>If the telemetry and whatever are your main concern you can just not connect the TV to the internet in the first place.
That's not a solution. How long until TVs refuse to work unless they can phone home? Or phone home via built-in cellular?
That's not a solution. How long until TVs refuse to work unless they can phone home? Or phone home via built-in cellular?
Companies like Samsung are already pushing hard to monetize their TVs, selling ads and shoving them down users throats. Imagine what a Samsung TV + Mobile combo can do to profile users: age, sexual preferences, political views, etc would be very easy to know by the manufacturer.
Going on a rabbit hole around TV privacy, I've read some TVs could connect to a nearby wifi if it's open access, or use HDMI as others pointed out. They can also capture images and sound and send it home to "improve sevices". I'm not sure how much of the above is real vs paranoid fears, but the prospect of this scenario being standard practice in the future is both possible and scary.
Call me paranoid but to avoid some folk on the other side of the world having a list of what I watch and pictures of my family I use the 'service mode' on my Samsung TV to switch off wifi capabilities and bluetooth. I also factory reset the device every few months. I'm not even sure that protects me 100% but at least I try. Because once your data is on the wild, got knows how secure it is, and what malicious actors can do with it...
This is a myth that goes around HN as far as I can tell. Nobody's ever provided a concrete example of a specific TV model which does this. It's like the "TVs soon coming with a 5G sim" one, which people also speculate on.
The only concrete claim I could found is [1] - however, I admit, there is no further proof that this claim is true.
There are interesting discussions about the topic in [2] and [3], however even there are no addition concrete examples besides [1] - so, it might be that [1] is in fact how the rumor started.
> It's like the "TVs soon coming with a 5G sim" one,
Not yet, true, but there are enough signs that make such a development credible: Built-in connectivity over which you have no control is already standard for cars. Projects like Amazon Sidewalk show that vendors are clearly thinking about taking connectivity in their own hands. A large part of the value proposition of 5G is connectivity everywhere and a supercharged internet of things.
So I see this as the most likely trajectory for the future.
See also [4].
[1] https://forum.developer.samsung.com/t/if-you-choose-to-not-c...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275350
[4] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/01/huawei-reportedly-plans-f...
Make sure you have no open WiFi around and do not connenct the TV over HDMI, since it can also provide it with the Internet.
The same wires are used for HDMI ARC, so any device supporting ARC (most TVs) inherently can't support ethernet on the same port.
I think it may be some time before network connectivity is required on the majority of screens.
I can imagine it happening with scattered brands here and there. The bigger concern for me would be connecting to my neighbors ring or adding one of those low bandwidth lte network cards.
I can easily image a future where it's not even advertised anymore whether your device has a cloud connection or not - you just find its behaviour has magically changed one day.
I also expect other manufacturers to follow Amazon's example and create their own "ring" networks. So your Samsung TV might connect to the neighbor's Galaxy phone which is logged into their wifi, etc...
Also, I recall reading that TVs from certain manufacturers had/has bugs in them that will prevent TVs from functioning after periods of time without connection or firmware updates.
I never needed to use it and I’m not sure what was the motivation to introduce it into hdmi, but requiring cooperation would explain why it wasn’t used widely.
Most devices didn't support ethernet over HDMI, and it was not something that could be passively supported.
> I never needed to use it and I’m not sure what was the motivation to introduce it into hdmi
The idea was that you could have your TV or AV Receiver connected to your normal ethernet and any other connected devices would just magically have network connectivity as well.
Turns out that most people who care to wire their home theater don't mind just using a switch to connect everything directly, and most of the world will just use WiFi if given the opportunity.
Also AFAIK it was limited to 100mbit/sec so by the time it became a thing it was already kind of obsolete.
The same wires on the HDMI cable are used for HDMI ARC, which is far more useful to most TVs (as it allows smart TV apps to back-feed their audio to a soundbar or receiver "upstream" of the display.