Your new smart TV is so cheap because it's collecting and selling your data | Hacker News Reader

Your new smart TV is so cheap because it's collecting and selling your data

businessinsider.com

45 pointselorant26 comments

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

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

The court transcripts of the Visio provide a snapshot of insight. Visio was selling reduced data without informing consumers that they were being monitored. There is case information on line and I don't recall it exactly, but it was demographic, ethnicity and watching habits. I'm sure that could be extended to recognize room furnishing. In another project Affective sells Emotion As a Service (EAAS) which extracts data from 24 points on the face. A single capture can be decoded as an expression, and expressions across time can be decoded as emotion. That algorithm could be ported to a smart TV though I don't think there have been any announcements yet.

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?

I’ve been wondering the same about AppleTVs and network connected TVs. Recently bought a Sony TV that has Android TV, I didn’t realize until I took it home.

Consumer reports has a write up to let you know what to disable based on the manufacter.[1] I’m still tempted to do wireshark.

[1]https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...

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.

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.

I'm in the market for a new TV, what should I be looking for?

Personally, I'm considering looking at computer monitors the next time I need to buy a living room display. Some of the larger gaming monitors announced at CES are so much better than my 37" 720p TV, it may be worth the cost to avoid the SmartTV stuff.

Some people have also said that a computer monitor has less lag, too. I have a VCR with HDMI output, so you can use that for tuning the channel.

Seriously consider getting a projector and screen. They're never "smart" and are dramatically cheaper at larger sizes.

If you have a lot of devices to plug in a mixer may also be needed.

It's great but you always have to turn off the lights to watch.

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?

On a smart-tv I was given, I manually set garbage WiFi info and that seemed to work. No internet and no scanning.

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.

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

Since people are asking, one way to find dumb tv’s is to look for “commercial displays” or “monitors” that meet your specs otherwise. They usually have a smaller bezels and less of the bloatware/spyware if any. They will be a little pricier by about ~20%.

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

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.

uBlock Origin + Nano Defender lets me read the article just fine. You may have to turn some additional lists on in uBlock though.

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

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

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