable it. When a notification comes in, there's a quick route to disable forever, otherwise I have to go preemptively digging
Sending ad notifications is a recent trend, normally Apple guidelines don’t allow it, but they know that Apple cannot much fuss about with all the regulatory pressure.
It’s the enshitification of the notification system, the apps are already filled with ads and now they’re making you open the app or splash things on your face.
Why do you even need the United app? They have a website.
This is why whenever you try to do anything significant on a web site with a phone, they tell you to "Download our app". Detection is very good now. Slack can see right through desktop mode, cheater, and will redirect you to the app regardless.
Never had that issue on Vanadium browser, or Brave or even Firefox. I personally refuse to download an app if there is a website for the same. For a long time I was even using door dash in browser.
Why use a website at all, then? United has a reservations 800 number and you can print your boarding pass at the airport.
I get the sarcasm, but it's like comparing apples to oranges. Calling a number and talking to people is vastly different to clicking some buttons on your phone. App/website have almost same user interface, just different ways to get to that interface. Calling the number is totally different interface.
Often there is an extra fee to use the 800 number. (I'm not sure about United, but some places do that)
Boarding pass. For the airline apps, it probably is a good assumption that most people want to get a notification that their flight is delayed, or started boarding, etc..
They don't advertise it, but you can many times add the Apple Wallet pass from the website. And it actually sends you flight change notifications too.
Unfortunately the Apple wallet boarding pass is often out of date with any gate changes. The app will update immediately.
When I get email like that, I mark it as spam. That trains the spam filters to remove their marketing email from everyone's inbox. I see it as a community service.
That behavior is what finally got me off Facebook awhile back.
Edit: And something similar with Windows now that I think about it; there was a privacy setting which would appear to work till you re-entered that menu. Saving the setting didn't actually persist it, and the default was not consumer-friendly.
LinkedIn does the same thing re emails, notifications, etc that they send. I think I turned off notifications that connections had achieved new high scores in games they play on LinkedIn. Absurd.
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LinkedIn is one the most useless app ever. I have trashed it countless times, but I do use it now and ten to keep up with companies and respond to a few solicitations. There is almost never anything of value in my feed, between the fake jobs and the low value self-promotion AI-written posts. Who even reads this? Not even mentioning the political, and pseudo-activist posts. And this happens despite systematically marking all of these posts irrelevant or “inappropriate for LinkedIn”. This app is beyond repair. Uninstalling.
“House Project Managers”
I especially like how they add it to the bottom of a widget with hidden scrollbars, just to make it totally missable that they added them at all!
The real trick is to never connect your TV to the internet under any circumstances. These things are displays, they don't need the internet to do their job. Leave that to the game consoles and streaming boxes.
I worry about the new cellular standards that support large scale iot.
Search for 5g miot or 5g massive iot or maybe even 5g redcap
Existing LTE is fine. If they wanted to embed modems in the TVs they could do it now. I'm guessing they simply don't have to, simply because a huge number of consumers will dutifully hand over their Wi-Fi passwords.
This is exactly the situation we're in with new automobiles...
While this is certainly possible, I’d imagine this sort of thing would be found quite quickly and would result in a massive lawsuit if not disclosed on the package.
It's going to happen on any device. It's a software thing. If LG isn't doing it, it's Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. My PS5 basically shows ads on some system ui screens (granted mostly for "game" content but it still counts).
I firewall my TV from my Printer just so they don't get any ideas.
I have a Hisense TV which recently did the same. It turned on personal recommendations and advertising. I have no idea where the ads are or how it works; I only use devices over HDMI. I'm sure the TV is spying on me incessantly nonetheless.
I’m using my tv with all the stuff disabled (the ones it’s possibly disable), but even then I realize I don’t trust them and I don’t trust their choices. Because they get to say sorry and not held responsible.
I want smart tv because I want use my streaming services but that’s it. I also want high quality panels. Maybe the solution is high quality TVs where you just stick a custom HDMI device (similar to Amazon fire stick) and use it as the OS. Not sure if there are good open source options since Apple seems to be another company that keeps showing you ads even if you pay shit load of money for their hardware and software, Jobs must turning in his grave
The solution is a separate, internet connected device to play media connected to a non-connected tv.
Honest question: Why would "separate internet connected device", in the case of apple tv, firestick, roku, etc, won't do the same thing?
The TV would definitely spy on you, the connected device might not. And even if it does, you can pick one from a company you mind less, or who you've already given up on trying to prevent spying on you. For me, that means a Chromecast; I haven't managed the effort to de-Google, and most of what I watch is Youtube anyway. For some that might be Apple, who is probably the least egregious offender among the big companies. Or you could use a Raspberry Pi or other small computer and have even more control, at the cost of being higher effort.
I think they probably would, with maybe the exception of Apple TV. It’s probably not a coincidence that Apple TVs are the only hardware in this space that isn’t sold at a loss (or near loss), the rest are simply Trojan horses to park in the living room and maximize profit elsewhere by leveraging its privileged access to your eyeballs and/or ears (really no orifice is safe from these companies anymore, watch out for Smart Bidets).
I call this Zucking.
When a new permission appears without notice and defaults to the most-violating setting, gaslighting you into the illusion of agency but in fact you never had any, you've been Zucked.
I literally only buy computer monitors for TVs. No nonsense. Yeah, they're usually a bit more expensive but at least it doesn't spy on me.
Same behavior seen with spam email. You unsubscribe from one "list", but you're added to infinity new ones.
Seriously, why can't we just have a law that makes entirely illegal the retention of any personally identifiable information in any way that is legible to the retainer.
You can store my data for me, but only encrypted, and it can be decrypted only in a sandbox. And the output of the sandbox can be sent only back to me, the user. Decrypting the personal data for any other use is illegal. If an audit shows a failure here, the company loses 1% of revenue the first time, then 2%, then 4, etc.
And companies must offer to let you store all of your own data on your own cloud machine. You just have to open a port to them with some minimum guarantees of uptime, etc. They can read/write a subset of data. The schema must be open to the user.
Any systems that have been developed from personal user data (i.e. recommendation engines, trained models) must be destroyed. Same applies: if you're caught using a system that was trained in the past on aggregated data across multiple users, you face the same percentage fines.
The only folks who maybe get a pass are public healthcare companies for medical studies.
Fixed.
(But yeah it'll never happen because most of the techies are eager to screw over everyone else for their own gain. And they'll of course tell you it's to make the services better for you.)
I want my TVs to track me as much as a 1970s toaster. They have no business knowing who I am or anything about my life, yet alone twice a second capturing what I watch.
Once a generation starts to accept that everything they do is getting tracked, things may never go back, it may even lead autocracy.
Arguably we already have autocracy (call it emergent, if you like) in both the EU and America due to a combination of abdication and subversions of democratic will, self-governance, and sovereign nationhood over the last many decades, which is really starting to show its ugly nature just recently.
People forget, autocracies don’t just show up one day and announce “ok, we’re going to do autocracy now and I’m your dictator. Ok? Good?” They are conditions that have a long tail setup and preparation and then an accelerating escalation (where it seems we are now) and then, if not adequately countered, it bursts into place almost overnight.
That has resulted in the state of, in the EU, unelected (popularly) Commission Presidents dictating and dominating all of Europe, and the Presidency using powers it wasn’t supposed to have to tariff and threaten countries with destruction, conferred upon the office by a Congress that has also failed its core function.
Shallow thinkers tend to think in terms of the past archetypes, but it is unlikely that we will ever see anything like one of the middle eastern or Latin American autocrats with a clownish amount of metals on their chests ruling the West. It is a small cabal of people that manage a new kind of patronage system where everyone gets a piece of the plunder of the peasants. Call it neo-aristocracy if you like, until a better term emerges. Remember, the new tricks and lies tend to not be the same as the old tricks and lies.
Lmao
> unelected (popularly) Commission Presidents dictating and dominating all of Europe
What are you talking about?
It's exhausting getting "normies" to care about that. Frankly that ship has sailed, on a cultural level. Things that were unthinkable 20 years ago are just... yeah that's normal whatever.
"normies" are dying out. Most of the younger generation grew up chronically online.
Those are the normier of all.
Sending packages in the mail would be interesting. Though I suppose the only person that really needs to know your exact address is the delivery company, so maybe you could mail things with the address encrypted with the delivery company's public key..
Certainly doable.
You don’t even need to go this far. Just make deletion a right and clear consent a requirement like GDPR did. That’ll kill all these systems that depend on collecting information about people without their knowledge.
(Same goes for the credit bureaus and all the information brokers that slurp up every bit of de-anonymize information they can get.)
Not enough people care…ironically, largely because they’re in the modern opium den … watching and playing things on their screens.
Sounds like this: https://solidproject.org/about
But yea privacy is a silly thing to propose to a surveillance industry.
The hard part isn't the crypto or the sandboxing, it's enforcement and incentives
The hard part _includes_ the crypto and the sandboxing. Short of playing security theater games like "chuck it in a TEE", the moment your data needs any kind of processing, or possesses relationships with other users data (or their ability to view your data, like a social media feed), the complexity increases exponentially.
And the "convincing politicians to support the public good over the wishes of the lobbyists who fund their careers".
