
Your new smart TV is so cheap because it's collecting and selling your data - elorant
https://www.businessinsider.com/smart-tv-data-collection-advertising-2019-1
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deogeo
Conversely, when you pay top dollar for an expensive Android phone or a
Windows 10 Pro license, you can be sure your privacy remains intact. /s

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tdb7893
The crazy thing to me is it's so hard as a consumer to know exactly what data
they are selling. I wish they had to be transparent about what they were
selling.

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JohnFen
I think it's pretty easy -- they're selling (or selling access to) every piece
of data they have access to.

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tazard
But how can you know what exactly they have access to? Simply the channel you
are watching, or the height and number of people standing in the room using
(for example) something like this:
[https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/a3aaqp/mit-
de...](https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/a3aaqp/mit-device-uses-
wifi-to-see-through-walls-and-track-your-movements)

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krageon
Assuming that they're going for cheap with a good rate of return, I'd be more
inclined to go with "screenshots of whatever you watch and when you watch it".
Of course, you can do all sorts of interesting analysis on this (when is this
person home, what hours do they probably work, what demographic do they belong
in given what they watch and when they watch it, etc). I don't think you need
cutting-edge research based stuff to get some seriously creepy invasion of
your privacy.

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tazard
True, I was just trying to point out that as a regular consumer, it's very
difficult to know what data they have access to. With a little creativity,
they could have access to _a lot_ of data. Much more than most people probably
realize.

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qubex
Considering I have a set-top box (AppleTV) I usually don’t connect my
televisions to the network. Surely that means they cannot send whatever they
collect back home?

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gaius
Your TV could send telemetry via 3G - you’d never know.

Or the manufacturer cuts a deal with your broadband provider and gets a
backdoor out via your WiFi hub, if you use the standard one they gave you. Or
a hidden app on an Android phone that the Android TV chats to when it’s
nearby.

IP over HDMI is also a thing.

I am never connecting our Sony smart TV directly to the Internet, like you we
have an AppleTV but it’s only a matter of time before you won’t be able to buy
an unconnected TV at all.

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deadmetheny
And to add to that, it's next to impossible to buy a new dumb TV without
knowing the keywords you need to be looking for.

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e1ven
Would buying a smart-tv and never connecting it to Wifi work?

Or would it be constantly scanning and looking for an open access point, and
get online once a neighbor leaves his open for a few minutes?

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flukus
I'd want one with hardware kill switch for any network connectivity. I
wouldn't trust them not to do something stupid like automatically connect to
open access points, connect to mesh networks like google wifi or use 4g as a
fallback (anyone do smart TV teardowns?) for small but valuable data.

Aside from stupidity like that, having wifi on might be susceptible to
vulnerabilities in the network stack or otherwise pollute the local airspace.

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wmeredith
But you’d trust that their hardware kill switch was actually hooked up to
something?

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mateo411
I had to pause my Ad blocker to read this article.

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headcanon
Irony aside, the Business Insider ad-blocker popup is easily removed from dev
tools FYI, its just deletion of a single DOM node(modal) and removal of a few
classes.

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plg
Ironic that this site won’t let me look at the article because I have an ad
blocker installed !!

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JohnFen
No, it's not, because I don't have one. And won't ever have one.

