Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch
theverge.com772 points by tortilla 2 days ago
772 points by tortilla 2 days ago
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.
> Most likely ... sending the 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
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?
Possibly one of the better known (and widely used?) implementations is Microsoft's PhotoDNA, that may be a suitable starting point.
What system do you use to get that level of visibility?
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'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?
I would not be surprised if Google TV devices will sooner than later start using DoH to 8.8.8.8
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/
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.
Pfsense firewall. There is a week long learning curve and it’s best to put it on dedicated hardware.
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.
> you have zero privacy
Is this data linked to me personally in some way (e.g. though an account) or is it anonymous data?
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?
If someone is going to get paid to build it anyway, I might as well be the one getting paid for it.
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.
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.
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)
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”.
It makes its creator the money they can spend buying the products they see in TV ads.
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.
I assume these systems are calculating an on device perceptual hash. So not that much data needs get flown back to the mothership.
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.
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, ...).
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 it? I don’t think you need particularly high fidelity to fingerprint ads/programs.
Attribution is very painful and advertisers will pay lots of money to close that loop.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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'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.
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.
You could try getting an European TV, at least then it will ask and you can say no.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
A banner from Apple or your TV trying to navigate you back to its own HBO app?
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.
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.
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.
> > 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.
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.)
You mean like GDPR but stronger?
like GDPR, but cookie banners are by law preemptively answered with no
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
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).
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.
It's faar worse. Automotive manufacturers and live IP camera feed. (See also tesla motors)
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.
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”
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.
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 :)
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…
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.
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.
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
Why do you even need the United app? They have a website.
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..
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.
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.
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.
I’m at the point where I just cleared everything out of Linkedin and have designated all LinkedIn emails as spam. It’s just a modern equivalent to a slave market, where slaves vote to be the pick-me alpha slave.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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).
"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.
That does tell me why Paxton brought this suit. Either that or somebody is trying to blackmail him over something he watched.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"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.
This is okay if you want a small TV, and/or are willing to forgo the picture quality of a modern big TV.
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.
..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'.
> 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.
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?
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.
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
Dumb TVs are hard to find: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/the-ars-technica-gui...
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.
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?
Smart TVs quietly turning into data collectors feels like the same pattern we’ve seen with phones and apps except now it’s happening in the living room. If ACR is truly opt-out only through vague prompts this case could finally force clearer consent and limits on passive surveillance hardware.
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.
Thanks, Texas.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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
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.
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 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.
Until they start using Sidewalk/LPWAN type things automatically instead of your home WiFi.
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 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.
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.
And audio. I don't want a separate audio setup.
A separate audio setup could have much better sound than built-in TV speakers.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
Perhaps the one thing Ken Paxton and I agree on.
A broken clock is right twice a day!
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
So.. if it was American companies doing the spying it would be a different story?
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 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.
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
Reminder. Just don't connect a smart tv to the internet.
Easy fix
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.
That exists, it's called a pi-hole, and it's very popular. It will block the 'tv spy' apps.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
surprising to see that this lawsuit hasn't originated from CA given the privacy laws that was established such as CCPA.
Do they mention tagging your Bluetooth IDs at the same time?
In Soviet Russia TV watches 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.
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.
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.
(I do agree with the measure, though).
Did they exclude the makers of video projectors (Epson, BenQ, Optoma, etc) simply because the market segment is too small?
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.
Any good options for wifi/wire gateway (opensource) that can filter and block spying?
Disable Internet connection and just use them as a display.
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.
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.
I've got two more dumb TVs sitting in my closet for when this one burns out for exactly this reason.
Why focus on TV makers and not include social media and other computer/phone surveillance?
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...
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.
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)
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 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 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.
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.
Wiretapping laws should apply; you could have an HDMI capture card hooked up to camera with mic etc.
Is this the Californication of Texas?
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.
Yeayyyy now for the EU to finally do the same. But they're too busy nerfing privacy laws to appease trump.
In other news, Americans discover why the GDPR isn’t such a bad idea after all!
Excellent. Badly needed. Thank you Texas.
[flagged]
> "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.
It’s not spying. You agree to that in the tos!
/s
[flagged]
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.
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
There's no such thing as a libertarian state that doesn't fully legalize Cannabis and Abortion.
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, "at last, something good out of Texas". Maybe you're on to something?
[flagged]
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
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?