You mean like GDPR but stronger?
like GDPR, but cookie banners are by law preemptively answered with no
Its not just cookies. If you tell an LG TV that you live in Europe it will ask you if you want to turn of these “intelligent features“(ACR)
in fact, cookies legible to anything except the single sandboxed webpage running on your local browser would be illegal and thus never exist to begin with
I like it, but we'd need to find a new way to do auth (and then prevent that from being used for non-auth-related tracking)
i mean that the business models of google and facebook would go poooof
Sadly not. Context based ads is a thing.
Context based ads also give away information about the user. Because if you buy the goods that were advertised the vendor knows which contexts apply to you. It is not very precise information and it may involve probabilities, but it is still information.
Yeah and like coupon codes for discounts etc.
That's a vey reductionist position.
So, you can. This is GDPR in a nutshell. You have that protection if you have dual EU/US citizenship.
Agree. Also they say it’s not personally identifiable if they know everything about you but associates it as anonymously. Basically renaming you to random artifact. Fees La like major loophole. That’s why I don’t like chrome.
Saying that I think I am already hooked on free and/or easy to search etc etc BS. Basically take my data for convenience and some advanced tech. Honestly feels like addiction.
"All of the big TV makers" except Vizio which is owned by Walmart, of course, who happens to do ACR and ad targeting:
> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizio
If the lawsuit goes forward, it'll be really easy to force the same on Vizio.
Well it wouldn't be Texas if there wasn't some grotesque corruption involved. Vizio is the absolute worst of the TV manufacturers when it comes to this shit, so now it's clear Texas is really just trying to bully Walmart's competition rather than do something positive for consumers.
That does tell me why Paxton brought this suit. Either that or somebody is trying to blackmail him over something he watched.
Isn’t that also we got only consumer protection law we have? Somebody leaked the video rental history of a senator etc.
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Sure but won't this case set precedent that all manufacturers are bound to by law?
If this case succeeds, suing Visio on the same charges would be a cakewalk.
It should be illegal to set information collection settings to on by default. Being watched is considered a threat almost universally across all animals.
you would be incredibly uncomfortable with someone wide-eyed staring you down and taking notes of your behavior, wouldnt you? This is what tech companies are doing to everyone by default and in many cases they actively prevent you from stopping them. It is the most insane thing that people only seem to mildly complain about.
Humans are intensely social creatures, and are not adapted to feel the same way about things done invisibly versus visibly. That's how you end up in weird situations where people know the pervasive spying we're subjected to is wrong, but can't muster the will to act on it most of the time. It's cases like these where "voting with your wallet" produces terrible results. On one end you have organized groups of people figuring out chinks in human instincts, and on the other you have an unorganized mass of people doing what feels right or is expedient. You need coordination on both ends for competition and optimization to play out and find an acceptable compromise.
> Humans are intensely social creatures, and are not adapted to feel the same way about things done invisibly versus visibly.
This is why the EFF or some other privacy watchdog should fund a ad campaign depicting Google, Facebook etc. as a creepy stalker character peeking through someone's window, following them around, noting everything they do, gaslighting them etc.
Expose this abnormal norm for the disgusting behavior it is.
It's always amazing how many people plop anti-consumer comments out here. Like, of course you bastards deserve to be served ads on your own TV that you just paid $800 for. Because why? Because ... the market is wise, and "the market" is screwing us, so ... we must ... deserve to be screwed?
Whatever is being offered to us must be the best deal we can get, because ... it's being offered to us?
What drives this sentiment? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
Exactly. The free market has very little recourse when companies basically all start doing the same thing, and more or less don’t tell you about it. You certainly don’t see “takes a screenshot of your TV every 2s and uploads it for us to analyze” plastered all over the boxes! I guess the idea is the consumer will be omniscient and that a company will come along offering a privacy protecting alternative… but those incentives just doooo not work!
Seriously, totally deranged to think the “free market” is capable of protecting humans against widespread nefarious behavior from colluding actors with vast amounts of money and power.
A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept and markets like electronics are nowhere near free. Collusion is something that happens in an oligopoly. The fact many markets degenerate into oligopolies and monopolies is why we need government. 30 years ago I feel like people understood this. Now it seems everyone thinks they know what free market means just because they heard the term one time.
"A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept"
How would we know the real-world properties of a theoretical concept from economics? We understand pieces of economics, but certainly not the whole thing. Let's say we make the market free-er and free-er. Apart from politics junkies, who knows for sure how that behaves?
I like this branch of discussion and I want it to keep growing. What has to happen to make an electronics market free? Is the situation about spyware TV/cars can not be improved in any kind of Libertarian or Anarcho-Capitalist world without the Government? Is bad government worse for the electronics market than absence of any governments?
All unregulated free market arguments rely on low/no barriers to entry. There are very few markets where this is true in reality.
Some things like semiconductor fabrication will have huge barriers to entry for the foreseeable future due to being massively capital intensive and involving lots of trade secrets etc. We can't really do much about this.
What we (ie. the government) can do is ensure no entities own the entire supply chain, so you can't run a fab and also market finished consumer goods. That way, manufacture of consumer goods (including the software) from the raw fabricated parts gets a much lower barrier to entry.
We can also force consumer manufacturers to advertise all "features" that we deem to be important. We already do things like energy ratings, why not privacy ratings too? The more information consumers have the better.
Make no mistake, any capital intensive industry like electronics will degenerate into an oligopoly without government, or you can dream of a day where everyone can print semiconductor wafers at home.
It's driven by the fact that many of these people work for companies doing similar things, and this is how they resolve the cognitive dissonance. Otherwise they'd have to accept that their work is unethical.
I've wondered about cognitive dissonance. Another "cog diss" possibility is, maybe I have a strong aversion to admitting that I'm getting screwed. Maybe I can relieve those feelings by arguing publicly that I'm not getting screwed. Or that it's "inevitable" for me to be screwed.
I don't know. It's one guess among many.
Because the companies are selling technology to us cheaper than cost in exchange for this? I do think they should be required to offer a revenue-neutral way to turn off ads but it would cost several hundred dollars and only me & 5 other weirdos on this website would buy it.
You can look at Vizio's quarterly statements before Walmart bought them: their devices were margin negative and "Platform+" (ads) made up for it: https://investors.vizio.com/financials/quarterly-results/def...
We all know that they would artificially increase the price of those models and exclude tons of features to punish users and say it’s not profitable.
They should not be allowed to track user at all as a hardware manufacturer, let the users purchase the tracking software themselves and get a rebate back.
That may be a good point. But I don't think it's an answer to my question.
My question was, Why do people get so passionate about being screwed? Say consumers really are receiving a $300 discount in exchange for being forced to watch say 30 hours of ads. Is that really such a fantastic opportunity that I'm going to go cheer for it publicly, or claim it's consumers' fault, or it should be mandatory, or we must just accept it because (whatever)?
I think most people don't see the basic trade of "you charge me less but get my data & my attention" to be a bad deal, particularly when the upside is a large TV which was a _huge_ status symbol (for better or worse) not even 15 years ago.
On the other hand Texas seems to have a problem with it. But say you're right. Does "not a bad deal" make people enthusiastic about it?
Why go out there and evangelize about a half-assed rewards card that comes with privacy leaks? That's what I'm asking.
I'll speak for myself. I think it's pretty universal that when someone says "I want X", people believe them. Where I find myself slightly rarer is that when someone's purchasing decisions says "I want X", I believe them.
People seem earnestly willing to trade their attention and data for ~a couple hundred dollars (this was my best estimate of how much cheaper ads make TVs - about $50 per year of ownership with 5ish years of ownership typical). I am much more worried that people who are not earnestly willing (me and the 5 other weirdos mentioned in my OP) don't really have a good outlet. It would be a genuine loss if the government no longer let people trade their attention and data for a cheaper TV, according to the people (I really had to resist capitalizing there) themselves. I don't have to like it to believe them.
I understand that you want to answer your own question, not my question. That's fine.
I told you why I care about defending this (although, I wouldn't say "enthusiastic"). You don't have to like my answer.
I don't like ACR at all.. but after reading all the raging about ads on TVs I thought they would be terrible. Then I got one recently - the ads are literally just links to watch movies & TV series I might be interested in, on my TV? Like yes I do want my TV to show me some things I might be interested in watching, the same way Youtube does. I don't like the increasing privacy violations like ACR being used to tune those "ads", but seeing recommendations on my TV is a feature I like..
Heck if I had strong guarantees that the data generated by ACR was used only to tune recommendations/ads using an anonymous advertising ID like IDFA and not linked to any personally identifying information, I would want that too. But sadly there is no privacy and no way of ensuring that now.
Not everyone feels like that. Yesterday the app of my tv provider on my Samsung TV home screen suddenly shows a Prime icon in its place, prompting to install the app if you use muscle memory to control the TV. I am unable to remove this annoying ad. I really really hate ads and will go to great lengths to avoid seeing any in my private home. So I see this as an invasion of my privacy. Not buying Samsung anymore.
My guess is that most people on HN work for companies that are in some meaningful way doing the same thing. What would be called spying 50 years ago is now the bedrock of how tech either makes money or improves their products.
I can not like something without wanting to make it illegal to do it. Simple as that. My preferences aren't necessarily someone else's preferences.
