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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I just got done buying a new TV. I badly wanted (and would have paid more for) a dumb TV, but couldn't find any. So I bought a smart TV and will simply never connect it to the internet.

But ... my new TV is Alexa enabled. I guess that means that no matter how hard I work to keep the damn thing offline, if my neighbor has an Echo, my TV will exfiltrate it's data on me completely circumventing my own network.

I try not to be a luddite, but good grief this is starting to feel like a sci-fi horror movie. Pretty soon we'll have to wrap our houses in a Faraday cage in hopes of maintaining some privacy. That or be excluded from modern conveniences like "television."

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I just started banning certain vendors altogether. With TVs it means I usually stick to Sony. It's a compromise because I genuinely like Sony's TVs and it's increasingly harder to find good TVs here that aren't extremely user-hostile re: analytics. It looked like Sony are the lightest offender without going for a dramatically worse TV, they have one ACR toggle but I plan to switch it off and maybe even delete the package via ADB.

My parents insisted on a Xiaomi TV because it's much cheaper, so we agreed on just not connecting it to the internet. I set up a one-off personal hotspot to update it (in case they fixed bugs in the ISP or such), then killed the hotspot. With them it's more of a (irrational?) suspicion in Xiaomi rather than anything proven, e.g.: I wouldn't dare touch Samsung until they stop selling what are essentially data-harvesting ad displays.

A buddy of mine informed they also make deals with ISPs that run those public facing WiFi networks, e.g. xfinitywifi or whatever it is called, and will automatically transmit data through those.

It is no longer enough to simply never connect the TV yourself unless you live on a farm without neighbors. You have to crack it open and physically disconnect the WiFi antenna to achieve the desired result. Hell, TV manufacturers will probably switch to 5G Cell antennas soon if they haven’t started to already.

>A buddy of mine informed they also make deals with ISPs that run those public facing WiFi networks

Is there a source for this? I've seen similar hearsay (eg. smart TVs connecting to open hotspots), I couldn't find a reliable source backing it up. The smart TV claim for instance, was traced back to a post on /r/privacy, for instance.

You are right. We are going towards a dystopia. Over the past few weeks, all the seniors in my family have accidentally updated and locked (i.e. bricked) their ipads. These tablets are essential to their quality of live. I'm convinced <deleted expletive> Apple engineers applied dark patterns to accidentally trick people into updating their OS. During covid, this means someone needs to expose the seniors to unbrick their bloody ipads. This should be criminal during a pandemic. Btw, I mean functionally bricked here. None of the seniors in my family remember their passwords or is able to deal with a fresh OS install. <deleted expletive> Sorry .. I needed to rant.

What's worse about these internet connected tvs is that they demand you confirm a terms of service agreement to give them data. You can't just disable it on your tv. I don't want those features but if my remote hits one of the online services it shows "vizo requires you to agree to this, pls give us your wifi password and data"

There have been many discussions here on HN about finding a good "dumb tv". Here's a recent one which appears to favor Sceptre: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24666968&p=2

I can +1 Sceptre. I got a Sceptre 65" 4k dumb TV on sale for $320 last year and have been happy with it. I hope I never have to join a smart TV; my experiences with them have been almost universally bad.

I got a perfectly adequate 60in two years ago from Walmart’s Black Friday sale for around 200 dollars with in store pick up. I’d guess you’d be able to do something similar this year

Amazing, thank you!

I found this pretty fast on Amazon. Seems like they're definitely out there. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00W5X1I9C/

I don't think in the future it will matter if the TV is "smart" or not. Amazon is definitely going to sell access to this network to device manufacturers as an IoT platform so you you'll never even know if your TV is on their network.

I have a new Samsung smart TV and i bought an AppleTV and connected that. Works great.

My new Sony smart TV functions "fine" without an internet connection. I use a Shield TV for streaming. It does however pop-up an overlay once a day reminding me to connect to the internet. It also crashes on startup about half the time, presumably because it's failing to connect to a server somewhere.

So far, these annoyances have been tolerable but really shouldn't exist at all with a $1,000 appliance.

It boggles the mind that we somehow reached this acceptable state of a crashing TV. If a PC monitor crashed, it's either a RMA or a 2/10 review, why is it okay for a TV to do that?

It's an edge case. For 99% of users, it will be connected to the internet and that connectivity was a reason for purchasing.

That I understand, but you can still find reviews mentioning "this TV crashes a few times" and somehow it isn't a showstopper, it just gets excused as "bugs they'll fix later". That part annoys me.

Do Google's devices also do that? I thought if I didn't connect my Chromecast-enabled TV to WiFi it would maintain radio silence, but I've never tested it.

Is it not possible to just buy a dumb LCD panel with inputs and use an OTT device to stream?

I couldn't find any LCD panel that wasn't tiny or outrageously expensive. I only spent maybe 30 minutes looking, so it sounds like I may have missed some good possibilities (like Sceptre).

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