> Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet.
Unless they find an open WiFi network.
Unless they find an open WiFi network.
Now, if we're talking about the danger of devices incorporating their own wireless communications and phoning home on a network of their manufacturer's own choosing without the knowledge or consent of the owner, that is a serious risk, and one that IMHO should be mitigated by regulating it out of existence before it has any chance to become established practice.
Are you aware of any TVs that are doing that?
Found it: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...
Ugh. Looks like the contents of the post got deleted.
But here's another example of devices getting sold with their own cellular connectivity preinstalled.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/01/huawei-reportedly-plans-f...
Fortunately, some thoughtful person saved it in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20201003141448/https://old.reddi...
Contents:
So I just had a rather annoying experience. I own two Samsung Smart TVs, which honestly gave me the heebie jeebies to purchase. With that said, at the end of the day I decided that as long as I didn't hook it up to the net, I'd be good to go. I've been using them for a few years, and have felt pretty comfortable with the situation, so imagine my surprise when I sit down to watch something on the living room tv (which I don't use all that often) and my show is interrupted by a notification that "SmartHub" had updated.
After digging around in settings for a moment, I realized that one of my next door neighbors had installed an open router with internet, and my tv had silently automatically connected to it and began doing its normal internet stuff. I have no idea how long it was connected like that.
After looking though the settings and a few Google searches later, I realized there was no actual way to disabled the wireless connection on that TV. It expected an internet connection, and intended to get one. Ultimately, I managed to get it to stop what it was doing by letting it connect to my router and then blocking it via access control. I then followed up by going into "IP Settings" and setting that to manual, while leaving all the values at 0. It complained, but allowed me to keep the setting.
Anyhow, figured I'd share, since I imagine quite a few people here are also not keen on a smart tv connecting to the net, given some of the history surrounding them.
Hardcoding DNS for example which makes Pi-hole ineffective. That is increasingly happening and should quite rightly be criticised.
It's absolutely necessary to try to anticipate the future, because the future always becomes the present. If we don't try to anticipate, we will be stuck with whatever is given to us. Like the introduction of ads on Android TV.