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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

... and that's exactly why my TV will never have an internet connection.

By now, it doesn't really matter which brand you use. I have analyzed Samsung, Sony, LG and Philips and ALL of them send data about your usage to NetEase in China and ALL of them have ToS that say that they might record your voice and store it for improving their AI or whatever. Plus all of them shove suggested apps in your face, so I'd say it is only a matter of time until all of them show more aggressive ads.

But if you fully wipe it and then keep it fully offline, most TVs have a great screen and they can be configured with "gaming mode" to work like a low-latency HDMI / DisplayPort display. And without internet, there are not ads :) and no forced (useless) updates.

BTW, my LG OLED is completely ad-free, defaults to using HDMI port 1 and even has GSYNC. Just connect any barebone with an NVIDIA card and you have 100% control over what you see.

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> and that's exactly why my TV will never have an internet connection.

That's increasingly difficult, e.g. HDMI offers ethernet communication. I also don't think salespeople care to be informed well enough on this feature. It seems that the last resort is digging through the user manuals found on the internet before the purchase.

Is there any device you might connect your TV to that actually provides Ethernet over HDMI (at all? unprompted?)? People keep citing that ability, but I can't remember ever actually encountering devices that do it.

Even if this actually becomes widespread (indeed I am not aware of any consumer device providing pass-through network access through its HDMI port), I'd expect most devices to have a toggle for this or a privacy-friendly company like Apple might even make the lack of that "feature" a selling point.

The world is a sad place, the fact that we have to pay a premium so we don't get features.

We need companies to rise up against this bullshit. It won't matter until the customer base is educated in privacy.

We need a massive campaign to spread privacy awareness. Only then, there could be a market. Apple can afford to do this because they're big and they already have a customer base. A mid-sized company trying to sell privacy oriented products in a mass market is going to be left in the dust.

The society continues to regress. No one cares.

You can always hook up a computer and use the TV as a monitor.

How do you know they aren't tracking that either? Your TV has a computer inside that has the capability of watching whatever is being displayed on your screen.

TCL Roku models will do this. They have some kind of content matching running on the display signal.

Thankfully they let you disable it. But mine has the internet connection disabled entirely anyway.

If you have a computer hooked up, you don't need the TV to have internet.

There is a difference between it having a network connection (i.e. ethernet) and having internet connectivity - you just need to be able to control the tv's traffic.

If the manufacturers start adding a 4G modem to their devices then that might change things. Hopefully the economics of that never work out.

Just block it in your router. Everything has to go through it eventually.

..but then, just like some smart home devices, it would either constantly annoy you with an icon or popus about "missing internet connection" or outright refuse to work at all with a cryptic "something went wrong"

Perhaps there will a market for HDMI “condoms”.

I never found a device that supports HDMI Ethernet Channel. I'm really curious whether any device exists.

I have an LG. I never connected it to the internet, but it still has a built-in, always-on, no-way-to-disable wireless access point that pollutes the wireless channel it broadcasts on.

I suppose you could open the back and unplug the aerial cable from the motherboard. Unless they’re using one of those tiny surface mount aerials of course :(

nothing a hot soldering iron won't fix.

My alternative, as I actually like my Samsung TV (lots of features including AirPlay 2 and Apple TV for not a lot of money): block the shit out of any connection it makes using https://NextDNS.io.

If the tv can’t load the ads it also cannot show them.

You can do this with Pi-Hole as well, after turning it on for my Samsung TV the number of blocked requests was pretty amazing.

Agreed but would you mind sharing which Samsung connections you are blocking in order to prevent ads from being displayed on the TV? I'm running NextDNS.io too (router config) and their logs show a plethora of Samsung queries that are all allowed, but I also have a Samsung phone and refrigerator. The only one they block by default is smetrics.samsung.com

In the Privacy tab, you can specifically select a "block of rules" for Samsung devices. Also, EasyList will block a lot of requests.

Unfortunately, NextDNS will not show from what device a blocked request came unless you give it a name in the app, and of course there is no NextDNS app for Samsung TV's. Some suspicious domains I see often in my logs:

samsungads.com tvx.adgrx.com samsungcloudsolution.net

But, in short, I have loaded NextDNS with the most common blocklists (EasyList, Anudeep etc.) and added the "Samsung" list. Result is: no ads anywhere on my 2018 smart tv.

Well fuck. I didn’t know that. I was just about to buy a nice new 50” 4K Samsung smart TV. Purchase cancelled. Will keep my dumb Samsung 32” ass end model.

he's not saying don't buy that fancy tv. just use a roku/appleTV/etc.

although those devices might also have their own privacy issues. :/ best of the bunch i guess?

I'm going to stick to my existing method of shipping USB sticks to the TV I think.

From the article:

> Roku is hard at work turning its TV platform into a "next-generation ad platform" [0] while Amazon has been showing ads on FireTV devices for years. Most of these platforms have also been confirmed to use ACR, just like Samsung.

https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...)

