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Comment by Bran_son | Hacker News Reader

> But almost 225 million TVs sell annually. People buy smart TVs.

There's literally nothing else on the consumer market. Edit: There may be a dumb Sceptre TV hidden in a Walmart warehouse somewhere, but I checked and there are none available in my entire EU country. Meanwhile the smart TVs sure don't advertise their spyware as prominently as their price, so we can add fraud in addition to robbery.

> As I understand governments just set a bit to disable IME on already existing processors. But if you want a feature and are willing to give them billions of dollars, Intel or anyone else absolutely will add a feature for you. [..] Custom silicon is absolutely a thing

If all it takes is setting a bit, I don't see why you'd invoke custom silicon except to muddy the waters.

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That's not even true, as I mentioned.

Examples:

https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Sceptre-55-Class-4K-UHD-LED-TV-HD...

Also, it's besides my point. The fact that people buy smart TVs in large numbers is proof of the fact that the privacy concerns are not a factor in the mass market's buying decisions.

Do you own a TV? Did you buy a Sceptre? Why not? Did you not care enough about the privacy consideration to do a quick search to see that they exist? Most people don't.

> If all it takes is setting a bit, I don't see why you'd invoke custom silicon except to muddy the waters.

Because I was responding precisely to your gripe about "impossibility of buying a CPU without Intel Management Engine (or AMD equivalent)". If you are happy setting that bit, then the problem you are complaining about doesn't exist:

https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/factory-laptop-with-ime-disa...

https://hackaday.com/2023/04/12/disabling-intels-backdoors-o...

> Do you own a TV? Did you buy a Sceptre? Why not?

I do, I did not, because my TV is old enough to not yet be "smart", and because Sceptres are literally not available anywhere in my country. Am I now virtuous enough by your standards to point out how hostile manufacturers are to users?

> The fact that people buy smart TVs in large numbers is proof

Hey I wonder if you asked ten random people if they knew their smart TV was reporting the contents of their USB sticks and their viewing habits to 3rd parties, how many would answer yes? This is the same revealed preference tortured logic that concludes people don't care about child labor because they still buy chocolate. Out of sight out of mind.

> If you are happy setting that bit, then the problem you are complaining about doesn't exist

Then this is a recent development, because in 2017 even Google was unable to get rid of IME: As of 2017, Google was attempting to eliminate proprietary firmware from its servers and found that the ME was a hurdle to that. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#By_Goo...

I don't disagree that the state of things are the way they are.

People say they care about the moral hazards, noneconomic costs, and other bad downstream consequences of their consumption if confronted about them.

Yet, most go right back out to the store and continue consuming the same products and services anyway. But saying that someone does or doesn't support something has no functional relevance when they open their wallet and literally reward it for happening.

My point is only that that there is one reason why these things happen -- because the economics of these situations encourage companies to take these actions.

I don't like that these things are happening any more than you do, but lip service it will never change it. It has to be made financially unviable. For it to stop, either the mass market must be convinced to make purchasing decisions based on it, or the activities must be made financially unviable by force of law.

>But saying that someone does or doesn't support something has no functional relevance when they open their wallet and literally reward it for happening.

A very relatable example for people here are gamers and professionals who shout they want AMD Radeon to become competitive to Nvidia GeForce, and then go right out and buy Nvidia GeForces once the products come out. We don't even need to talk about Intel ARC.

Capitalism is a system of voting with wallets, so voting with speech has no bearing on what results come out of capitalism as you say.

Another take: people are consistent - they want something to happen, but they don't want to make a big personal sacrifice that may, possibly, with a very little probability, actually make it happen, and that's only if almost everyone does it at the same time.

I.e. gamers are not dumb.

> Capitalism is a system of voting with wallets, so voting with speech has no bearing on what results come out of capitalism as you say.

Modern economy is a system set up in a way to force people to wallet-vote for specific classes of options, as it exploits the fact that most people are extremely price-sensitive by default, since the pool of votes they have is almost entirely spent on voting "yes I want to keep living in this apartment" and "yes I want me and my family to eat today". People will accept a lot of shit from the market, in order to not lose the vote for "my kids get to have a meal every day".

Looking at purchasing patterns of regular people and making inferences about their general preferences? It's even more idiotic than making a psychological study of students in your class, and generalizing the result to the whole population.

Everything you say flies in the face of Nvidia continuing to get away with ridonkulous pricing despite continued claims of gamers wanting to see AMD Radeon become competitive.

