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My advice is to stop seeing a “smart tv” as a feature and see it as an expensive piece of equipment subsidised by extra advertising revenue. Don’t get upset abo
by davidhyde 6y ago
My advice is to stop seeing a “smart tv” as a feature and see it as an expensive piece of equipment subsidised by extra advertising revenue. Don’t get upset about this, just understand it for what it is. Now, what can you do about it? Easy, don’t connect it to the internet. They will tell you that it needs updates but come on, what is a security vulnerability going to to to something that’s only output is a screen and audio? So there is your answer. Don’t use the smart features, plug in something you trust like a raspberry pi and use the expensive part of the product (the screen itself) without incurring the cost (the advertising they were using to subsidise the screen)
- aphextron 6y agoWhat's really concerning is that "smart" TV's are no longer an upgrade, but the standard. You practically cannot find a new dumb 4k TV. When I went to purchase one recently, Best Buy at least had no other option.
- wvenable 6y agoAll smart TV's are dumb if you don't connect them to the Internet.
- bigbubba 6y agoThey won't spy on you, but you'll still have to deal with the laggy shitware they run. In some I've had the misfortune of using, simply changing the inputs was a torturous affair because of the shitty software the TV was running.
- devrand 6y agoThankfully most let you skip the UI entirely by having direct input selection IR commands. Get yourself a generic universal remote that either has these buttons, or custom ones you can program. With this I basically never see the UI on my LG and Samsung TVs, and I certainly don't interact with it unless I need to get into settings.
- simias 6y agoI still remember the near-instant channel switching from the 90s, when analog signals and CRTs where the norm. You could change channels on a dime. Now with complex video and audio codecs, video post-processing and shoddily coded software there's been a very severe downgrade in that department. I don't have a TV at home but every time I'm in a hotel or my parent's place I notice how laggy it is when I'm just browsing through the channels (which is what I do 90% of the time when I'm using one, since there's hardly anything worth watching anyway). For those of you who are too young to know what I'm talking about, have a look at this: https://youtu.be/v83WEzw8tfw?t=44 https://youtu.be/v83WEzw8tfw?t=44
- jedberg 6y agoThat video is already laggy compared to what I remember as a kid. If you were watching OTA analog the channel change was near instant. Even on our cable box it was near instant.
- biztos 6y agoWas it not actually instant? My recollection from the 80's was you switch the channel (physically) and it's... switched! So was there some magical latency there that I just couldn't perceive, or are the "near instant" reports talking about some other type of TV? Or something else?
- ddingus 6y agoChange was instant, took a frame or two for all the sync, gain, etc to settle.
- jedberg 6y agoThere was a few ms of latency but you couldn't actually perceive it unless you used a slow motion camera or something.
- simcop2387 6y agoThere absolutely was some latency, about 13ms worth, because it had to wait for the next field to start so it could properly synchronize and start drawing. But you'd never notice that yourself.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoI am personally considering just getting an HDMI switch that I can manage externally from the TV. I mostly use the Android TV device I bought and its much more stable than the UI on my offline Smart TV thankfully it has most if not all the apps I need.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y agoThere are lots of shitwares that don't do async, so the shitware runs at a snail's pace offline because all the spyware requests have to time out before the shitware can do anything.
- choward 6y agoIf they have wifi you have no idea if they're connecting to open networks.
- Teever 6y agoI've heard the solution to that is to set up an AP in your house that is either firewalled or doesn't have an outbound connection and connect your smart devices to that AP.
- vsareto 6y agoApartments are a problem though
- culturestate 6y agoUnless the TV ignores your settings and hops to random networks when it can’t phone home through your AP, this approach should still work fine in apartments.
- MaxikCZ 6y agoFrom what I understood, this is precisely what some new models do.
- powersnail 6y agoBuy a cheap router, don’t connect the router to the internet, and connect all smart appliances to the router.
- jerrysievert 6y agoit used to be that way for "3d" tv's. I'm really hoping that "smart" tv's get relegated to the same fate.
- ssss11 6y agoThis. I found the same thing in Australia.
- kzrdude 6y agoWhat's a good media player system for raspberry pi in that case? Any chance that it can drive netflix?
- grawprog 6y agoSmart 'X' in general has become synonymous with 'paid for by your data we scrape 24/7' at least when it comes to most consumer range products and platforms made by big tech companies... Smart phones Smart TVs Smart speakers Smart doorbell/security cameras Smart home systems If there's one thing these all have in common it's: 'Known privacy issues regarding tracking and data collection by large tech companies.' When a product is marketed as smart...I assume it's smart as in it's watching and learning from me and giving the data to someone.
- summitsummit 6y ago> profited additionally by your data we scrape 24/7 since it's not necessarily "paid for" via the advertising
- grawprog 6y agoGood point... Would 'heavily subsidized by' work as well?
