Hacker News Reader

Comment by greggarious | Hacker News Reader

So what is the justification for this being acceptable behavior (beyond the usual "read the 20 page, graduate-reading-level privacy policy)?

Sites like Google and Facebook provide free services in exchange for ads.

Personally I think it is ludicrous that a company thinks it OK to use my personal information to enrich themselves, via a device that I paid for.

View on HN

If you think Google and Facebook are the only companies doing this on the internet, you're in a for a huge shock. There are tons of companies that do this without providing any service for you.

Recall a recent story on HN about Exactis leaking data on 100s of millions of people? That's just one of them, and until the breach almost nobody had ever heard of them.

True. Basically, every time you get an annoying GDPR popup, you've found someone complicit.

That's a stretch. I worked on GDPR compliance and it wasn't because of anything underhanded or nefarious. Just had to comply with new regulations.

If you need a popup you are complicit. In that case it's very likely you are spewing my personal data to third parties.

It's the law! I'm not sure how you don't get that. People have to get explicit consent to Terms of Service and marketing. If you don't understand that times change and companies have to adapt to follow the law (with a popup modal of all things gasp) then I'm not sure what to tell ya. Good luck with that mindset.

Arguably though that's just a level of indirection though, isn't it?

Ie, I assume most of the sites I visit track me for advertising purposes. This is no different than Google, it's just that with Google I expect the developers of the tracking to be Google directly. With the NewYorkTimes or w/e I don't expect them to be doing it. I expect some random 3rd party to be doing all the real tracking.

Now I know nothing about Exactis, but I'd wager (perhaps incorrectly) that their product is directly related to a product I was consuming, such as written news content or w/e.

Yeah it was incredibly annoying when my new expensive TV played ads when I was trying to browse apps... really? WTF.

I've started to rely more on my PS4's apps to view TV. While it does have its own ads, none of them seem as intrusive as the one from the native TV interface.

The PS4 by default puts ads alongside your purchased games, but at least you can turn that off (for now)

My Vizio replaced its built-in, vanilla Chromecast capability with a conventional “smart tv” interface that I didn’t want. And to be able to use that, they force you to accept a TOS that includes monitoring.

Worse, I couldn’t tell it to stop connecting to my WiFi after all this happened. I had to ban the TV from my LAN and change the WiFi credentials.

I spent a lot of money on that TV, only to have it go rogue on me.

The VERY first thing the LG television I bought did was show me an advertisement. I had to blocked its MAC address from the router.

You don't pay the full cost of the device - at least in the case of Roku devices. Roku is all about making money from advertising - from the home screen where half of it is an ad to the hard coded shortcut buttons on the remote that are sponsored by various streaming providers.

While the AppleTV 4K costs a lot more. Apple made a simple proposition -- I give them money and they give me stuff. They don't make money by selling user data.

This happens all the time. Recently I bought a sous-vide machine, and realized that it would phone home with details of my cooking, along with the WiFi AP. Essentially someone at the company would have an idea of my location, along with whether someone was at that location, and maybe my food preferences.

The idea that this kind of analytics is not opt-in, and that you are essentially forced to provide this on a product that you paid full price for is ridiculous. It may feel like an overreaction to worry about someone knowing what you are cooking, but how do you guarantee that this information will not be combined with other pieces of data by a third party to create a more complete picture of the user?

You bought a network enabled sous-vide machine?

I am as shocked as you are are, but apparently they exist: https://www.cookmellow.com. A bit like a remotely-programmable slow cooker, but then for the limited amount of ingredients a sous-vide will cook.

Yes. The newer ones enable control over WiFi. Joule requires you to connect to WiFi to get firmware updates.

Please see the following statement from our partners at In-Q-Tel...

I'm actually sort-of okay with this. It's opt-in and there's no dark patterns pushing you to accept. The only thing I have qualms with is the obfuscated language they use to say "we send what you watch to advertisers".

Contracts of adhesion, left in place via lack of proper corporate regulation.

You can literally decline. It's not like you need to accept to use your TV. What do you lose out on? All the "special offers" they're going to send you?

cheaper TV ?

That's never how it works, though. Instead of offering a cheaper TV, they will instead offer a TV priced at what they can sell it for, and make money on the data sale as well. If they WERE to increase the price in exchange for not selling the data, someone would likely ask them why they weren't selling the data anyway, along with the price increase, if sales weren't negatively affected. To not do so would be leaving the money on the table, theoretically. The safest thing to do would be to not have the data at all, avoiding the temptation to sell.

I don't like not having an option either, but that's not a good argument since what they can sell it for is really what number of sales at what price. Presumably they would sell fewer at a higher, non-ad-subsidized price.

GP argues that they have no incentive to offer a non-ad-subsidized TV at a higher price, because consumers will for the large part not notice ad-(preference-)subsidization or otherwise consider it a factor in the decision to buy such a TV.

I hope you don't own a cellphone running iOS or Android.

Android is fine as long as you:

- don't login into Google Account

- don't enable GPS, because every time you enable it, you get a popup suggesting you share your location with Google. If you choose "don't ask me again", the button "decline" gets disabled so that you cannot choose a wrong option by mistake [1] (I wonder, why Google wants to know where I am going to so badly? Did NSA made an offer they couldn't refuse?)

- don't have spyware from a manufacturer (noname Chinese phones often have it)

[1] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/115944/in-lollip...

I ask myself this exact question about any and all vendors of machines running Windows 10. Still don't have a good answer other than they do it because there is no law to stop them and it's profitable. I mean why else would a business do this or anything for that matter? The justification therefore must be profit at all costs. The cost here is personal data. The cost in other industries are human lives. Companies enriching themselves at others' expense is the foundation of our society. What companies like Microsoft and Vizio are saying is that the price of the tv is the dollar cost plus a lifetime of data collection. Of course, there's no need to connect to the internet in case of these tvs. People running Windows technically have the same option but it's not such a good solution in that case.

Jumping to Windows 10 is a somewhat bizarre segue from Smart TVs seeing more than they should.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com