Hacker News Reader

Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

How about you don’t connect your TV to the internet? Here’s a consumer reports article that tells you how to turn off most tracking if you must connect it to the internet.[1]

Get a decent set of network hardware so you can monitor everything that’s going on. I can recommended UniFi by Ubiquiti, despite the recent blow back about crash reports being sent to them.

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

View on HN

> How about you don’t connect your TV to the internet?

Then we'll see the manufacturers include SIM cards, at least in countries where it's affordable.

Twilio is making this pretty easy. I just ordered three SIM cards from them that I can provision, to see how it works. Their aim is for these SIMs to be utilized in IoT devices.

https://www.twilio.com/wireless

That's the future of all internet connected appliances. We're already seeing it with cars, at some point it will be affordable enough to include in TVs, fridges, ovens, anything that might want to phone home.

Hope you're not connecting it to any internet-connected device (PC, console, etc) either because most HDMI cables nowadays have pins to carry an ethernet signal as well.

My Sony TV and Apple TV do not support it. According to stack exchange nobody really supports it, although I can’t attest to the commenters credibility.[1]

A quick google search doesn’t show any Sony TV with this capability.

Can you give me an example of any consumer TV that supports Ethernet over HDMI?

[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/325215/appletv-eth...

You're not suggesting some grand conspiracy of smart TV and computer/console manufacturers, I hope? As far as I know, PC GPUs don't support this anyway.

That means the PC, console, etc would have to voluntarily act as a network gateway for the TV. I've never heard of a device configured that way by default. Even if I wanted to do that, I don't know how I'd begin to enable it on anything other than a Linux box.

I had been wondering if the comcast boxes would be providing this as a side door. (hdmi from tv going to cable box, cable box has net access )

When I asked about data sharing with these dvr boxes and the new streaming stick option, only thing they could tell me is that 'virtually all video decoding and streaming devices are sharing data with multiple third parties'

I returned the dvr box, and have not chosen to use their new streaming stick.

You could also sabotage the wifi chip or antenna if you wanted to make 100% sure the tv doesn't connect. Good luck trying to connect to wifi without an antenna connected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com