But I didn't really ask "why do some consumers prefer not to make certain unwanted features illegal"? I asked why some consumers are so wildly positive about being forced to adopt features they hate.
Lemme example. In the weed space, I don't think anybody would take this seriously: "well it's illegal and there's nothing we can do about that so it's pointless to discuss dissenting views." Or "it's going to be legalized and there's nothing anybody can do about that, so there is no possibility of debate." People would just laugh at that.
But when it's normal consumer activity, those same arguments seem to cut ice. Why?
I feel this is a generally strange situation. TVs seem to be pretty much the only tech that is somehow inflation proof, and that is largely due to the surveillance capitalist approach they come with.
I am a strong privacy advocate, but I also believe in customers choice. Hence, the primary issue I have with this technology is not its existence, but the lack of transparency in the pricing and the inability to truly properly opt out of this data collection.
At some point in the past year, I‘ve read someone suggest a „privacy label“ for electronics, akin to the energy efficiency labels that exist around the world. The manufacturers should be forced to disclose the extend of the data collection as well as the purpose and the ability to opt out on the product packaging, before the customer makes the purchase
HN tell me people want adverts, they are for my benefit so I can benefit from them.
HN is a haven for principled libertarians but I don't see many such comments in this thread.
Sadly, it seems like the contingent of people who have a problem with Smart TVs is small but noisy, and has no real market power. If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
Sort of reminds me how we complain loudly about how shitty airline service is, and then when we buy tickets we reliably pick whichever one is a dollar cheaper.
The problem is that consumers are not savvy. They go to the store, and compare TVs based on features presented. Colors, refresh rate, size, etc.
Its only when they get home (and likely not even right away) that they discover their TV is spying on them and serving ads.
This is a perfect situation where government regulation is required. Ideally, something that protects our privacy. But, minimally something like a required 'nutrition label' on any product that sends our data off device.
As far as I know, there is nothing to prevent Samsung from selling you a TV, then sending out a software update in two years which forces you to accept a new terms of service that allows them to serve you ads. If you do not accept, they brick your TV.
So it’s not a question of being savvy. As a consumer you can’t know what a company will choose to do in the future.
The lawsuit seems to be about using ACR, not the presence of ads.
> As far as I know, there is nothing to prevent Samsung from selling you a TV, then sending out a software update in two years which forces you to accept a new terms of service that allows them to serve you ads. If you do not accept, they brick your TV.
To the parent commenters' point, this is a perfect example of a situation where governments should be stepping in.
The thing that prevents a TV mfg from bricking your device is that they'd be instantly (and successfully) sued. In fact, there have already been many such class actions, ie with printer inks.
The downside is that it's sometimes easier and cheaper to just pay off the class and keep doing it.
> If you do not accept, they brick your TV.
That ought to be a slam dunk win in court. Especially since they probably won't show up to my local small claims court and I'll just send them the judgement.
> The problem is that consumers are not savvy...
> ...This is a perfect situation where government regulation is required.
Isn't this precisely the dynamic which causes governments to have an interest in ensuring that consumers don't become savvy?
I wouldn't say they aren't savvy. Many aren't, but also I don't blame them. Often you can buy a perfectly reasonable device and then they ad spying and adverts after you bought it. Most reviewers also don't talk about this stuff, and there are no standards for any of it (unlike e.g. energy consumption).
I agree more legislation is required.
I went with Philips Hue smart lighting specifically because it could work without an account or any internet access for the bulbs or hub.
Guess what became required this year? At least it seems I can still use them offline if I don't use the official app. But the official app is now just a popup requiring me to create an account. I'm not sure if I could add new lights using third party apps. Not like I'm ever buying a Hue product again though.
Yep, the store TV is in demo mode, then that first firmware update at home it changes it completely.
a required 'nutrition label'
This didn't work for GDPR cookie warnings.
True. But it does work for food safety, and to help curb underage drinking and smoking, to stop lousy restaurants from serving unsafe food and for lots of other stuff we take for granted.
Top down governance isn't a silver bullet, but it has its place in a functioning society.
Hope does spring eternal, doesn't it 8-/
If no one manufactures such a product, how does the "market" express this desire?
Buying one toaster, that would last your lifetime, is easily manufactured today, and yet no company makes such a thing. This is true across hundreds of products.
The fact is, manufacturing something that isn't shit, is less profitable, so what we're gonna get is shit. It doesn't really matter what people "want".
This is true for toasters and TVs...
How often are you replacing toasters?
Not the person you're asking, but about as frequently as I replace washing machines. The fact that I'm doing it at all is the problem, especially since both machines had been "solved" by the late 1970s.
The non-electric office tools I have from that era are perpetual. Eternal.
How often are you replacing washing machines? As we had more kids, we upgraded our toaster from a 2-slice to a 4-slice, somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 years ago. Can't imagine we paid more than ~$20 for it. Still going strong today. If it lasts 10 more years, all my kids will be moved out of the house, and I suppose we could downgrade to a 2-slice model again. Unless the grandkids like toast.
A situation in which many people care a little,but a few people care a lot in the other direction,is almost exactly what government is for. Ken Paxton has issues, for sure, but good on him in this case.
> If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
I am not convinced of this. there is more recurring revenue involved in spying on people
There is a market and people pay for it. However they are mostly not TVs, but monitors and those paying for it have the budget to pay far more. However this market will always exist because some of those are showing safety messages in a factory and if the monitor in any way messes those up there will be large lawsuits.
I don’t agree with this. The only way this would make sense is if consumers were made aware of spying vs not spying prior to purchase.
But TV manufacturers can change the TV’s behavior long after it is purchased. They can force you to agree to new terms of service which can effectively make the TV a worse product. You cannot conclude the consumer didn’t care.
This 'Wild West' is easily solved with decent consumer law. Spying could be shut down over night if laws levied fines on TV manufacturers pro rata—ie fines would multiply by the number of TV sets in service.
If each TV attracted a fine two to three times the amount manufacturers received from selling its data the practice would drop stone dead.
All it takes is proper legislation. Consumers just lobby your politicians.
We're past the point when most people can claim ignorance. And surely we have enough protection to at least defend against the "changed the terms and conditions after purchase" situation? They can't force me to do anything, and then stop working if I refuse.
For now maybe? Consumer protections are at an all time low at the moment. Your exact argument about “we all know this just nobody cares and stop whining” is exactly what will be cited if you attempt to take action if they brick your device.
Dumb TVs are hard to find: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/the-ars-technica-gui...
The problem is lack of information at time of purchase, in both cases. It's so onerous to figure out what these products are doing that people give up. Same in the airline case. If any of the airlines actually provided better service at a higher price, they'd have a market, but it's impossible to assess that as an end user with all the fake review bullshit that's all over the Internet these days.
The only cases where it's clearcut are a few overseas airlines like Singapore Airline who have such a rock solid reputation for great service that people will book them even if the price is 2x.
I've been shopping around specifically for this type of thing. There's two options: one is to buy a monitor display similar to what's in restaurants and retail stores and the other is to switch to a projector without smart features. The monitor displays, like your computer monitor, is even more expensive than regular TV's because they have special features that make them better to have on all the time at retail stores. They don't even have sound systems. The other option is projector displays which are generally the more sane option but they are not as easily installed. I suspect that privacy conscious consumers will go for projector displays as they aren't bundled with spyware. There's still risks like with the Roku TV box but it's much easier to replace the streaming unit. Apple TV claims that it doesn't utilize ACR so that's a solid choice but I would personally go for a Linux box with an HDMI out.
> Sadly, it seems like the contingent of people who have a problem with Smart TVs is small but noisy, and has no real market power.
No one cares. Smart TVs are super awesome to non tech people who love them. Plug it in, connect to WiFi - Netflix and chill ready. I have a friend who just bought yet another smart TV so he can watch the Hockey game from his bar.
> If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
What happened to that Jumbo (dumbo?) TV person who was on here wanting to build these things? My guess is they saw the economics and the demand and gave up. I applaud them for trying though. I still cling to my two dumb 1080 Sony TVs that have Linux PC's hooked to them.
Wouldn’t smart TVs that didn’t spy on you also be awesome? Seems like a knowledge gap to me. This gets solved as soon as people realize what’s happening. Right now they don’t realize TVs are cheap because of the ad subsidy.
"If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one."
The problem is easily solved and I'm surpised more people don't do it. For years I've just connected a PVR/STB (set top box) to a computer monitor. It's simple and straightforward, just connect the box's HDMI output into a computer monitor.
Moreover, PVR/STBs are very cheap—less than $50 at most, I've three running in my household.
If one wants the internet on the same screen just connect a PC to another input on your monitor. This way you've total isolation, spying just isn't possible.
Do you have a nice 65” OLED monitor option with solid display settings supporting Dolby modes, etc I can examine? I tried to find one and nobody is selling.
Not 65" but for a really large picture I just use the HDMI input on the smart TV sans internet and it's fine (also the TV makes a good large monitor). Works well on the projection monitor too.
This is okay if you want a small TV, and/or are willing to forgo the picture quality of a modern big TV.
Just put the HDMI into the TV set input and forget connecting the internet. That's the situation with one of my TVs and it gives a great picture. Also it works fine with my projection monitor.
