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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

Downfall implies a failure or ending, it seems like they're still selling like hotcakes. This is why we need regulation to save us from surveillance, most consumers want cheap and don't understand/care that they're selling their privacy instead.

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They’re selling like hotcakes because you cannot find non-smart TVs anymore

It's called a large computer monitor or projector, but you have to pay a lot more because it's not being subsidized by ads or surveillance.

Even if you could smart TVs would outsell dumb TVs by a great margin.

I don't know if that is true. Everyone I know with a smart TV uses some other device hooked into it (roku, apple tv, video games) to run the actual streaming apps because the TV hardware is so poor. If they could buy a TV that's just a TV and pay a little less to not have those features they aren't ever using, they'd probably do it. Most people just care abut whether a TV is a certain size and only gamers really care about 4k. If you cared about 4k for movies you wouldn't waste that resolution on compressed streaming content; you'd probably have a small blu ray collection.

Aside from a few Apple TVs I don't know many people who do that, especially not Roku which I presume is some American thing, but I know a lot of people who use the apps on their Smart TV. The rest are hooking up the TV to their computer. I also know a lot of people (me included) who wants a 4K TV just to watch Netflix in 4K so I don't think that's generally true. Don't know anyone who uses Blu-ray.

Maybe its a generational thing with us millenials having these devices. Almost everyone I know has a game system, either a PS4/5 or an xbox.

They do exist if you look for them:

e.g. https://www.sharpconsumer.uk/electronics/tv/non-smart-tv-hd-...

(Edit: size and resolution admittedly not great)

That's the beauty of great click bait. A word or idiom can mean different things now to people from different social nets. "Downfall" here could mean in terms of sales, or it could mean in industry reputation, or even more things even the author isn't aware of. Either way the headline has apparently tested well probably due to its controversial meaning.

some manufacturers are outright scamming people - philips has added advertisement to TVs after they were sold!

I thought that was Samsung. Of course it wouldn't surprise me if it was both.

Same with my Nvidia Shield TV which is aggravating.

At least with the Shield, nVidia wasn't the one that added those ads. It was Google. nVidia was put in a bad situation there, and I'm hoping they'll correct it soon.

Sony did too. I tried to bypass it by getting a relatively expensive nVidia Shield. It got home screen ads about a year later.

I quite like my android tv on my lg display. It’s responsive with a nice solid feeling remote. I think there are ads on the screen but I’ve never given them more than a passing glance except once or twice I was recommended a good tv show. Most people outside of the HN crowd really don’t think about this stuff at all.

> I’ve never given them more than a passing glance except once or twice I was recommended a good tv show.

Looks like the ads worked.

To my knowledge, LG TVs don't run Android TV, but webOS instead.

Sony*, sorry

Any TV sold in the EU must adhere to the GDPR, so there has to be some sort of opt-out for tracking (and yes, GDPR opt-out also applies for "anonymized" profiling)

No opt-out. It must be opt-in - off from the start.

This does not stop companies from making it very difficult to stay opted out, or to disregard GDPR entirely. After all, enforcement is very rare.

Then it will be the classic "Do you want to opt-in?" popup with two options: "Yes" and "Ask later" with a lack of a No button. Just show this every time the TV is powered on, and getting "consent" is a matter of weeks at best.

Intent matters, and EU DPOs and courts have already begun striking back against dark patterns [0] years ago.

[1] https://www.datenschutzkanzlei.de/grenzen-des-nudging-lg-ros...

Tell it to Meta who used that pattern on Whatsapp to obtain consent to merge data with Facebook.

Meta is governed by the Irish DPO which just about everyone else thinks they're intentionally stalling, Germany is pissed in particular [0].

[0] https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/datenschutz...

My LG TV has opt-in for tracking. That said, a lot of stuff just refuses to work unless I accept it. I refuse to use those features. It's a lose-lose situation.

So what legislation? How many consumers even knowing that they are being tracked and advertised to are willing to pay the price so their hardware, software, and services come ad free?

If the US follows what the GDPR did, we will just have pop ups before every TV show asking us will we allow tracking.

If there is actually legal force behind our ability to say no, then this is not a bad place to be.

Ideally we'd include in the law the provision to say no once for some extended period of time. CAN-SPAM is a precedent for this, I believe.

How did that work out?

Well, given that people make pretty good money baiting companies that don't respect their opt-out, I'd say it's working fairly well. It's not scammers we're battling here, it's companies that need to play by the rules.

Your downvoters don't know that that's exactly what happens. I see cookie consent popups on the TV, every time. I have no idea where they are coming from.

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