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Comment by obscura | Hacker News Reader

Yet another example of the customer coming last. Are TV's that force ads on customers heavily discounted? If not, the manufacturers are earning extra revenue while the customer loses their privacy and gets nothing in return other than annoyance.

It's a good illustration of why privacy is so complicated: most people wouldn't think that in buying a TV they're compromising their privacy because they don't know about ACR and such. The manufacturers, of course, know all about it, but it's not in their interest to share the information - specifically, to do so in a way that empowers the consumer to make an educated decision at purchase time. (Or am I wrong and they do in fact explain everything "on the box"? I haven't had to buy a TV in a long time.)

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This is so stupid. When I bought my TV it didn't behave like this, but now for some stupid reason I need to get ads on it?

I mean, normal TV it's 90% ads 10% content, do we need to watch even more ads?

Anyone has any idea on how adding a filter like AdBlocker to your router? Never thought about this but it's getting useful af.

I do this and it's been somewhat useful - you need to disable blackhole rules periodically to get app updates though (and the TV will send a storm of DNS queries your way if you dare to block queries)

Frustratingly, recently the latest Plex app stopped working with the block rules I had in place, so I've had to allow through a lot more of the TV's traffic to samsung domains than I'd like.

My primary annoyance is Samsung's monitoring of what I do on my TV, and secondarily their IPTV service, which it seems to default to on startup (I only use apps and PC/game console sources, the TV isn't plugged into or tuned for any channels).

Realistically I need to switch to a Shield TV and hope that nVidia's privacy policies are better... and never buy a samsung tv ever again.

The Shield TV runs Android TV, so you are just moving your point of trust to Google instead...

Pi-Hole would probably do the trick: https://pi-hole.net/

Just an fyi, it's good to setup firewall redirection from suspicious devices as well.

For my Roku I have setup a redirection for all DNS port queries to my pihole as some app developers are getting wise to this and using their own DNS.

It won't be long until they encrypt this traffic and lock us out completely though.

Yes, that works! I have a Samsung Frame + PiHole. Incredible amount of network requests are blocked now.

i tried blocking DNS or whitelisting and you probably see that large amount of blocked requests because it tries like every second if you refuse the response.

The future is https://imgur.com/H9dd3B1

https://pi-hole.net/ ?

    Yet another example of the customer coming last.

Unfortunately, it's worse than that. It's more like a case of the consumer coming first.

The vast majority of consumers don't care about this. They're trying to get the biggest screen for the least money. And TV manufacturers are giving it to them.

However, to remain price competitive with the other TVs on the shelf in WalMart, they need to rely on ad revenue. So, we get TVs with ads.

This isn't a dystopian thing forced upon us by evil TV manufacturers. This is a dystopian thing we've asked for.

> The vast majority of consumers don't care about this.

You may be right, but how exactly is someone meant to make an informed decision when they don't know what their TV is doing? It's unreasonable to expect the average person on the street to be an expert on the subject and to have fully researched everything before walking into a store, so if the TV's packaging doesn't say anything about the subject, how do they learn?

> However, to remain price competitive with the other TVs on the shelf in WalMart, they need to rely on ad revenue.

Which other TVs are you referring to? And is this really the case or are you speculating? Surely a company the size of Samsung can be competitive without having to resort to this sort of activity?

    It's unreasonable to expect the average person 
    on the street to be an expert on the subject and 
    to have fully researched everything before walking 
    into a store, so if the TV's packaging doesn't say 
    anything about the subject, how do they learn?

I 100% agree with you that the current solution stinks and is unfair.

The solution depends on who you ask.

Some would say that it's up to the consumer to be educated. Like you, I don't think this is realistic. It's not realistic to expect every consumer to become an expert in the nuances of every single thing they might buy.

Others would say that if it's really important to customers, we'll vote with our dollars and demand alternatives to the current situation.

Some would say that the government should ban the practice or at least require some sort of very clear disclosure.

What would you like to see?

Not really. We are asking for TVs without internet access, but the market has decided for us.

"We" are a tiny minority.

The vast majority of people just don't care and want the most TV for the least money.

It's a "tyranny of the majority" kind of situation. For TV manufacturers, it's not worth catering to the tiny minority of customers who think like us.

How do you know that? I am going to go out on a limb here and say you have not done background research on TV manufacturers who focus exclusively on inexpensive dumb TVs, so how can you know it's not worth it to them?

It is entirely possible there are other factors as to why we are not buying from them right now, such as supplier-related issues unbeknownst to us.

In short, the economy is more complex than claiming "demand" and saying we are done.

I have almost never heard anybody outside of the tech world express concern about this sort of data collection, and even most tech-savvy people I know explicitly reject the idea of caring about it.

Yes, admittedly this is anecdotal, but I am talking about an extended family/social circle of hundreds of people over the course of quite a few years. The odds of it being a massively unrepresentative sample are rather low.

Let's turn it around. How do you know that people are concerned about data collection?

All available evidence points to my assertion being correct. All sorts of "smart" devices, chock full of phone-home tracking, are flying off the shelves. There are alternatives, but they are quite niche.

I am not talking about the demand for privacy, I am talking about the demand for dumb, inexpensive TVs. You are saying it is impossible to find a market that needs dumb, inexpensive TVs. But suppose all of those people saw an option for a cheaper TV that happened to be dumb. This line could even be sold by a major brand. Call it something like a "SimplySmart" line.

Ah, I see the misunderstanding.

The "smart" functionality is how they achieve low prices. They subsidize the cost of the TV by selling your usage data. They may have deals with app providers as well - similar to how the price of a consumer laptop is subsidized by preloaded crapware.

Suppose we were onto something?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24666968

Come to think of it, I believe those brands for dumb, cheaper TVs exist. Check out Sceptre TVs. I will make sure I grab one for my next replacement.

Given the privacy angle, I expect they won't do ACR in Europe. Because that would require asking permission and the courts have ruled that "free and explicit consent" means the user must be able to say no. Otherwise it doesn't count as consent and the massive GDPR fines come into play.

For all the bad press it got, I'm happy to have GDPR because it very firmly puts the consumers in control of their data.

Enforcement isn't fully there yet, but with Oracle getting sued and pulling the plug on the European side of their Blukai data sales business things are moving in the right direction.

My new LG CX tv has an option in the settings for this (in Norway) so I can just turn it of.

My old Sony Bravia with android tv didn't even honour my DHCP DNS settings so I made the firewall reroute all the requests to my internal dns for "pi-holeing".

GDPR is a massive win for consumers, enforcement will come it just takes time :)

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