Apple TV seems to be the only reasonable option at this point.

oh and don't plug the network jack in on the tv.

At this point I don't think any Samsung TVs have cellular connections built in. So just stay away from the 'smart' features. I recently bought a 70" Samsung "smart" TV but the only interaction we have with it is to switch to the Apple TV input. The TV has no network configuration, and it never will.

How do you know it's not using open wifi networks?

I don't. There aren't any open wifi networks anywhere near my home, though. I assume if it did that someone would have noticed by now. That's a naive assumption, but given how many people actually look for such behavior, it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

It could still store the data on the device. Then in the future, a companies like google could drive around with an open wifi network on their street view cars and charge TV manufacturers for gathering the data. Or drones with open wifi could be deployed.

> And without internet, there are not ads

until all TVs will have built-in 5G SIM

> 5G

Don't believe coverage maps from wireless companies - 5% will get reception at best.

Why would they need a 5G sim for that?

They could easily be delivering ads and siphoning user metrics with 3G, 4G, or LTE sims today.

I will build a faraday cage around my house!

I use a pi-hole to block that traffic.

The difference is that you had to accept their EULA. I didn't because even if I technically prevent their data extraction, I still want it to be illegal for them.

That is true, but it will nag you every time you turn on TV.

At least my Samsung TV had several EULAs that were optional. I accepted the basic one that allowed me to use the onboard Netflix and then opted out of data collection via CCPA and installed a Pi-Hole. I didn’t accept the one for voice control or other “smart” features.

Eventually TVs will VPN out. Dat revenue is way too sweet...

As long as it's on my network, I can still block the VPN endpoint, or simply block based on source IP, or put the TV in a non-routable subnet.

...Assuming it displays anything at all without being able to phone home.

Chances are good the TVs of the future will just display full screen error messages if they haven’t been able to upload your content engagement metrics in the last 15 minutes.

> I have analyzed Samsung, Sony, LG and Philips and ALL of them send data

I always suspected something like this, but never went through the effort of checking.

Did you by chance document and publish your analysis somewhere?

If they do this with TV sets sold in the EU, then unless they offer some opt-out mechanism (actually, opt-IN, but whatever) directly on the TV set, this is a blatant GDPR violation.

I checked the German models. And yes, it is a GDPR violation. Plus it makes the integrated 4k movie player stutter because the CPU use from the adware causes thermal throttling on the GPU. That's why I investigated in the first place...

Have you written an article or blog post about your investigation. This deserves to be more widely known. You could even try contacting publications like the New York Times, or at least tech magazines. Get the message out, and maybe job offers in the process.

Surveillance just might be the best case against the idea of ubiquitous computing, at least in any real democracy.

LG OLEDs with Gsync are absolutely amazing.

My only concern is the longevity of OLED.

can confirm, even without gsync.

lg seems to have the best OS and the best panels.

WebOS was really a good operating system. It works surprisingly well for TVs even now.

there are numerous sites out there with long term tests on this subject and it comes down to, you have to go out of your way to harm the TV. As in, keep specific channels on 24x7 across a long period of time. Also, unplugging when not in use is not allowed.

Sorry? You can't unplug the TV when you aren't using it? Why? That's something new to me. My parents have a little box that automatically 'unplugs' their TV after extended periods of inactivity to prevent unnecessary power draw (the Australian government provided them for free at one point). That would somehow damage the TV?

> Why?

I've heard LG OLEDs run a pixel refresher when "off".

How do you force WebOS to default to HDMI? I replaced my parents TV with a LG LED last year, and it defaults to showing "No signal found" when turned on, then you have to switch to HDMI.

If possible, make the device connected to HDMI turn on the TV via CEC, that should switch it to the correct input automatically.

I believe this is what also happens for me. When I turn on the pc, the TV automatically switches to it.

I dealt with getting blasted with the "No signal" thing on my LG webOS TV for several months before finally figuring it out. I wish I could remember how and tell you, but I can't recall. But don't give up! It is possible.

EDIT: Actually, I'm not sure if I got it to default to HDMI but I did definitely get it to show something other than no signal. Try using the picture frame feature (where it shows art in a picture frame). After so doing, I think it at least defaults to the picture frame. I also have a Roku connected that seems to be capable of telling the TV "hey switch to me", so sometimes I get the Roku HDMI and sometimes I get picture frame, but at least I never get No Signal anymore.

That's strange. I have an LG (a couple of years old I think?) and it defaults to whichever input it was on previously.

So if I turn it off while on HDMI 3, it turns on to HDMI 3. If I turn off to antenna, it turns on to antenna.

Only irritation I really have with it is that it's run into the odd error and will reboot suddenly. :|

It should default to showing whatever input is currently marked as "TV/Cable". Out of the box, that is the OTA tuner. If you want it to default to an HDMI port, you will need to use the connection manager to tell the TV that there is a cable box connected to an HDMI port and to use that as the TV input.

I think that the trick is to use a monitor/commercial display instead of a tv.

Have you checked Toshiba?

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