Walmart buying TV-brand Vizio for its ad-fueling customer data | Hacker News Reader

Walmart buying TV-brand Vizio for its ad-fueling customer data

arstechnica.com

132 pointsjameslk143 comments

There are "universal scaler" boards which are free of this "smartness" and yet have a tuner and other multimedia features you'd want in a TV, and are also quite cheap:

https://mysku.club/blog/aliexpress/67872.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre... (translation of above into English)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tst5Xmh3q-A

I wonder how popular a service for "upgrading" TVs with those would be. Market it as "spyware delete" and I suspect you might get a lot of business... possibly to the point of causing the manufacturers to take offensive action.

Can't you just not connect it to the internet? I prefer Microsoft to spy on me on my Xbox.

In the days of 5G this is no longer a guarantee.

I don’t know if any tvs include this kind of thing yet but 5G modems and service are cheap enough for devices to not need your network to phone home.

This is a worry, but (a) so far it’s still in the future (b) 5G coverage is not complete enough in residential areas, at least in America. Many houses have extremely poor cell service.

A press release from AT&T boasting about 5G IoT progress

https://about.att.com/blogs/2023/5g-redcap.html

Customers of various smart television brands have, over the past few years, reported that their newly acquired television will, given power, connect to nearby open wireless networks without user intervention or permission.

Any device that connects to my wireless network is not able to do anything until I go into an app on my phone and manually move it to an account that will give it access. Fortunately, there are no other open networks within range.

You should still put a password on your Wi-Fi network to encrypt your traffic.

WPA3 allows for non-password protected but still having encryption:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8110

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_Wireless_Encrypt...

* https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/security#Wi-FiEnhancedO...

* https://www.wi-fi.org/wi-fi-download/35331 (PDF)

Is this actually widely implemented in WiFi clients and APs? I have never seen the "Enhanced open" indication in Android.

Yeah, that’s not going to stop network sniffing unless your network is protected.

I've heard this too, but never seen a shred of evidence. Do you know of any?

It might change when 5g becomes ubiquitous but I think it is an urban legend as of today.

Maybe open it up and disconnect the antennas?

Who even has an open wifi network anymore?

No one. It is pure urban legend. If it were true, it would not merely be a thing said in forums, it would be national news.

Theoretically a company that drives through neighborhoods often such as Amazon could have an open hotspot and an agreement with TV manufacturers to share the data.

I heard that a couple of times but I've never seen an actual demo that it occurred..

Yes, with LG, you can apparently still avoid connecting it with recent models, which gives you have effectively a dumb monitor with (for OLED) a glorious picture. Can’t vouch for other makes.

TCL is the same.

It will only show a popup when turned on to tell you you're not connected to the internet, but it goes away after a few seconds and then it's smooth sailing.

It remembers and selects the previous input when turned on, and it also seems to do input auto-switching when I turn on my set-top box. After I've configured the image parameters and whatnot, I never touched its remote anymore.

I hate the UI on my LG TV.

I want to play a video game, or connect my laptop to it. The input is already set to the correct HDMI port from previous usage, and it has a video signal on it.

When turned on, the TV still displays an app selection bar a the bottom that never goes away.

Also, I can't tweak the colors, only choose from a few presets. And color calibration is terrible, vivid yellows become some weird color.

Which model? My LG C2 had none of these issues. It also hasn’t been connected to Wi-Fi in a year, so maybe it’s an issue with the latest software.

55UJ630V from 2018.

Did a coulpe of updates several years ago, but I got worried it woud install an update with ads, so I turned off automatic updates.

But it kept pestering me, so I unplugged the Ethernet cable and bought a Fire Stick.

Now I'm getting automatic trailers on the Fire Stick when it boots up.