..and constant notifications that the network is not connected, that there are wifi APs nearby, do you want to configure one(?), and that it's been 157 days since the last software update, and that you should connect your tv to the internet to get newest bestest firmware with 'new features'.
I simply don't experience that problem.
I think government is the only way to regulate below pain threshold nonsense that weighs down society.
but I think small issues in society might translate to small issues for government action, and regulatory capture has a super-high roi overturning "minor" stuff.
I suspect only showing real harm for something is the only way to get these things high-enough priority for action.
I kind of wonder if the pager attacks, or the phone nonsense in ukraine/russia might make privacy a priority?
isn't a smart TV that's not connected to the internet just a dumb TV?
wait until your TV has it's 5g modem to bypass your wifi
This isn't really an accurate analysis because it assumes the only parties involved are the TV manufacturers and the purchasing consumers. In fact the third party is ad brokers and so the calculus to alienate some users in pursuit of ad dollars is different.
If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.
I don't think they would. There are some TV manufacturers that are better about not nagging you (which is one of the reasons why I bought a Sony last year), but as time moves forward, companies have been less likely to leave money on the table. This is just the logical result of capitalism. Regulation will be the only way to protect consumer privacy.
Similarly, air travel gets worse as consumer protection regulations gets rolled back
This sounds like victim blaming to me. "What do you mean you don't understand how software and the internet works and thought this was just a TV?!"
If you want to make a free market argument you need to look up what a free market is. In particular, consumers need to have perfect information. Do you really think if manufacturers were obligated to make these "features" clear that most people wouldn't care?
I skimmed through what the TX governor/attorney general/whatever it's called said, and I don't think he even understands "privacy". All he's bothered about is that the data is going to China instead of American companies.
Of course they don’t understand privacy, they’re the same ones also trying to verify gender to use a restroom.
I appreciate them caring about what you watch being recorded but it’s pretty clear too they only care because the tv manufacturers are not “American Companies”. Walmart is getting special treatment and will be allowed to operate
But they named companies that are not Chinese eg Samsung. I think the claims are well spirited and the China argument is an aggravating factor for many, so no harm in having it. Will likely lead to higher interest in the case, so that's good.
Samsung is still Korean, which means the money made off your data are not going to an all american company :)
Also, if i remember what I read well, he may not be aware that Samsung is not Chinese.
What American TV manufacturers is there? LG is from Korea as well, Sony is originally from Japan and there two smaller (I assume, since Koreans dominate display market) Chinese manufacturers. But together those five are most of the units manufactured globally, so makes sense to sue them to have the biggest impact.
Saying especially one subgroup does not negate other subgroups being included in a larger group.
“Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans’ devices inside their own homes,” Paxton said. “This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries.”
Fundamentally how is this any different from what Google or Meta or Comcast or AT&T do? Comcast knows everything that goes to the TV and sells that data. At&T sells your browsing data… Those are services you pay for monthly.
Sure the method is different but it’s the same goal. Company x learns your interests so It can monetize you by selling to advertisers
AT&T sounds like the same thing, Google sounds different because they theoretically claim to not sell your data, and instead sell ads, and Google can show you an ad you want to see because Google knows you so well. It doesn’t precisely sell you to advertisers in the same way.
Anyways, the whole thing sucks for consumer privacy and needs to be outlawed. The problem is that companies come up with unique, tricky ways of exploiting you, and people can never fully understand it without a lot of effort. Someone might be ok using Google and seeing contextual ads, but wouldn’t be ok if they knew Google was saving a screenshot of their browser every second and uploading and reselling it. The first can feel innocuous, the second feels evil.
>Fundamentally how is this any different from what Google or Meta or Comcast or AT&T do?
It's all garbage all the way down.
Why do you think it's different? At first glance it seems more or less the same thing to me.
"The TVs “are effectively Chinese-sponsored surveillance devices, recording the viewing habits of Texans at every turn without their knowledge or consent,” the lawsuits said."
This explains why Vizio, who is owned by Walmart, was not sued.
Sony, Samsung, and LG are not Chinese companies but they are being sued. It's more likely that Vizio is not included because they already got hit by the FTC (but not hard enough to disable ACR).
From what I understood, ACR on Vizio TVs was disabled, but is available as an opt-in "feature". I don't know what sort of person would opt-in...
[flagged]
It's also excellent pro-privacy advocacy. I am happy to have a big tent for this issue.
No, that's the problem - it's not good advocacy. The destructionist movement is more appropriately seen as arbitraging away existing concern about the issues they claim to take up. Their politicians' main use for reformist political causes are as cudgels for threatening businesses with, after which they back off once their own pockets get lined. As a libertarian who cares about many of the causes of individual freedom they dishonestly champion, I'm well acquainted with their abuse of ideals.
>As a libertarian
Libertarian PD, by Tom O'Donnell [1]
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
So mid.
The lack of a capital L is because I'm not whole hog on the "Libertarian" party's kool-aid. In fact, I often argue against much of it as it runs contrary to individual liberty.
On this topic specifically, privacy is an integral part of individual liberty. So claiming to care about privacy, only to simplistically dunk on the more general subject is just odd.
Furthermore, elsewhere in this thread you've espoused the idea of examining arguments on their merits and not who is making them. So it's directly hypocritical to be dismissing my argument based on a quick self-description that I only threw out to mitigate the dynamic of destructionist/fascist cheerleaders writing off all dissent like it's only coming from progressive democrats with blue hair.
>So mid.
Worst take ever. So mid as to be published in a major publication.
Major publications are pretty fucking mid...
Also do you have anything to say about my other points? Your other comments were seemingly substantive, but now you're just being combative for combativeness's sake.
>The destructionist movement is more appropriately seen as arbitraging away existing concern about the issues they claim to take up. Their politicians' main use for reformist political causes are as cudgels for threatening businesses with, after which they back off once their own pockets get lined. As a libertarian who cares about many of the causes of individual freedom they dishonestly champion, I'm well acquainted with their abuse of ideals.
You are making points about their "movement" and generalities about what those politicians do. I don't care about their movement or their general behavior, because I will take this win for privacy to the extent that it is successful at getting devices like this more regulated or (unlikely) eliminated.
Do you think that Trump's coalition is internally values-consistent? I sure don't; but they effectively made abortion illegal in a lot of places, and it seemed to make them happy like it had been a long term goal of theirs or something.
The thing is that I do not see this ending up as a win for privacy. At best it's political grandstanding that will end up in a quid-pro-quo settlement and get dropped by the following news cycle. But there are worse possibilities like it's used as a cudgel to force the manufacturers to add "age verification" (eg sign into an account on the TV to be able to use it at all), or other creeping digital authoritarian dynamic which will then be sold as a "win".
A fundamental difficulty is that there is very little legal basis for a right to privacy. An AG is incapable of changing that, especially after commercial surveillance practices have been around for decades (precluding common-law approaches to novel behavior). Legislatures are where we need constructive action on this topic.
Which is why the generally performative behavior of the destructionists on the vast majority of causes they claim to champion is highly relevant. I'd say the few "successful goals" of the destructionist movement (criminalizing abortion, jackboots attacking minorities, appointing destructionist judges) are exceptions that prove the rule on how generally non-constructive their pushes are.
So.. if it was American companies doing the spying it would be a different story?
Not according to the law. Speeches are not the law.
Yeah pretty much. No regulators are batting an eye at the industrial data gathering schemes of Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. and they never have. And the only major social network under real legal scrutiny is TikTok.
The American Government wants to have the cake and eat it too, as per usual. They want to leave the massive column of the economy that is surveillance capitalism intact and operating, and making them money, and they want to make sure those scary communists can't do the same. Unfortunately there isn't really a way to take down one without taking down the other, unless you legally enshrine that only American corporations have a right to spy on Americans. And (at time of comment anyway) they seem to not want to openly say the reason is just naked nationalism/racism.
Doesn't the $2 million fine paid by Walmart just make this a cost of doing business? Doesn't seem enough to be a deterrent.
That fine was levied years before Walmart acquired Vizio.
And of course: casual reminder that Vizio does extensive ACR and ad targeting, and even bought a company doing it to facilitate that:
> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]
But I'm sure Texans are fully aware and consented to this, right?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizio
This is exactly why the current ad model is broken.
Users are tracked without real consent, advertisers still waste budgets, and everyone loses except the platforms collecting the data.
What’s interesting is that you can actually build effective ads without spying at all — by targeting intent signals instead of identities, and rewarding users transparently for engagement.
The tech is already there, but the incentives are still backwards.
This is called contextual advertising. It's becoming more popular as cookies are becoming less effective.
As long as the firmware is proprietary and cannot be inspected or modified, the only reliable way to avoid snooping by tech industry is not to connect any "smart" device to the Internet. Use the TV as a dumb monitor for a PC under your control (running Linux). If streaming service X will not run on Linux because DRM is not implemented or enforceable on a free device, do without it, or find alternative sources for the content (hint: Linux ISOs).
You say "only", but if it is illegal, optional, and can be detected freely, it is very likely to not happen. For all the snark one can muster about DOJ, with those three things in place, it could get expensive very quickly to try to circumvent the law.
