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Comment by _wp3r | Hacker News Reader

I was certain this was a parody site, but after reading the hilarious comments on HN I am no longer confident.

I'm really hoping so. Maybe it's an accidental early April fool's joke. Testing the site and someone posted it without thinking? If not, bring on global warming, we humans are never going to learn about useful technology. Just speed it up and let's get it over with.

Normally when you strip things away, you make things cheaper than the competition... not hike the price up by an extra $150 from the leading brand name.

If this tv was dirt cheap, I'd have no issues with it. It makes sense. As is... no and their air of superiority they have is the real thing everyone is angry about.

This is where you are kind of off - as a consumer all you can buy today is smart TV’s. Smarts that is there to track your viewing habits and besides that gives you bloated firmwares with buggy apps and crap you’ll never use.

The only alternatives to this would be commercial screens, and they cost a tonne! For some reason, selling a non-smart TV is more expense... so - somewhere in all that smarts, you’re the product, I guess.

I would absolutely pay extra for a television without an onboard camera and stealth network connection, yes. It's sad that we should expect to pay extra for our televisions not to spy on us, but here we are.

We bought one of the last "non-smart" TVs available in the store just a few years ago and one of my great (arguably ridiculous) regrets is that when we went on the road this last time, we sold our place furnished, giving up that beautiful, giant, "dumb" TV to buyers who I'm sure don't appreciate its value.

I agree only if you're not buying a streaming device that has a built in mic that tracks and sends your info anyways.

Look, I'm against the tracking culture we're in. I refuse to get IoT anything and I don't do the whole home automation crap. But I find it dumb when someone says "I don't want a TV that has a mic in it and sends my data... Alexa, turn on my Apple TV and stream Stranger Things from Netflix."

Seriously... A lot of the same people have an Alexa/Google home/whatever. IoT devices throughout their home. Streaming boxes that only use voice commands. Yet they complain about smart tvs sending their data... Almost as bad as making a movie about aliens that die from touching water and they decide to invade a planet that's 70% covered in water and regularly has water fall from the sky.

This is such a fatalistic and sad attitude...”Why should I wear clothes anywhere if my doctor sees me naked?”

Apple, Google, and Amazon encrypt their data in transit, I have an ongoing customer relationship with them and I keep abreast of their privacy policies. I’m not happy, but I generally know what they’re doing with my data.

Not so with my flippin’ toaster or my computer monitor. And TV manufacturers have a very bad reputation when it comes to shipping everything they can get unencrypted back to home base.

They only reason they encrypt the data is so they can be the first ones to resell the data. They dont want someone to play interference and get the data for free. It's not for "the customer's safety". I dont care about the encryption, I dont want them collecting the data in the first place.

But the television’s unencrypted collection is fine?

At a certain point, it doesn't matter in a practical aspect. It's like trying to figure out who gave you syphilis. You already got it. You need to deal with that first before caring about the "from who". Once the encrypted data is sold off, it's passed around more than a cheap hooker with VD.

Encryption is just the sedative they give you before they do execution by lethal injection. There should be no data collection, by anyone. Don't pretend that "Oh, we encrypt your data that we take from you, for your benefit. Because we care."

They all need to stop collecting data and selling it off. FAANG and more. All of them. I'm fine with collecting anonymous view count/length of programs. That technically can benefit the consumer since it helps justify producers on what shows/movies to fund. Beyond that, there's no reason a single bit of voice data or transcript should go over the internet. No searches or anything IDing at all. No matter how secret squirrel they go about it.

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