Yeah, from LG to Amazon is out of the frying pan and into the fire. Amazon is one of the most privacy invasive providers there is

If it were as simple as just not connecting to the internet as is often suggested, I'd have done that already! Also yeah, it can be a bit of diminishing returns on the privacy front when it comes to the things we do use to drive our media consumption haha

Go find a TV a few years old with android or whatever 'smart' OS on it and tell me how long it takes to boot and be meaningfully interacted with (like opening an app, like the TV app). What about how many times it randomly reboots in the span of an hour and loses all configuration including selected time and time zone configuration which in the case of a TV renders the electronic program guide literally unable to function (oddly specific, but bear with me...) or how many really weird bugs you run into like the top of the line Samsung 'smart' TV I once borrowed (which did lose time and time zone setting when it rebooted) where when you tried to set the time or time zone, it would set the time an hour or two wrong in a completely unpredictable pattern. Using it felt like I was living in The Good Place when Eleanor was making it all topsy-turvy, I swear

I was so lucky that I found a 4K TV with a big enough screen with absolutely NO 'smart' features. None. It has what appears to be the same firmware as the old cheapo 720p TV I got to replace my old faux wood panelled thing that was so old it needed a chain of adapters to run a PlayStation (1). The EPG just ...works. Not that I watch TV any more; it's always on HDMI. It boots up in seconds. It doesn't randomly restart. I don't have to tell it to not connect to the internet cos it doesn't know that the internet exists! Glorious. I might also have a chance in hell of repairing it if (fine, when) it does die. I'll have saved up enough by that point to afford one of those big screens meant for advertising displays or whatever that doesn't even have a TV tuner either lol.

Please excuse my light hearted rant on the plight of my OECD nation problem (it's a real burden /s), but temporarily borrowing a 'smart' TV drastically reduced how much I watched and played because it was TORTUROUS to just get the stupid thing to turn on and show the HDMI1 input. I really do mean torturous. The extra privacy that comes with not having an internet TV is obviously a bonus, but I run all my media off my laptop anyway (I use my consoles for games only).

I just don't want software like that existing on a device where all it does is cause complications that just don't need to exist (for me). The built-in obsolescence of these TV OSes is just awful. If it were as simple as just not giving it access to the internet (ignoring the general availability of open wifi or the potential of 4/5G shipping with the TV itself so it can always phone home anyway) I'd love that and I'd do that but good lord I will stop having a TV before I use a 'smart' TV ever again.

> or how many really weird bugs you run into like the top of the line Samsung 'smart' TV I once borrowed (which did lose time and time zone setting when it rebooted) where when you tried to set the time or time zone

Apropos of anything else, wouldn't surprise me. My dhcpd.conf has several devices where I've set the time-offset to counteract - with varying degrees of success - IoT devices that think they know where they are and the time zone better than I.

My uncle recently got a smart TV (cuz it was on sale) but never uses the "smart" features, so as I was setting it up I declined to connect it to his wifi. The TV only showed the cable channels; trying to switch to HDMI, open the menu to change settings, etc were all locked out unless you logged onto a wifi network.

Wow this is really disturbing to hear.

Time to name & shame these vendors - do you remember what the brand was?

I assure you that the % of people that care about this to the degree that they’d go this far off the beaten track is far from being large enough for any TV manufacturer to care about, let alone for it to be worth it to them to change their product direction in any meaningful way. This is fanfic plain and simple.

I would love to replace the full hardware of my TV(s).

Starting times are horrible, it's like a bad joke where I wait up to 2 minutes to boot into netflix (boot horrible half smart OS, that boots into the MiTV stick (which sucks, and crashes) just to have a normal Netflix experience. You cannot control external speakers with the remote. They literally didn't put that in for their speaker output.

My full android TV is not better either, boots forever. Recently started to do HDMI only in BW until I factory reset it. I mostly use it with a Linux computer as that's less painful.

And the newest fun is that the remotes have constant connection issues on both TVs if they are more than 2 meters away. Which, why wouldn't it, blocks the whole screen until reconnected.

TVs at this point are literally the worst customer tech products I could imagine.

My Android TV (from Sony) has the habit of randomly restarting every so often, most of the time while I'm watching something I don't want to miss of course - no idea if it's doing system updates or just crashing, but even the updates could wait until I turn the TV off? It also has some quirks that appear from time to time (buttons on the remote not working, sound or image not working etc.), then I know it's time to, as the saying goes, try turning it off and on again. And, most annoying of all, sometimes it just randomly "forgets" channels, so I have to do a full channel scan (or restore the channels from a USB stick) to get them back. Since a few weeks, channel 4 is one channel when I press "up" from channel 3 and a different channel when I press "down" from channel 5. I can't even start to imagine a way to implement the channel list that would allow this bug to happen, but it does...