I've been using my pi-hole as my DNS and then also firewall blocking the TV from phoning out on port 53 in case the manufacturer has hardcoded DNS. Though I agree with the point and I shouldn't have to do this. This is just mitigation.
>and then also firewall blocking the TV from phoning out on port 53 in case the manufacturer has hardcoded DNS
I'm surprised they haven't switched to using DoH, which would prevent this from working.
It wouldn't even need to use any sort of standards-based DNS-like thing at all, if they control the server (on a stable IP address in the TV's firmware) and the client (the TV). It could be any data scheme (probably https for simplicity and blending in) along the lines of "give me all the other IP addresses I'll need, which aren't as stable as the one in my firmware."
Regardless, what is the benefit of putting the TV on the network but preventing it from doing DNS lookups anyway, even if you could be sure you succeed?
At the very least, i would assume the majority of folks here were pi-holing devices on their network.
What about cheap cellular modems built in?
Is there any evidence those exist in TVs and other home appliances?
Modern cars have cellular modems, I unplugged mine, and would not hesitate to take apart a TV and physically rip off the modem.
Absolutely yes. My prescribed CPAP came with 5G that uploads data for their app and for your physician to monitor your progress. You basically wouldn’t even know it had one, the plan must be managed by the company and automatically connects where ever you take it.
https://www.resmed.com/en-us/products/cpap/machines/airsense...
Maybe not yet - but 5g was built with the idea of making them cheap. It takes a couple years to design the cheap modems and then a few more years to get them in TVs, so they could well be coming in the near future yet - only time will tell. And the modem will also be your wifi so you can't really rip it off without losing other useful things.
>but 5g was built with the idea of making them cheap
For bandwidth, maybe. It's still going to add cost to the BOM. They'll have to recoup that somehow. Say a 5G modem costs $20 (random number). For it to actually make money, it'll need to be otherwise not connected to the internet, otherwise it can just use wifi instead. Out of 100 people, how many do you think won't connect it to the internet for privacy reasons? 1? 5? 10? Keep in mind, if they don't connect to the internet, they'll need to go out and get another device to watch netflix or whatever, so they're highly incentivized to. Say 10 out of 100 don't, and with this sneaky backdoor you now can sell ads to them. For that privilege, you paid $200 per disconnected TV, because for every disconnected TV with a 5G module, you need to have a 5G module in 9 other TVs that were already connected to the internet. How could you ever hope to recoup that expense?
assume they are aiming for $1 in large quantites. I don't know thier number but that is closer. And the cost will be low because they are bulk buying excess data. They can send this at 3am when everyone is asleep so cell companies can give a deep discount.
again the above is the plan, reality often changes.
The above pricing is just for the modem itself, not the data plan. There's no way you can get a cellular modem for $1.
Adafruit sells ESP32 for less than $3. Any manufacturer can get quantity pricing to lower the cost. ESP32 doesn't have cell (AFAIK), but it wouldn't be technically that hard to add if they wanted. While $1 might be a bit on the low side, it is reasonable.
If you're planning on using the TV as a dumb display for another device, and are determined enough to physically remove a cellular modem, then the TV's own WiFi is not a useful thing either, even if integrated into the same chip.
If you want the TV to be on your network (for casting or streaming or whatever) and you also want to filter that traffic (allowing connections only to the services you want to use) then you need it to be on your own network (wifi, if there's no ethernet port) and not on someone else's network (cellular).
The CPU, wifi, and modem are all in one in this future (think ESP32). That is the direction this is likely to move. You can't remove one without the rest. I suppose you could put your own CPU in and write software, but otherwise you are stuck.
I have not purchased a TV or car with these misfeatures, but I expect I will have to at some point in the future.
The most vulnerable part might be the antenna? Required by laws of physics to be a certain size and shape, and is not easily integrated into another more essential component?
If found, it can be removed entirely, or replaced with a dummy load to satisfy any presence detection circuits. But radiation can be minimized or eliminated.
Now obviously a device can choose not to function (or to be especially annoying in its UI) if it doesn't find a network. But people take cars (and TVs) to places with no WiFi or mobile coverage, and I don't know how the device manufacturers deal with that.
I don't need WiFi, all I need is the HDMI port.
Eventually these will use mesh networks to figure this out.
Nevada has a gaming dept that certifies the firmware in "slot" machines. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for TVs. Maybe include cars too... they like to phone home more than they should.
One does not want to end up on the bad side of Nevada's Gaming Commission [1]. They can and will rip you apart.
[1] https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000298248/hearing-in-la...
Perhaps the one thing Ken Paxton and I agree on.
Perhaps. But you also need to ask why Paxton is doing this as this case will vaporize as soon as that is accomplished. I would be much more optimistic if California were also signed onto this.
Paxton, however, doesn't give one iota of damn about individual freedom. So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge.
Unfortunately, we don't have Molly Ivins around anymore to tell us what is really going on here in the Texas Laboratory for Bad Government.
> So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge
This is about being in the news as much as possible. He is in a close 3 way race for the 2026 Republican spot for US Senate. The other two are current old-school conservative senator John Cornyn, and new comer MAGA Wesley Hunt (but not as MAGA as Paxton). Lots of in-fighting over funding, so Paxton is making sure to get in the news as much as possible.
Throughout the year he has been in the news for things that are useful like this and another suit against a utility company for causing a fire and others for typical maga things like lawsuit to stop harris county (Houston) funding legal services for immigrants facing deportation or immigrant-serving nonprofits or a "tip-line" for bathroom enforcement or lawsuits against doctors...it goes on and on and on. It's a page out of the Trump playblook, its like watching a trump clone. And thats the point.
A broken clock is right twice a day!
It is an important observation, and a reminder: evaluate positions on their merits, and not who is taking the position.
While I agree (and I agree with the upstream comments, too), there's often deeper reasons why we can short circuit fully evaluating an argument made on its merits: often the "merits", or lack thereof, are derived from the party's values and beliefs, and if we know those values to be corrupt, it's likely that subsequent arguments are going to be similarly corrupt.
There's only so much time in the day, only so much life to live. Could a blog post written by the worst person you know have a good point, even though it's titled something like "An argument in favor of kicking puppies" by Satan himself? I mean, true, I haven't read it, yet. There could be a sound, logical argument buried within.
This is also what "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" teaches, essentially. Trust is hard-won, and easily squandered.
"A lie is around the world before the truth has finished tying its shoes."
"Flood the Zone" is why some of us are so exhausted, though.
In these instances, the argument has to come from someone who is self-aware enough of the short-circuit to say "okay, look, I am going to address that elephant" — but mostly, that's not what happens.
Thankfully in this case, all we need get through is the title.
I don't care about people's values, unless I am evaluating them; that's their own business, and I am not the value police or thought police. Goodness knows there are people (hi, mom!) who are appalled by some of my values.
Roman Polanski and Woody Allen: terrible humans, but they have still made some of the best films that exist.
Everyone is the value police, though, at some level. It is either cowardice or willful ignorance to pretend you don't have judgements about how other people behave, some of which might compel you to act in some way.
Of course we have opinions. That’s the “broken clock” part of “a broken clock is right twice a day.”
It's also important to read the fine print when the perceived good position is coming from a guy who tried to sue Tylenol over autism.
This guy does nothing good on purpose.
>It's also important to read the fine print
It's always important to read the fine print. That would be part of evaluating an argument on its merits. His lawsuit over Tylenol + autism is easily rejected on its merits. That means nothing about this issue.
No.
.its an insane lawsuit, there are basically two outcomes crazy side effects from his lawsuit:
Tvs are banned. (Possibly can only texas permitted tv)
Or if he loses, which might be his donors goal of him litigating so terribly, all your data now belongs to the companies.
Theres no consumer friendly option here
I just want a somewhat trustworthy organization to develop a "DUMB" certification. I would pay extra for a DUMB TV.
I like the suggested "Don't Upload My Bits" backronym.
I have this article growing in the back of my head that is currently mostly a rant about how impractical technology turned out by comparing the current state with the old days. It's hard as there are countless examples and I want to address only the most embarrassing ones. Dumb vs smart TV alone could fill a tomb worth of downgrades. Do you remember the variable resistor, the rotary knob that provided volume control? The ease of use, the granularity, the response time!
I currently have volume control on my TV, one on the OS on the computer that drives it and one on the application that makes the picture. That is only half the problem
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/pblj86/windows...
I own a 60 year old black and white tv. If the volume knob vanished people would know the problem is in my head.
The thing is, I want smart features, I just don't want those smart features to be tied to the display. A separate box allows more consumer choice, which is generally a better experience. Easily flashable firmware would be an acceptable alternative for the same reason.
I'd be happy with a setup box giving me the ability to add apps for streaming services or whatever, but I don't want that STB spying on my either. I feel like even if all TVs were dumb monitors we'd just be moving the real problem of insane levels of data collection and spying to another device. We need strong regulation with real teeth to prevent the spying at which point all of our devices should be protected.
Hi-fi and AV enthusiasts have known that "separates" is where it's at since the beginning. Unfortunately it's such a small segment compared to mass market junk "content" devices and it's only shrinking as more people are seduced by the convenience of the shit stuff.
A separate box allows more consumer choice, which is generally a better experience.
