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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

> I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product).

You don't have that choice - what happens is you pay and become the product. Cable TV used to be ad-free, since you paid for it, then they figured out they can make more money selling ads. There are ads on the buses and subways, even though you have to pay for tickets. Windows 10 shows you ads and spies on you, yet you have to pay for it. You pay for a TV, yet 'smart' features get included, that spy on you and show you ads. You pay for a movie ticket, yet have to sit through 20 minutes of ads before the movie starts.

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Don't forget product placement or native advertising , so that you're being shown advertising directly in the movies or content that you're already consuming. It's turtles all the way down.

> You pay for a TV, yet 'smart' features get included, that spy on you and show you ads.

I've heard about this, but what exactly does this mean? I have a smart TV, but I never see ads. Supposedly it's spying on me, but how is it spying on me any more than the Netflix and Hulu subscriptions I already pay for?

This is not meant to sound defensive - I do believe it's too good to be true that my TV is as wonderful as I think it is. I'm just trying to understand what is so bad about it?

Many new "smart" TVs have "ACR" that sends info about what you're watching (regardless of whether on netflix or hulu or a set-top-box) to the TV manufacturer. [1]

Pro-Tip: At least for Samsung TVs you can un-accept the privacy-policy to disable this. This will also disable Netflix and all "smart" features but that's..exactly what I want in a TV. Alternatively just don't give the TV network access, but you may want to do a yearly software-update.

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

Thank you for this. Now I look forward to seeing all the ways my TV behaves differently now (no voice search, for instance).

Some smart TVs show ads outright, most of them phone home on the regular with fingerprints of whatever's on screen.

If you need any proof that they profit off of this, "dumb" equivalents of various models, if they exist at all, tend to be significantly more expensive.

In addition to the "ACR" issue mentioned, smart TVs have been caught throwing up pop-up ads anytime a person changes volume (including over movies/games) and scanning attached media (laptops, hard drives, USB sticks) and sending lists of all accessible files and folders back to the manufacture. Samsung in particular has been pretty shitty with ads and spying.

> what happens is you pay and become the product

I remember the first time I saw an ad on the in-flight entertainment system on a plane. (I think it might have been United, but they all do it now...) This and the shilling for their special miles-reward credit card, while you're literally captive (in a tube in the air), having paid to be there, is pretty much the epitome of hypercapitalism-gone-wrong today.

I thought that the cable TV subscription pays for the distribution and ads pay for the channels?

Upon further research, it does look like only a handful of cable-only channels were ever ad-free.

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