Own a Vizio Smart TV? It’s Watching You | Hacker News Reader

Own a Vizio Smart TV? It’s Watching You

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60 pointstysone39 comments

I don't understand why you'd want a Smart TV. If something goes south (in this age of disposable tech) it becomes like those TV/VCR combos of the past where 1/2 of it doesn't work.

http://www.howtogeek.com/176392/smart-tvs-are-stupid-why-you...

I don't get it either.

That article hits the issues why I won't buy one.

I'd much rather have a plain old dumb tv and a smart device attached to it. With the same tv, I have been through a Chromecast, a NeoTV, a Roku 2 and a Roku3.

I have kept adding features on to the same old tv.

Also, I'm concerned about EOL issues. A friend of mine had a smart Blu-Ray player, the manufacturer stopped updating the software and when YouTube stopped supporting the version of the app on his device, he was shut out.

It was a minor inconvenience to buy a new Blu-Ray player but if it has been his TV, he'd have to either go buy a new TV or buy an external smart device just to enjoy the same feathers the tv had when he bought it.

Meanwhile, I would have spent less for my dumb tv and smart devices while maintaining a more positive overall experience.

Yup. A smart TV makes you find a single product that is both a good A) TV and B) media center/computer or whatever you want to call it. Decoupling the devices makes it easier to shop for the best TV and the best TV media center.

I have a smart TV only because there are no alternatives. TVs in larger sizes that are just TVs are hard to come by, and were even two years ago when I bought it. If you find me a TV with 4k resolution and more than four HDMI ports and no 'smart' features (except CEC, because having my Chromecast and amazon fire stick turn on the TV is magical), I'll switch in a heartbeat.

Is 4+ HDMI ports a must-have? If you can deal with 3 HDMI ports, you can get a 4k Seiki non-smart TV for cheap. I think the 40" was around $399. I'm not hip to all the 4k stuff yet, so I don't know how it would compare to a higher-end Sony or Samsung, but I think mine looks fantastic.

Smart TVs don't cost more. And they function just fine as normal TVs. I got a 60 inch Vizio smart TV for about $400 and I'm pretty happy with it. I was pretty skeptical about the Smart TV features, but the built-in Netflix and Amazon Prime apps are actually very convenient and are more user friendly than a Chromecast. I can search, pause, rewind, change episodes, etc. without using my laptop. When the Smart TV features become obsolete, or I switch to a streaming service that's not available, it still has HDMI ports like any TV. As for this privacy concern, a) it can be turned off, and b) it's nothing new; Netflix tracks your viewing habits, Amazon tracks your viewing habits, Facebook tracks your web browsing habits, etc.

"It's nothing new" is not an excuse to continue a bad trend.

So long as it can be turned off, I don't really care. My decent-quality TV was cheap and I'm sure that it would have cost more if Vizio didn't supplement their revenue with this program.

You trust the companies to leave the features disabled if you disable them?

I don't.

Vizio is a bad actor, here. This paragraph illustrates that quite well:

"Cable TV companies and video rental companies are prohibited by law from selling information about the viewing habits of their customers. However, Vizio says that those laws - the Video Privacy Protection Act and cable subscriber protections - don’t apply to its business."

So lobby your lawmaker and make it illegal, or get them to enforce laws on the books if that activity is illegal.

> Smart TVs don't cost more.

Yes, they do. My non-smart Panasonic was a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than the equivalent smart ones.

Fair enough, I should have said: Smart TVs don't necessarily cost more.

Maybe because it was an older model? That case isn't common.

If you expect a certain set of features (3D, higher quality display, etc.), the only devices that satisfy those requirements have smart functionality built in. The non-smart TVs I've viewed at Best Buy in the last year or so all look washed out or otherwise inferior. It sucks, and I prefer to use a streaming box versus the smart functionality, but to get the features I wanted I had to pick a smart TV.

You wouldn't. I wouldn't. Members of general population... that's a different story. Companies do everything in their power to make people choose smart TVs. They deceive people with marketing and price smart TVs below dumb TVs. They also make sure customers aren't aware of the expected lifetime of such smart TV. Couple it with the fact that for a non-technical person, setting up two separate devices that sorta, maybe will work together is infinitely more complex than just getting one that has all the "smart" features bundled and working out of the box, and there's no surprise that people buy those.

The "fix" to this is to not let your TV connect to the internet. Instead, use a set top box that you trust to stream Netflix, etc. Mythtv or tvheadend are good solutions for live tv if you have a computer with a capture card.

I wonder how long it'll be before a smart TV is sold that automatically scans for and connects to open wireless access points so it can phone home.

That works until manufacturers make a deal with cellular networks. precedent: onstar

No. The fix is to militate against "smart" TV makers and boycott them until they remove this malware and stop snooping as a means to gain more revenue. That is the only fix. No other fixes are trustable and verifiable at this point.

The fix is, don't ever buy a smart TV. Buy the stupidest TV you possibly can.

TV makers don't know anything about software and security, and they don't care at all about user privacy. So they shouldn't be allowed to write software and put features in their TVs.

TV makers don't know anything about software and security, and they don't care at all about user privacy. So they shouldn't be allowed to write software and put features in their TVs.