In the life of my last TV (10+ yrs), I've had to switch out that separate box three times. It would have sucked & been way more expensive to have had to replace the TV each time.
Firmware can be updated, sure, but there's the risk of some internal component failing. There's the risk of the services I want to use not being compatible. I'd also prefer to use an operating system I'm familiar with, because, well, I'm familiar with it, rather than some custom firmware from a TV company whose goal is to sell your data, not make a good user experience...
Of course, this ties back to the enshittification of the Internet. Every company is trying to be a data broker now though, because they see it as free passive income.
Regarding the failure of internal components--there are some 'failure' modes which I had not even contemplated previously.
I have a TV that's only about 5-6 years old and has a built in Roku. It mostly works fine, but the built in hardware is simply not fast enough to play some streaming services, specifically some stuff on F1TV. And before anyone asks, it's not a bandwidth problem--I have gigabit fiber and the TV is using ethernet.
Anyway, between that, general UI sluggishness and the proliferation of ads in the Roku interface, I switched to an Apple TV and haven't looked back.
Just don’t connect your TV to the internet.
Yes I know there is a theoretical capability for it to connect to unsecured WIFI. No one still has unsecured WIFI anymore
We've already had TVs which only started serving ads after a few months of use. What's stopping them from selling TVs which stop working if it hasn't been able to connect to the mothership for a few weeks?
And instead of a full brick, let's just downgrade to 360p and call it an "expiration of your complementary free Enhanced Video trial".
>We've already had TVs which only started serving ads after a few months of use. What's stopping them from selling TVs which stop working if it hasn't been able to connect to the mothership for a few weeks?
Same thing that prevents your phone manufacturer from adding a firmware level backdoor that uploads all your nudes to the mothership 1 day after the warranty expires. At some point you just have to assume they're not going to screw you over.
> At some point you just have to assume they're not going to screw you over.
That'd be quite naive in my opinion.
That's not a good answer, unless you just want cable. YouTube, Netflix, etc won't work. Buying hardware is paying extra which is already a deterrent, but anyway just shifts the problem to that piece of hardware - is the stick vetted to not do any harm? Other solutions are often impractical or overly complex for non-technical people. I haven't seen any good answers to date. I guess your TV just shouldn't spy on everything you watch? Seems like a reasonable expectation.
Buy an AppleTV.
Google devices are out because they are developed by a advertising company.
The Roku CEO outright said they sell Roku devices below costs to advertise to you.
My TCL/Roku TV recently started showing popups during streams with services like YouTubeTV and PlutoTV, that basically say, "Click here to watch this same program on the Roku Network". I poked around the settings on the TV, and sure enough, there were some new "smart" settings added and enabled by default. I disabled the settings, and the popups stopped. But it's only a matter of time before something else appears.
Apple is already sending spam notifications for stupid bullshit like that F1 movie.
> is the stick vetted to not do any harm
The stick is $30 and trivially replaced. The TV is closer to $1000. Worst-case scenario I'll just hook up an HTPC or Blue-Ray player to the TV.
The $30 stick is also sold below cost and makes money from advertising. The only one that I would trust is AppleTV
Because with a stick, I can easily decide to chuck it and replace with another. Over and over again. Hard to do with a TV. Even if I had the money, disposing of one is a royal pain.
I trust Apple’s business model.
For now. They’re about to undergo a CEO change, again. Who knows what will happen in the future, particularly if the shareholders expect the perceived value provided by enshittification.
John Ternus, SVP of Hardware Engineering, is considered the front runner for CEO right now. The board wants a more product oriented CEO this time. Things could change but makes me optimistic.
Its not like they change CEOs every year - Tim Cook has been CEO since 2011.
I just connect it to a computer and watch YouTube without ads and movies without anti-piracy warnings (from a store I go to-rrent them).
How do you hook it up and how do you control it remotely?
I do the same thing. My PC is hooked up via HDMI to a receiver which goes to the TV via HDMI. I use VNC on my phone to remote control it. It works well. The phone’s touch screen functions as a mouse and you can pull up the phone’s on screen keyboard to type. My wife is extremely non technical and does fine with it. Usually we just use the browser to watch ad-blocked YouTube or unofficial sports streams.
Elecom Relacon, the only wireless input device worth owning.
We just switched to a laptops and USB-HDMI cable that always dangles near our TV. Someone wants to see F1, sports or a movie, they just plug it and watch like it's a big computer screen. If 9yo can do it, anyone can do it.
Until they start using Sidewalk/LPWAN type things automatically instead of your home WiFi.
Pretty sure some already do this.
This theoretical capability could connect to a neighbor's WIFI in an apartment or condo.
Every router shipped these days either by the cable company or separately is configured with a password by default.
And a guest wifi that is password free on by default. All it takes is a neighbor to get a new router from the ISP. I just had to turn my guest wifi off because I noticed a lot of bandwidth on it (likely coming from our neighbor who was bragging about cord cutting).
Even that WiFi is gated by having to have an account with the ISP at least it was with Comcast.
what stops Comcast and TV makers from making a deal to use it?
So now Comcast is going to make a deal that TVs can use their guest WiFi network without logging in but only to send surveillance information?
>>And a guest wifi that is password free on by default.
I've literally never seen a router with a guest wifi enabled by default, from any ISP or otherwise - is that a common thing where you live?
It was common that Comcast has a separate WiFi guest network where anyone with a Comcast account could sign in and use it.
It's anecdotal, but I live in an apartment and while most of the WIFI networks are password protected, not all are.
My Wi-Fi isn't. I live about 2 miles away from my closest neighbor, so it was an inconvenience.
The trick was finding TV's and what not that don't need an Internet connection. Vizio was the only brand I could find that still had just dumb tv flat screens, believe it or not.
I would have thought modern devices would complain about unencrypted enough that putting even the password 123456 would be less painful
I would much rather buy a dumb TV. I feel that the smart TV experience is an opportunity it eventually make TVs feel dated and slow. I would rather buy a standalone streamer that I can plug in. Buying a new $100 dollar streamer every couple years is cheaper and produces less e-waste than buying a new giant TV.
I isolate smart TVs and other IOT devices to a separate network/subnet, and usually block their network access unless they need an update.
A related alternative would be that the listed tv price included the price of time spent viewing ads, and the sale price of your usage data (and that changing the price, say by showing more ads, required agreement).
A DUMB TV costs $x, while a badly behaved smart TV costs $y up front, plus $z per hour for the next few years, where y is potentially slightly less than x.
Look at "Commercial" TVs. This is what they call dumb TV's nowadays. I guess they're mainly targeted at businesses who want a TV to for things like informational displays, conferences, etc.
I only found this out because I thought my 15 year old plasma TV had died, but it ended up being the power cord.
They say you can just get a large PC monitor, for me it's the ads that would drive me nuts
I would agree if they would sell them over 55 inches with the latest panel technology in a similar pricing ballpark.
I really like that thin one featured on LTT a long time ago, it's like just a sheet of glass you attach to a wall, it's crazy.
Extra-thin LCD panels are typically edge-lit, and edge-lit panels are not faring well at all in RTINGS' longevity test.
And audio. I don't want a separate audio setup.
A separate audio setup could have much better sound than built-in TV speakers.
Certainly, but I am not interested in dealing with that.
The exist, for commercial/enterprise use (usually digital signage and meeting rooms). They cost a few times more than consumer-grade, because of the word 'enterprise'
> They cost a few times more than consumer-grade, because of the word 'enterprise'
They cost more because they aren’t subsidised by this junk.
Likely much smaller sales volume as well. Economies of scale are a thing, especially where marketing (largely through dealers / vendors / distributors) is a major expense.
> Likely much smaller sales volume as well
It’s a good hypothesis. Every one I’ve seen is the consumer version in a more-rugged exterior running different software, so I’m sceptical.
That would again suggest that it's marketing (that is, the process of finding distributors and buyers) rather than production and design that are the principle cost-drivers. A seller of "dumb" devices has far fewer potential buyers (or at least perceives as such), and fewer channels for distribution, so they're going to have to focus more effort, and cost, on sales and marketing. It's not the cost of designing or producing the products, but of matching them to distributors and buyers, which would dominate.
I'm not certain of this, but I'm fairly confident it's a factor.
But a commercial TV - the ones used, ironically, for ad displays in malls and things like that.
Ha, we had a company email to all employees saying that we are not allowed to view any company confidential material on any Samsung TVs and appliances because they will take a screenshot of whatever it is you are watching and send it back to Samsung, unless explicitly disabled in settings but that setting is frequently "bugged" and just turns itself back on after some firmware updates.
Do they also block using Microsoft Windows ?
Does windows take screenshots of my activity and send it to Microsoft to sell me ads?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/retrace-your-ste...
"Recall does not share snapshots or associated data with Microsoft or third parties"
So the answer is no, it doesn't.
You're not thinking four dimensionally.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/windows-recall-demands-an...
Good.
As long as there are no clear laws this will only get worse. Imagine a TV with an e-sim. There will be no way to turn the connection off unless you pack it in aluminum foil.
Talking about e-sim, Texas should also sue all modern car brands. Most cars today are online and spy on your driving behavior.
This is scary, but very likely in the future.
