It should be legally required for these products to allow for people to turn 'smart' features off if they want to. Unfortunately, it probably won't be any time soon.
And yet...
And the perfect example! If I was choosing between two otherwise-equivalent hot tubs I would /definitely/ pay more for one without the ability to call home. Are there enough people who would also be willing to pay more, and pay enough more to make up the difference in lost advertising revenue? I guess...not?
> There's a hot tub brand who include LTE radios in their hot tubs
Only source I've seen so far for this ridiculous claim is "an executive of Sony said so in an interview". Yeah, a really neutral source of information, indeed.
55" open cell panel costs less than $100 and this is by far the single most expensive component in a TV.
So a $300 Walmart special Roku TV might needed to be subsidized a little, but doing the same on a fancy LG, Samsung or Sony would be purely out of greed.
I read some representative from Nvidia Shield explaining that they were forced to add a Netflix button to their remote in 2019 because Netflix would no longer allow their app to be installed on devices without a dedicated button.
Some smart TVs can milk money from subscription partnerships, but on a per-tv-sold basis it's not really that much.
I mean, I can understand the value of user data from Facebook but a stove or a fridge? What exactly are they selling?
Edit: realized now we're talking about TVs but still, is that data really worth that much?
I'd like to see sources on that.
Amazon's tablet is like $20 cheaper if you buy it with integrated ads. A TV will have a hard time showing so many ads through the day that it'll halve the price.
I just checked a (Swedish) price comparison site and the cheapest 65" 4K TV currently available was literally less than half the price of the cheapest Not Smart TV.
Also with Smart TVs I had a choice of over 200 different models, while with Not Smart TVs I had a choice of 2.
What we do know is that even the least price-sensitive consumers, that buy the most high-end TVs, aren't given the option:
Buying a product knowing it has ads in it is one thing, but users on Reddit and elsewhere are understandably angry about ads suddenly being patched into their devices—especially in cases when these devices are multi-thousand-dollar 4K Sony televisions - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/google-pilot-program...
Appliance companies seem to be barely making margins anymore, so it's not like they're robbing you blind, more that a startup would need to create a simple device that is also twice the price of everyone else.
You'd hope that there's be enough of a delta in that "pay more", and enough folks who would do so, to make a market. Shame it seems like there isn't.
See also: US made hand tools. Everyone seems to yearn for the old Craftsman days, but not enough people want to pay that premium. While Harbor Freight seems ever expanding...
I'll probably never buy a television again, since it seems you can't buy a decent non-smart panel without crossing into the enterprise (and adding an order of magnitude in price). And I'm not alone! How is there not a single manufacturer making a single modern non-smart LCD TV? Hell, call it the "HNTV" and expect to sell no more than...20,000? At 200€ in margin that's a 4m€ product line, surely worth throwing off given that the R&D is just removing hardware from an existing model?
Doing it yourself would be way too risky.
But be prepared for the big guys to absolutely bury you once you show any inkling of success.
I think it's a great idea, but I can see why nobody has tried the space. I sure wouldn't.
- Producing and especially shipping and storing huge and/or heavy appliances is expensive AF, which means you need a lot of upfront capital for inventory and warehouses
- Getting onto Amazon is easy, but almost no one buys a fridge on Amazon - which means you have to establish a relationship with brick-and-mortar retail, and that is difficult: the retailers expect free demonstration units for each location or subsidy for advertising, as well as have ridiculously long payment schedules (depending on whose rumors you listen to, some chains want up to 1 year of time from product delivery to payment due date!).
Basically, it boils down to the question on how and where to get money to disrupt an industry that has enormous cash requirements, low margins and an extremely niche target demographic. Your best bet is a benevolent billionaire willing to put up cash for decades.
There is a lot to be said about throwing whole classes of users under the bus (elderly, people with disabilities) when asking them to manage technology mostly because how these things are going to be implemented (e.g. the security vs usability dilemma).
I welcome new legislation in this area but it seems to me that lobbyists are once again screwing over the general consumer by adding anti-features into these legislations. Luckily IOT-vendors are absolutely abysmal at protecting their devices so I doubt we'll see too many devices locked down that weren't already.
one thing:
> Luckily IOT-vendors are absolutely abysmal at protecting their devices so I doubt we'll see too many devices locked down that weren't already.
it is either compliance or no CE stamp (if a product does not meet safety requirements they have to remove connectivity or take it off the shelves). And either they are already scrambling because the cost of this has already sunk in, ... or they are in for a surprise pretty soon because becoming compliant isn't a one-off activity but means restructuring their entire processes (e.g. test automation to maintain that compliance)
> It should be legally required
Absolutely not. But I also don't want that level of company control over everything. I think "government punishing companies" is a much better alternative to "companies punishing people".
> Or, a soldering iron.
In this case, the wireless card could be just detached physically. But what happens when e.g. device requires network access to work, but also has some malicious feature? What if the malicious feature is baked in the hardware, e.g. DRM? Do we just pull out an electron microscope and a disassembler?
> price in externalities
Since we cannot fundamentally eliminate exploitative behavior just yet, seeing as the world is full of suffering and people grow up with all sorts of psychological trauma and cannot help trying to secure themselves at the expense of others, the biggest antagonist of the market that we can tackle is information asymmetry.
In some countries, you can bet that every mention of a regulation intended to tackle a specific instance of information asymmetry abuse (often enabled by advances in technology) will be accompanied by concerns about “government control over everything” and that “the market should fix it”. Unfortunately, that agenda mostly helps the exploitative behavior.
If we don’t do our best to keep the market working by compensating for information asymmetry, command economy will eat it.
> we cannot fundamentally eliminate exploitative behavior just yet
Are you saying that exploitative behavior is exclusive to capitalism? If so, would you elaborate how do other economic systems avoid exploitative behavior - i.e. what makes capitalism so much worse?
My point is that exploitation is inherent property of a huge power difference. It doesn't matter if the system is capitalism, socialism, or whateverotherkindism.
Reminds me of a quote from a very talented mathematician:
Imagine the case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the same amount of land, but one of whom is more powerful than the other. The powerful one demands a piece of the other’s land. The weak one refuses. The powerful one says, “OK, let’s compromise. Give me half of what I asked.” The weak one has little choice but to give in. Some time later the powerful neighbor demands another piece of land, again there is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a long series of compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets all of his land. > My point is that exploitation is inherent property of a huge power difference.
It doesn't have to be a single company per se - all the companies could hold power over you at the same time.
E.g. if most huge refrigerator companies agree (explicitly or implicitly) to all include "smart" features that violate the customers' privacy, then the refrigerator companies hold power over you - you can't buy a refrigerator without "smart" features, as there aren't any on the market. You can ask for a "dumb" refrigerator, but ultimately you aren't the one making the refrigerators, so you don't make the decisions. Perhaps some other company will join in, and try to fill in the niche of "dumb" refrigerators, but they will either not have the resources/connections of the already-established companies, or their efforts will be undermined by the already-established companies in order to keep their power, or they might even succeed but have their refrigerators so expensive that privacy-seeking people have to pay premium in order to get it.