> Since a few weeks, channel 4 is one channel when I press "up" from channel 3 and a different channel when I press "down" from channel 5. I can't even start to imagine a way to implement the channel list that would allow this bug to happen, but it does...

And here was me thinking I spend the extra for a Sony on the next TV as they appear to 'more stable'. But well...

I don’t think his anecdotal experience is representative of the masses. I have a Bravia Google TV and I’ve experienced none of his issues, except that controlling external speakers is limited to something like 10 surround sound SKUs, presumably all Sony options. Other than that, we’ve loved the speed and usability of this TV for about 2.5 years now.

My in-laws have a fairly high end Sony smart TV (Android TV based) from only 3 or 4 years ago and it's the worst POS I've ever encountered. It was always a bit sluggish (flipping through menus, changing channels, etc) but recently it has slowed to an absolute crawl. Any type of App or even bringing up the menu takes like 2 minutes, and turning on the TV takes like 5 minutes. Once it's booted up, at least flipping through the OTA channels "only" takes about 2 or 3 seconds, so it's somewhat usable.

My initial instinct is that some sort of hardware is failing (storage, maybe?) but it was quite slow to begin with, so it's plausible a software update is the cause.

Adding an anecdata to the pile - my parents have a Sony Smart TV and yeah, it's a POS. Trying to watch some YouTube videos at Christmas and it would frequently crash with "This page requires too much memory" errors.

I have this problem. I almost cannot use it at all apart from chromecast streaming.

Any ideas what could fix it?

Just speculating, but do a factory reset and never ever connect it to the Internet. Maybe try older firmware if it's available.

When I was a kid my grandparents had an old style TV with vacuum tubes. It also required several minutes to “heat up” before the picture appeared. I guess we’ve come a full circle.

Minutes? More like seconds, tens of seconds at most; you can watch videos of them starting up on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jImib9Keio8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxUQw5vCDZs

If it's any consolation my in-laws have a similarly sluggish LG WebOS TV. When I go over there I hate having to navigate the menu.

At home I have an non smart LG with an Nvidia Shield.

At least on my LG TV, basic non-"smart" controls are available directly via both RS-232[1] and IR remote without recourse to menus.

The IR remote, in particular, might be a solution for your in-laws' TV, as LG-compatible IR remotes are "plug-and-play" and available for less than $10 (avoid "service" remotes for this application, as they include a button that makes it easy to accidentally factory reset the TV, which is both annoying and, in the case of OLED TVs, maybe even potentially harmful[2].

RS-232 is particularly nice for tinkering with one's own TV, as it allows you to disable the OSD entirely, completely neutering all smart TV functions and pop-ups until the TV is turned off (or OSD is re-enabled via RS-232), and also includes video and audio controls not available on any of the IR remotes I've seen (brightness, contrast, bass, treble, etc.).

Along with a 4-port IR-controllable USB switch[3] and an audio interface with a TOSLINK input[4], I use the RS-232 functionality as a basis for my desktop "KVM", with inputs, brightness, power, and volume controlled with an Apple Siri remote paired to a Mac.

The only times I touch the menus are rare cases where I actually want to use the built-in smart TV apps (viz., for 4K video from services that don't support it on Mac or PC).

[1] https://github.com/jasminetroll/LgTvControl/blob/master/Docu...

[2] Source: unconfirmed Internet claims that the button resets a panel refresh timer that may lead to burn-in and warranty invalidation, which seems crazy for something that could be triggered without confirmation by a simple IR command one might accidentally mis-program into a universal remote by mistyping a single number.

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Sharing-Computers-Perip...

[4] https://babyface.rme-audio.de

Which is awesome and highly recommended, but for the present application any USB audio interface with low-latency monitoring and TOSLINK should work as well (and if you don't care about mixing the currently active HDMI audio source with other audio like I do, the volume on the TV's built-in speakers and non-digital audio outputs is controllable via RS-232).