After this article I installed AdBlock Home to my HA unit and moved DHCP to it. Filtered LG domains and few thousands others. Apparently LG TV actively uses internet even in switched off state.
It's bonkers to say the least and unacceptable.
The China angle will grab headlines, but the more uncomfortable truth is that the entire smart TV ad model seems to depend on surveillance most users never fully understood they were opting into
Sounds like a thing the EU could regulate for us Europeans.
Though I do not understand why this isn't categorizes as illegitimate spying.
Do NOT connect a machine you don't have control over to the internet. Every machine these days will spy on you
There are no more machines over which we still have control.
A plain old linux PC. It can be installed on anything. I do have to give up on HDCP and DRM some times, as mentioned somewhere else in this thread.
But yes, you are right!
Smart TVs turned into computers with monitors and microphones, except the whole computer part is out of our control and they barely work as a monitor.
Did they sue Google for reading all your emails? Or Meta for seeing all your personal history? Or Walmart for determining someone's very personal relationships based on their buying patterns? Or just every salesman out there whose job is to be nosy about customer's life and work?
Reminder. Just don't connect a smart tv to the internet.
Easy fix
What are TV brands/OSes that complain the least when not connected to the internet?
My LG and Samsung TVs have never been connected to wifi. They don't complain at all.
Good for Texas. State governments often protect us from the federal government. Many laws that we have now were only passed at the federal level when about 2/3 of states previously passed the same laws (e.g., women's voting rights).
This is the same AG who sued Tylenol over autism. While we can applaud the effort (broken clock theory?), it’s all but guaranteed he’s getting paid for helping another entity. Corruption is on the menu and fully expected these days.
It's about time. They should include Vizio as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VIZIO_Official/search/?q=ads
https://www.reddit.com/r/VIZIO_Official/search/?q=advertisin...
It's amazing to see what they have gotten away with in the last few years. The average consumer has no choice and now way to opt out of the nonsense.
If I had been told I'd an article today with the phrase "Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claims..." and asked to predict the remainder of the sentence, a reasonable pro-consumer stance would probably not have been in my top 20 guesses.
Disable Internet connection and just use them as a display.
In Soviet Russia TV watches YOU!
It gives me distinct pleasure to see the little network cable plug from the cable coming from TV be sticking just so half-way out of the network switch enough so that I can easily plug it back in without hunting for it behind all the equipment, but also enough to know it can't talk to anything.
It seems like there is a big business opportunity for someone to create a box you attach to your network to filter outgoing info, and incoming ads. Too much work for a tiny team to research what everything is talking to, and MITM your devices and watch DNS queries, etc, but if there was something dead simple to block a Samsung fridge from getting to its ad server, I have to think it would sell.
A sibling comment says "just use Pi-hole" which kind of works and is also inadequate. A similar system is Ad Guard Home. These work at the DNS level with preset lists of bad domains. They aren't necessarily going to catch your TV calling out to notanadserver.samsung.com because that domain name is not recorded in the list of naughty domains. They are definitely not going to help if your device reaches out via IP.
Another approach is to disallow all DNS or only allow *.netflix.com for the TV. In my experience attempting to only allow certain domains is a game of whackamole where everyone in the house complains their stuff is broken because it needs undocumentedrandomdomain.com.
>Another approach is to disallow all DNS or only allow *.netflix.com for the TV. In my experience attempting to only allow certain domains is a game of whackamole where everyone in the house complains their stuff is broken because it needs undocumentedrandomdomain.com.
...not to mention that apps have random third party SDKs that are required, and might not work if you block those domains. A/B testing/feature flags SDKs, and DRMs (for provisioning keys) come to mind.
That exists, it's called a pi-hole, and it's very popular. It will block the 'tv spy' apps.
I tried using a Pi-hole for this exact reason: prevent bullcrap TV ads. My Roku TV wouldn't stopped working. I had to whitelist so many roku-related domains that it basically became pointless.
I had the same issue, decided to remove Roku instead…
I used to have a Roku TV, plus a a few of the standalone Roku Ultras for my other (non-Roku) TVs. I got a full page advert when I started up the TV one day and started the process of replacing them all (I think it is when Roku were experimenting with that).
Over about a year I replaced them with Apple TVs* and the user experience is far better, plus the amount of tracking domains reported by Pi-hole dropped precipitously! The TVs don't have internet access at all, they are just driven via the HDMI port now.
* I replaced the Ultras first, and when the Roku TV eventually started acting laggy on the apps I replaced the Roku TV as well.
I thought of pi-hole but I’m not sure it is dead simple. I’m thinking a box that your incoming internet connections connects to and an outgoing connection to your wifi router.
The market probably isn’t big enough yet, but I’ll bet it grows. I mean _Texas_ is bringing it up!
Encryption works against you when the attacker is inside your network. The solution is to keep them out.
Until Samsung builds a fridge that won't cool if it goes more than some period of time (a week?) without pinging their servers. They'd probably get away with it given the friction of getting a large appliance out of your home and back to the store. Bonus evil points for making this feature active only after the return/warranty period expires.
You probably overestimate the market for something like that. Most people don't know or care. Those that do are more likely to hang out on HN or adjacent places and know how to deal with it themselves anyways.
> accusing them of “secretly recording what consumers watch in their own homes.”
Secret? There's T's&C's that people agree to when starting up their TV that tells them.
That doesn't make it right of course and it shouldn't just be opt-in, it should be banned entirely. If you want to analyse my viewing behaviour, pay me.
I would be curious to see a comparison of the T&Cs in these TVs.
I generally agree that reading the T&C is on the user and you cannot blame the lack if transparency onto the company, IF the T&C are sufficiently comprehensible. Some T&Cs I‘ve read are written in obscure enough legalese that it might as well be considered hidden information
So you buy a new TV, unpack and install it, and then when the whole family is gathered around, you suddenly get this confirmation on the TV if you agree with their T&C. Are you supposed to reject them and return the TV at this point? T&C should be part of the purchase agreement, instead of being forced upon the user while using the product after purchase. Any one-sided change of T&C after purchase should be invalid and punishable.
It's secret because they don't tell you exactly what they record and how. Can you?
So what if a large TV is being used to cast business information in a meeting?
It's ironic that Sony as a media producer and TV maker could be streaming copyrighted images for an algorithm to use.
Could this be used as an example from AI companies on the use of copyrighted images for training data?
What bugs me is that it is impossible to buy a TV these days that is not "smart". (Of course I know I can just not connect it to the internet, and I don't, but I wish there was a company in the TV market which would make privacy a selling point).
surprising to see that this lawsuit hasn't originated from CA given the privacy laws that was established such as CCPA.
California is friendlier to both advertising (Google, Facebook) and entertainment (Hollywood, generally), which might tip the balance.
But yes.
Isn’t this a thing for all providers? YouTube definitely spies on what you look at and Netflix knows as well. Or is this just because a TV actually doesn’t provide the content, just the view? And is there’s a difference if you have a streaming device like Roku?
Content providers knowing when I watch their content is not concerning to me. They're on the other side of a transaction with me; they have as much a right to store the details of the transaction as I do. Even Blockbuster had that information.
What's concerning is when third parties start snooping on transactions that they are not involved in.
I've got two more dumb TVs sitting in my closet for when this one burns out for exactly this reason.
Hello Texas!
What about cars? Tesla, in particular does record an awful lot of personal data about you...
“How many times is he gonna watch that Kathy Ireland swimsuit special for 2-3 minutes?”
“X + 1”
I hope they’re enjoying the video footage.
Sincerely, for anyone technical competent, I don't even see the reason to connect your TV to the internet (or even the local network).
I do have a smart TV, but I have no use for it since my NVIDIA Shield does all the lifting.
A good enough android TV dongle will cost €30. So...
The sheer amount of compute spent on advertising on this planet boggles my mind.
Also all the smart people spending a career trying to get other people to buy things that they don’t want or need l, the relentless consumption of which degrades the very environment which supports us. It’d be funny if you didn’t have to play the game too.
Wiretapping laws should apply; you could have an HDMI capture card hooked up to camera with mic etc.
Any good options for wifi/wire gateway (opensource) that can filter and block spying?
https://pi-hole.net/
Thanks, Texas.
I remember a time when the word "smart" referred to a high level of intelligence. Rather than a marketing ploy aimed at the innocent.
Maybe I'm a little slow, but assuming that everything I watch on TV is copyrighted content, wouldn't that make every screen-grab a DRM violation?
I just assume everything is spying on me. It doesn’t change my behavior much, but I definitely don’t try to do anything illegal if I can help it.
What is _illegal_? And who defines _illegal_? And would you know when something legal is made _illegal_?
Can you stop this type of activity with DNS blocking or is it just inescapable?
It's absurd, I've blocked outgoing connections for all home devices and appliances by default. The printer and TV were some of the worst culprits.
How do you watch streaming content? If you choose a movie in Netflix, I expect it makes an outgoing connection to Netflix's servers.
They typically use different dns domain and subdomains or subpaths, because the same server cannot ingest analytics and stream data at the same time. So, keep roku.com but block scribe.roku.com
I understand that. It would seem to take a lot of experimentation: Netflix has a lot of servers and domains, and at their scale many could be involved in any interaction.