I'm not sure that blanket restrictions on evolving technologies are a good idea, but the manufacturers and any store selling their products should be required to prominently disclose any unexpected or potentially unwanted behaviour so potential purchasers can make an informed decision. If we are truly going to see the Internet of Things invading our homes and household devices coming with privacy policies, perhaps we should legislate that those policies must be written on packaging and displayed alongside the products in stores in text large enough to read from as far away as you can usefully see the product itself. ;-)

Yes, I can implement the fix that @bsilvereagle recommends, but consumers don't all need to be tech savy to avoid being abused. For the same reasons we have fair lending laws, we should have fair tech laws.

sneaky ass vizio.. the setting to disable this is buried under a system diagnostics section with the word "Reset" prominently showing as the menu entry. It's as if they want to discourage owner from venturing into that menu out of fear of the Reset.

Much safer to never give the TV network credentials.

One of the crappy things is, for example, the way LG chooses to approach this. My guess is they're just as bad as Vizio with their new "WebOS" TVs (disclosure: I own one, started reading disclaimer - they send all activity to LG proper as well). Opted out of everything thinking I won't watch any OTA or cable on the TV anyway since it's a media room panel, however I did want to use the built in Netflix / Amazon from time to time instead of having to provide another box in a minimalistic A/V setup.

Problem is... As soon as I tried to fire up Netflix the app on the TV needed an "update". To get the update you have to agree to all ToS. Complete and utter BS approach to forcing customers into a path of least resistance.

It's also hard to get a premium panel (I was specifically looking for 4:4:4@60Hz) without the "smarts". It boiled down to price vs features vs requirements and thus I ended up where I did. I ended up revoking my acceptance of ToS and biting the bullet to use an external device for streaming content... Unfortunately I don't think most people care, or if they would they don't realize they should in these scenarios. The unfortunate reality...

> Netflix the app on the TV needed ... agree to all ToS

Was the Netflix app one of the advertised featured?

Was this ToS presented[1] to you before you purchased it?

If they advertised a feature but failed to deliver it in the product you paid for, then I think you deserve your money back. They failed to deliver a merchantable good, as required[2] by UCC § 2-314(2)(f).

[1] "It was posted on our website" doesn't count, unless that was the place you purchased the TV. Requiring consumers to search every manufacturer's website before purchasing anything is insane.

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-314

> Was the Netflix app one of the advertised featured? http://www.lg.com/ca_en/tvs/lg-58UF8300-uhd-tv - It's not clear from the product landing page what's included with regards to apps. However, Netflix is installed out of the box and there doesn't appear any way to uninstall it. But, it's unusable, as stated, until it's updated. The only way to update it is to agree to the ToS.

You can see on this landing page: http://www.lg.com/us/experience-tvs/smart-tv/use

That Netflix is clearly part of the standard build (no installation required - Netflix comes with the TV out of the box, no interaction required.

Sounds like this is illegal. So what's my recourse with LG?

Nope. Not safer. There are ample ways for TVs to sneak onto the internet, without credentials, and those ways are only growing with time.

What are those ways?

They call the feature smart interactivity. Set to on. Talk about a dark pattern.

This was on Ars a while ago. I mentioned how even today's "non-smart" TVs have to decode digital ATSC signals from the antenna (unlike the TVs of decades ago) in one of the comments, and how today's "monitors" are not that different besides lacking this decoder/tuner and a few other things like the IR sensor/remote.

I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen any tuners on a stick, given the increasing trend of things that directly connect to HDMI ports. On the other hand, most "dumb" monitors don't seem to often include multiple HDMI inputs, so that might explain that.

Tuners on a stick have been around for well over a decade (Hauppauge was probably one of the first consumer focused brands and still sells a myriad of tuners). The problem is CableCard (out of CableLabs, which is run by a consortium of all the providers) and it's amazingly restrictive licensing. This is part of the reason why you can't really get a tuner for things like MythTV... Well, you can - but even though things were relaxed for CableCards (since it was such a craptastic solution for everyone but the cable cabal as a whole) the providers still control the DRM. And so having a cable card on Linux without a relationship with the powers that be results in the bulk of non-public broadcast to be useless even with an "approved" CableCard on Linux.

I am talking about OTA ATSC tuners.

And like I said, plenty of those types of products exist to solve that problem...

http://hauppauge.com/site/products/prods_hvr_external.html http://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/

...what I was describing is the problematic issue with CableCard and the DRM problem: the inability to run a trustworthy OS (i.e. non-Smart-TV-solution-that-spies-on-all-your-viewing-habits) to process encrypted QAM and the like... ATSC solutions are aplenty, some of the best are the Silicondust hardware.

I was actually talking about the physical "on a stick" format, not actual tuners.

I'm a proud owner of an HDHR and am eagerly looking forward to Silicondust's software DVR. My CableCard experience has been remarkably trouble-free for years, but I've also been using it with Windows Media Center.

I couldn't ever get the HDHR working with MythTV. It has a long way to go as a product for end users, and hope it finds more success one day. I've worked (professionally) with the devs behind MythWeb and Schedules Direct, and I know they have some good talent available to them.

Windows Media Center remains the best software or hardware DVR experience I've ever had, and it makes me very sad that Microsoft decided to discontinue it.

The only winning move is not to play, as they say. Televisions are overrated anyway.

The comments on that article are awful. Spare yourselves and don't read them!

ive a vizio smart tv (they basically are all smart tvs now) its just not online. easy. the software sucks anyway.

1984

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