If you want changes in a company's behaviour, you buy or boycott their products as applicable. The bottom line is literally and rightfully the only factor companies truly care about.

> Everything you say flies in the face of Nvidia continuing to get away with ridonkulous pricing despite continued claims of gamers wanting to see AMD Radeon become competitive.

That's the problem though: unless AMD can offer GeForce equivalents at lower price, gamers won't be buying it. They'll keep buying Nvidia products instead, because they want to play their games now, and they aren't going to settle for a worse card just to make a point.

> If you want changes in a company's behaviour, you buy or boycott their products as applicable.

No, you don't, because boycotts don't work. They never did[0]. They cannot be made to work, as humans simply can't spontaneously self-coordinate at the scale necessary[1].

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[0] - Except hyper-local cases where the majority of the target market knows the vendor personally, and know each other personally, because they live in the same area.

[1] - This being the general reason for most of our present-era large-scale and global problems.

It’s not up to the consumer which GPU is better; it’s up to the producer. A consumer might want better competition but if the competing producers aren’t actually delivering, there’s nothing the consumer can do about it. Maybe you’re describing some theory where you buy the inferior competing product hoping that the company reinvests those revenues into developing a better product, but (a) there’s no guarantee of that ever working out and (b) this particular example doesn’t even work for that since both AMD and Intel have CPU revenue they could invest in competing with Nvidia.

I mean, if AMD GPU’s were worse across the board but people bought them anyway because they were that annoyed at Nvidia, what would that actually demonstrate? It would demonstrate that AMD didn’t actually need to step up their GPU game after all. They could carry on with an inferior product and face no repercussions. The thing is, real world customers, given the choice, don’t usually buy inferior products in an effort to subsidize struggling producers. And if you force them to do so, you basically end up with the Jones Act.

Both sides factor into the equation, the producer needs to produce good products and the consumer needs to decide whose products they wish to enable more of.

Look at Intel and AMD in the CPU market: AMD is slowly but surely taking market share from Intel because they are making the superior products overall and the consumers are willing to put their wallets where their mouths are. By contrast, Nvidia vs. AMD in the GPU market is an example of consumers not willing to put their wallets where their mouths are and the market will reflect that.

The difference is that AMD is making CPU’s that are competitive with Intel on a cost-performance basis. It doesn’t make any sense to blame this on the consumer when it’s a case of the producer failing to compete.

> For it to stop, either the mass market must be convinced to make purchasing decisions based on it, or the activities must be made financially unviable by force of law.

In the end, these are kind of the same thing; because the laws are made by the people the mass market elects. The second can sometimes advance in a direction people don't "care" about, but they can't long go strongly against them.

e.g. the EU could require all smart TVs be sold with a switch that puts them in "dumb mode" and it would probably work for them, but if they straight banned smart TVs that'd get overturned quite quickly by the people.

> The fact that people buy smart TVs in large numbers is proof of the fact that the privacy concerns are not a factor in the mass market's buying decisions.

It's not a proof of it at all.

People don't choose options from the abstract space of possible TVs. They choose from what's available. The vendors can and do set the range of choices people have, and there's shit all mass market can do about it. Literally everyone may hate it, but if the vendors don't offer an option that doesn't suck, and/or spend a lot of effort and money advertising the options that do suck, then people will buy it, and will hate it, because they don't have an actual choice here.

Non-smart TVs do exist, but also if the privacy concerns were something people were really concerned, they could choose not to buy them.

The reality is that people do not care enough to even read the privacy policies.

> Non-smart TVs do exist

Not at comparable quality or price point. The insidious parts about abusive business models like surveillance/ad-sponsored or "free with ads" is that they set a price point that more honest business models can hardly reach.

Take two practically identical TVs by two competing vendors. One decides to go evil and have their product show ads in the UI, while siphoning data. They other does not. The first can use the money they make on ads and surveillance to lower the price of the product, even below manufacturing costs. You can't compete with that while staying honest.

> The reality is that people do not care enough to even read the privacy policies.

Of course. Why would you expect to? Every product and service now comes with insanely long terms of service and privacy policies, written in a way as to prevent regular people from even trying to understand it. There is only so much hours in a day, so much days in a lifetime, so much money in the wallet - people "don't care" about privacy, but not in the sense that it doesn't matter, but rather there's too many more important/pressing things to do than read ToS-es all day.

Yes, this is in line with what I was trying to point out above about the economics of the situation. The economic value consumers place on privacy is lower than what is required to release a mass market competitive device without ad data monetization. Think we’re just talking in circles at this point.

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