Roku is cryptolocking TV’s until you give personal data
medium.com
medium.com
"Cryptolocking" is something I generally associate with malware that encrypts your hard drive and won't give you the decryption key unless you pay a ransom.
This is "there are dark patterns that make it difficult to get past the initial setup screen without signing up for an account", which is not the same at all.
For the future, I recommend to the writer that he spend less time on sensationalism, and more time on editing.
This pattern and cryptolocking both have the common trait that you have to pay to get past a specific point, so I get why this happens: they're indistinguishable from a "typical end user" point of view.
Really, I think "Paywall" is maybe closer to the proper term to use here.
> Lets get something straight here. Gender should ALWAYS be a optional choice.
This is a good take. Many more services should make gender more optional. It's unnecessary for almost all services, it's something that is often used for _poor_ targeting – targeting based on markers in platform activity is likely to yield much better targeting, and unless you spend a lot of time thinking about how to model the answers to that question it has the potential to exclude and offend. Let's just stop asking for it!
This is why I will only buy "dumb" TVs that can only display input from external sources.
I agree with only buying "dumb" TVs
It's probably about time for someone to figure out the firmware update process and come with a DD-WRT style open source firmware that doesn't have all of this nonsense.
Yes, most people may not realize that's an option. But also, yes, the TV price already factors in the financial benefits of getting people's personal information. I remember reading an article on this, oh yes: https://www.businessinsider.com/smart-tv-data-collection-adv...
""" It's not just about data collection. It's about post-purchase monetization of the TV. """
To quickly include the comments which often come up in similar threads -
There are some TVs you can find at BestBuy without smart features, but they're usually not 4K.
In many cases you can use a "smart" tv, and avoid putting it on your local wifi. Some TVs reportedly require internet access to work at all.
In other cases people have said that the device jumped on a neighbors open wifi without prompting.
People often say that including these "smart" features makes a TV cheaper for a manufacturer, since they can then sell your viewing data.
During setup, I declined to connect to WiFi and then set the TV to automatically switch to HDMI 1 when it turns on, and to honor CEC over HDMI so that my external AppleTV box can power it on and off. Taught the AppleTV remote how to handle the volume on the TV, and that's it. The Roku remote is in a drawer, and the TV behaves as a dumb monitor.
I'm not even sure whether it's possible to buy a large TV without software loaded on it, but you don't have to let that software run!
In my opinion, a "right" price would not encourage the kind of behavior that puts bullshit software on a device in the first place. Also, your TV could be connected to mobile networks and you would not know, although I'm not sure what information they can divine from the TV being on or off, other than the times someone is home or not.
My TV could have a secret mobile chip, it's true. So could literally anything brought into my house larger than a chip+antenna. I don't think that a TV would be the first thing I'd suspect.
Whether TCL will someday close that loophole for future models remains to be seen.
Also I think you might be surprised to learn that ROKU's market cap over $18B and most of that is likely due to their user profiling -- https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595384/roku-ceo-anthony...
A company maximizing their revenue will inevitably end up implementing surveillance - it's a way to take more value from a relationship after the price has already been set. And if you're willing to pay more to avoid surveillance, this just means you're a more valuable target to surveil!
The only way to overcome is to not play by these given rules in the first place. By definition this means you're being a pirate, whether you're looking for ways to compensate the creators or not.
Roku is not just a physical device, or an OS. It's also in the advertising business. They stream video ads and display ads when you watch certain shows through Roku. Thus, they want to know a lot more about you to show you relevant ads.
But if this is the main OS of the TV, and this is a requirement to use external inputs. Then fuck this.
I think my Sony Android TV allowed me to skip user login during setup. I might be wrong because I logged in then subsequently put it on my “Internet of Shit” VLAN, where all the other terrible crap goes.
I recently set one of these up for my daughter, and there is indeed no way to use the display without a Roku account, and that does require a credit card, and sneakily tries to get you to sign up for trials, as the article mentions. It took a lot of effort for me to make sure my (3 year old) couldn't order HBO, etc.
Had I known that, I woudln't have bought it. It's easy to envision a future where Roku is out of business and this tv can't be activated again if needs be.
Instead of spending all this time writing an article and on.the phone, they should have returned it and got another brand of TV