I wonder why it takes a one state to wake up legally speaking. Why the Federal Government is not speaking about this... Or EU for that matter
I wish my Apple TV could take multiple pass through inputs.
From there I could pick an app or input on the Apple TV and then I'm good.
That's all I want, nothing these TVs try to provide I want, quite the opposite.
I loathe ending up on the TV menu...
That still doesn't escape ACR, AFAIK. These "smart" TVs still capture screenshots from HDMI inputs.
That's one of the reasons I only buy Sony for years now. ACR & the like are opt-out at the first terms/privacy screen, and you can even go into Android/Google TV settings and just disable the APK responsible. (Samba something-something)
I googled how to disable ACR on my new Samsung TV. Followed the instructions only to find out that it was disabled already. That, combined with a built-in physical microphone switch (which I noticed in the quick start guide before I'd even attached the wall mount) made me quite impressed with Samsung off the bat.
It does have some weird behaviors, though, like occasionally letting me know it has some kind of AI features or something, or bringing up a pop-up on the screen letting my kid know how to use the volume control on the remote every time he uses the volume control on the remote for the first time since power-on.
Still, a pretty decent TV nonetheless.
It's better not to connect the TV to the Internet at all. This will solve most of your problems. Use a Linux HTPC to stream content (not an Apple box, they collect telemetry and profile users like others).
What's your HTPC setup? I used Kodi for a while, but gave up on it as unsuitable as a frontend for netflix et. al.
I just use a plain linux/windows PC + Pi-Hole depending on the family member using it.
KODI is terrible for streaming and operating systems built around it are far too limited. For now the best option seems to be a plain Linux desktop, upscaled, and used with an airmouse remote. Keep an eye on this however:
https://github.com/KDE/plasma-bigscreen
I loathe whenever an older family member ends up at the TV menu, since chances are they will not be able to find their way back to whatever external device they were trying to use the TV as a monitor for. TVs using android seem to be irritated that you even plan on using some external device plugged into the HDMI ports.
You may want to look into an AVR (audio/video receiver), also known as a home theater receiver. Aside from powering speakers, that's their core function: connect a variety of inputs (HDMI, AirPlay, radio, composite, etc. etc.) to one or more outputs.
Did they exclude the makers of video projectors (Epson, BenQ, Optoma, etc) simply because the market segment is too small?
Pro plaintif not only because of privacy concerns, but if it raises the cost of televisions by introducing a production inefficiency, it is one step against the Baumol Effect.
Imagine looking around in the year 2025 and concluding that TV prices are high.
It blew my mind when TVs started being cheaper than windows per square inch.
I'd never thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right, particularly in Germany, by a factor of at least 3-4. 50-55" mid-range TV: plenty under 400 EUR. Double-glazed window about that size, custom-made (because just about all windows in Germany are custom-made): 1200 EUR, and that was about six years ago - I shudder to think what it would be now.
Similar to when solar panels became cheaper than fencing.
When you consider the differing regulation and applications, it makes a great deal of sense. Just making a window in the US can cost less than $10 if you hand assemble it. Making a window that conforms to all building regulations in your particular area is a huge undertaking that involves highly specialized equipment.
Why focus on TV makers and not include social media and other computer/phone surveillance?
Probably because Ken Paxton has no issue with surveillance.
US needs something like GPDR.
I've said it before and I will probably say it again, this is digital assault and should be thought of and treated that way. Companies, and their officers, should be treated criminally for things like this. Most people do not know/understand this is happening and that is by design. Is this view a little hyperbolic? Possibly, but the privacy scales are so far tipped against the average person right now that we need more extreme views and actions to start fixing things.
Do they mention tagging your Bluetooth IDs at the same time?
All of the big TV makers? So spying is okay if it's done on a smaller screen? (/S sorry couldn't resist a little context sensitive Grammer joke.)
Isn't that legal in Texas though?
It has been increasingly interesting to me how aligned the interests of platforms are with advertisers against the end consumer.
I don't think I have ever heard a person say they enjoy watching ads (except maybe the super bowl and even then it's a pretty short list).
Despite that, it seems like ads continue to multiply and companies get even more annoying and slimy with how they integrate them.
I guess what I'm wondering is where the breaking point is, when people start abandoning ad-filled platforms all together and ads become less profitable to sell/purchase.
The person or company to figure out a way other than ads to monetize eye balls (and its not just data, that's only used to make better ads) will be the next Google.
> they will be the next Google
No, Google will copy them and shut them down.
> Vizio, which is now owned by Walmart, paid $2.2 million to the Federal Trade Commission and New Jersey in 2017 over similar allegations related to ACR.
Lmao $2.2m is less than nothing to Walmart.
Is this the Californication of Texas?
I mean, I expect it to happen in my lifetime.
I personally have a Samsung TV, but this ACR and ad stuff is why ever since the moment I took it out of the box, it has never and will never, be plugged into the internet. I simply use an Google TV plugged into it for my actual streaming, and avoid all of this ACR nonsense (yes Google has their own tracking but I want Tailscale and SmartTube). I think this is the way to do it. Just use your smart TV as a dumb TV, and move on.
As a reminder if you own an LG TV, turn off the sneakily named "Live Plus" thing. This "option" makes your LG TV spy on you, tracking and reporting what you watch based on the image that is shown on the TV.
You need to go to Settings -> All Settings -> General -> System -> Additional Settings to make sure the "Live Plus" option is OFF.
Check it periodically, as it sometimes turns itself back on again after updates.
Yeayyyy now for the EU to finally do the same. But they're too busy nerfing privacy laws to appease trump.
Excellent. Badly needed. Thank you Texas.
> "This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries."
But, but, but, you agreed to the TOS didn't you, or else you cannot use your TV.
So you buy a big TV, unbox it, and disagree to the TOS. Can it still be used through one of its HDMI ports?
I have a cheap samsung from 5 years ago that pops up a dialog when it boots. I've never read it or agreed to it. It goes away after about 5 seconds. After that I stream using HDMI and all is well. It's also never been connected to a network.
Can't say what other TVs do, but this one works fine without TOS etc. If there is some feature or other that doesn't work due to this, I can say I've never missed it.
As far as I can tell, I'm doing that right now with a new higher-end Samsung television. The installer showed me how to make it boot directly to the active HDMI source and skip the Samsung smart hub. The TV has never been online and I don't see any reason to change that — what possible improvement could a firmware update bring? I don't use any of the television's software-enabled features.
Next do Smart TVs listening to you. This is the #1 cause of "uncanny" ads that people get on Facebook, etc. when they think their phone is listening to them. It's usually their TV doing the listening.
edit: why the downvotes?
In other news, Americans discover why the GDPR isn’t such a bad idea after all!
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Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
This is yet another case of people clicking through the TOS without reading or understanding it.
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It’s not spying. You agree to that in the tos!
/s
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I was going to say, "at last, something good out of Texas". Maybe you're on to something?
He probably already got one, from Vizio, for leaving them out of the lawsuits.
Walmart owns Vizio. Vizio buys components from other manufacturers and has assembly performed overseas. Not sure where the software comes from, but likely one of those suppliers.
I was going to say the same thing. I am really surprised to see Texas did this. I will now follow this keenly to see the resolution
> I am really surprised to see Texas did this.
I think this comes from strictly looking at the world in left/right terms. Texas is a pretty libertarian state. This is probably the entire reason the founders ensconced the states into the union the way they did.
This country is a _spectrum_ of ideas. It's not bipolar. Only the moneyed interests behind political parties want you to think this way.
There's no such thing as a libertarian state that doesn't fully legalize Cannabis and Abortion.
I wouldn’t call Texas libertarian. They have the most restrictive abortion rights,
They tried to fire teachers who spoke bad about a racist podcaster
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/15/texas-education-teac...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
Weed is still illegal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_Texas
You can’t sell liquor on Sunday
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_laws_of_Texas
There is a state law restricting what can be discussed in public schools
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/12/02/texas-public-schools...
And he is pushing for schools to post the 10 commandments
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...
I guess I just don't understand people who face what should be welcome political surprise with extreme and hyperbolic negativity. It's a feature of this forum which honestly bothers me. It's entirely unproductive and strikes me as a bad faith effort to avoid giving credit to "the other side" even when they're enacting a policy which benefits us all.
I was the original commenter you replied to, and I should say I am not negative at all. In fact it’s just extreme skepticism, it’s different. Given the track record and history of the state I still fully expect this to be a met grab opportunity and will be extremely happy and give credit and praise if they actually end up doing anything. My comment is only skepticism but I guess it’s a close cousin of negativity with a nuance
The comment I replied to said Texas has a liberterian streak. There is nothing libertarian about denying free speech, putting religion up in schools, not selling alcohol because of religion, etc.
But if someone want to praise a state that goes out of its way to tell other people how to live because of religion and say they are “libertarian” because they sue a TV manufacturer, I don’t think that tips the scales
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It’s impossible to offer any differing opinions or discussion on the differences between the smart TV thing and your whataboutism without triggering a flame war and being downvoted to oblivion.
What does this have to do at all with the posted article about smart TV’s?
You're right, it's not a productive comment and I would delete it if I could. I don't like how Texas Republicans operate but that's another topic.
reminder: there's tech that reads your mind. who gives a fuck about some Smart TV bullcrap
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