- bleepblorp 6y agoSubsidized implies that the revenue from advertising defers the cost to the end user. This isn't generally true for TVs. With TVs, the sticker price pays for the hardware. The ads pay for the extra house the manufacturer's CEO feels he's entitled to have.
- grawprog 6y agoNot so much. That's why, as a bunch of other comments mentioned, there's commercial displays available with equivalent specs to smart tvs that are essentially dumb terminals with no smart functionality that cost more than twice the price. Your data is subsidizing the low hardware costs.
- gjm11 6y agoI think this is a question that doesn't have a well defined answer. Most likely raw hardware cost is smaller than consumer price, which is smaller than what the consumer price would have been if the manufacturer weren't able to get extra profit by selling your privacy and/or attention. So who's getting the money from selling you to Facebook depends on what you think the "right" price without that would have been, and there's always a wide range of possible prices for any given product.
- rowanG077 6y agoIf you want to trust this you have to put your tv in a faraday cage. I wouldn't bat an eye if tv's actually connect via 4G to their spying servers.
- ssss11 6y agoBut alot of people want Netflix etc streamed. also alot of people dont know how to manage firewalls, pihole etc. This idea of stuffing tracking and ads into everything “smart” is such an insult to the individual.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoAnyone should be able to setup and use Apple TV. (If you trust Apple, that is). If not, you could use a Raspi? I had non-techie (but still young) friends who came up with and implemented this idea by themselves.
- kortilla 6y agoApple TV is expensive though for people without a bunch of cash. Pay $400 for a 4K TV that has Netflix built in and then spend $200 for Apple TV too?
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoDefinitely true, not everyone is willing to pay the price for privacy in the first price.
- awalton 6y agoThat's fine for now, but you just know within a crop or two there's going to be panels that insist on being connected to the Internet or they won't even display anything. And then once one or two companies have made that acceptable, they all will go that way.
- cbm-vic-20 6y agoAs usual, _Idiocracy_ is a documentary from the future. https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/idiocracy.jpg https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/idiocracy....
- nullsense 6y agoI like money.
- Scoundreller 6y agowe should hang out
- nullsense 6y agoCan't believe you like money too
- m463 6y agono no no. this is bad advice. 1) "Some Samsung TVs already try and connect to open WiFi networks if you don't connect them yourself." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629155 2) there is ethernet over hdmi - I would image this is another source of inadvertent connection. 3) samsung tvs require an ethernet cable to "update firmware" so HDMI works. 4) ACR - which will look at ALL the inputs. and wait for the next few iterations - smart devices talk to each other and exfiltrate data - smart device manufacturers collaborate with ISPs who have put wifi gateways in your house and your neighbor's house.
- coryrc 6y agoSolder the wifi antenna to ground (so long as the remote is IR and not radio!)
- jjoonathan 6y agoMy TCL starts to bootloop if it goes more than a month without connecting to the internet so it can download screensaver ads. The warranty people force me into the support gauntlet. The support gauntlet's first demand: connect it to the internet.
- echelon 6y agoThis is disgusting. Ads are ruining everything. And if you think it stops here, I've got bad news. This is only going to get worse without strict regulation.
- antman 6y agoEdit: Didn't know TCL is a brand, not available in my part of the world... - What brand is your TV?
- LeoPanthera 6y agoHe already said - TCL.
- 6y ago
- clouddrover 6y ago> Easy, don’t connect it to the internet. Maybe not so easy in the future. TVs might eventually have 5G internet connections built-in and paid for by the manufacturer. It could be worth it to them if they get enough revenue from their software platform through user tracking and advertising.
- tornato7 6y agoThis makes me remember the guy who was pulling SIM cards out of these IoT car boots and putting them in his phone for free 4G service.
- kllrnohj 6y agoOnly if there's enough users who refuse to give their TV wifi to justify such a crazy expense. Which seems highly unlikely.
- blame_lewis 6y agoThere are IoT SIMs available on most major carriers, which are intended for economical occasional low-data usage on large numbers of devices. They're popular in GPSes among other things. 5G is looking to reduce the cost of them further as LPWA is a key part of the standard.
- avh02 6y agomaybe one way to fight this is by finding a way to abuse these SIMs/connections to use a lot of data en masse until they get cut off or dropped altogether.
- blame_lewis 6y agoThey can easily be remotely disabled if there's any suspicious activity, ie to any other server than the telemetry backend.
- 6y ago
- CamperBob2 6y agoEasy, don’t connect it to the internet. No good. The TVs are starting to nag the user if left unconnected.
- Lio 6y agoSadly, that won't help you if the smart TV is constantly looking for open wifi networks to use without your knowledge or intervention. Rather than constantly monitoring and investigating what your TV is doing it's far simpler to just avoid Samsung, LG, Panasonic or Sony products. Even if your current smart TV doesn't do this, it's exactly the sort of dark pattern that certain manufacturers could add with an update and there's nothing you can do about it because you don't control the product. Best to just avoid brands you don't trust.