This is explicitly why the last TV I bought was a dumb TV. One less privacy nightmare to worry about. Of course, that just shifts the problem to the black box

This is explicitly why the last TV I bought was a dumb TV. One less privacy nightmare to worry about. Of course, that just shifts the problem to the black box on the other side of the HDMI cable, but I can watch as much over-the-air TV as I want without anyone harvesting my viewing habits. What we need as consumers are laws that would allow the owners of smart televisions, network-connected devices, and any other physical products with included software, to more easily control the behavior of the hardware that they own, without resorting to rooting and jailbreaking to "pwn ur own" property. (Including refusal to honor DRM restrictions.) I don't know why "you can't have your cake, and eat it too" is not an actual legal principle, but you can't sell a hardware device to the consumer and still control what they can or cannot do with it.