As a counterpoint we bought one recently (though it's literally their flagship, an A95L) and it's been wonderful. The only thing I could say is that the remote seems a bit battery hungry (~6 months on a. set of batteries).

To be fair, we don't use broadcast or cable, and use an AppleTV. So it's run as a dumb set for the most part. All the people complaining here seem to be using the built-in OS and tuner.

That's the problem. People want to use the TV's own OS. I never quite understood why.

It's probably crashing.

You can plug the TV into a smart plug and disconnect it from mains power when not in use. The boot times will probably be longer, but it won't crash as much during use.

It is. And yes it works better if it was disconnected before, but not reliable. However I likely have a unlucky stick, from the 3 I bought that's the one acting up most.

Yeah, that's quite possible.

My Sony also has some minor glitches like forgetting to output sound sometimes (a restart fixes it - it's most probably caused by one of the apps I have installed).

I just bought a dumb tv (on clearance as I presume the manufacturer is moving on to smart models).

Just plug into a regular PC media center with a full browser and use an air mouse (Wii like thing) to control

That's what I do in my living room. Still need to boot the TV to android, hope the remote works so I can switch to HDMI and hope the remote doesn't have connection issues because that captures any screen on my TV.

Raspberry pi, you can add HDMI-CEC and you can control the media center app with the TV remote without adding any hardware.

Or just get a stick pc that plugs in via hdmi

Just buy an Apple TV or similar and never connect the display to the internet.

Linux PC but otherwise yeah, I just laughed when TV asked for wifi and then set it to never ask again.

It has one job, display pixels, that's it, that's all I want it to do.

Yeah 100%. It is just a dumb display. One input. I don't even use the speakers or the remote it came with.

> It has one job, display pixels, that's it, that's all I want it to do.

If that's all it does, it's a monitor, not a TV. A TV has a second job: to directly receive over-the-air (and/or cable) channels. That is, the presence of a tuner is what differentiates a TV from a mere monitor.

Maybe once, but not so much anymore.

Is there a way to get decent output for drmed up crap (which is rather a lot of the video content most people want to watch) on Linux these days? Last I heard, you can't get 4k on Netflix and presumably also get the shaft from other streaming providers.

Pirate Bay (allegedly)

But then you're probably going to want to set up a bunch of *arrs and a nas, and things are looking less and less like a straightforward alternative to an appletv.

> *arrs and a nas

You may be complicating things. I make do with a 1TB hard drive and SFTP over LAN.

Old tech works just as well.

So you manually search for and download videos, manually curate your collection (including somewhat frequently clearing out space for new things), and manually keep track of what episode you're on in what show? That really does not work just as well.

Don't even need SFTP, http works fine with VLC :)

Literally just download your torrents into a web root that is set to list indexes, copy the link into VLC and go :).

I just drop mp4's/mkv's in a web root - you can play those in VLC with no issues.

VLC runs on everything anyone in my house cares about, it's so simple no one has an issue with it.

Just get a projector

But which one? All the good ones I see have also android on them!

One built before 2015

If smart TVs are spying on us so much that the ads are the most valuable part, should we start calling then telescreens? 1984 vibes.

Vizio is among the TV brands that were already caught spying on people through their "Smart" TVs (1). I do my best to stay away from that junk as my Kodi box is more than enough, but if I had one, I'd either never connect it to the Internet, or do that through a huge list of banned IPs, as mere DNS filtering pi-hole style could not be enough. Also beware of Ethernet equipped HDMI cables and unprotected WiFi.

1- https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/02/08/shocking...

Privacy concerns aside it’s problematic that a grocery store chain has enough money to buy a TV manufacturer. So many of the brands in our lives have become too big and powerful in my opinion.

Calling Walmart a "grocery store chain" is like saying GE is a "light bulb company".

Or Amazon is a bookseller.

Sort of the point, innit?

I don't get your point. Are you saying Walmart shouldn't sell food? Shouldn't be able to sell diverse things? Shouldn't be able to make money by selling things?

Neither of that, you're being deliberately obtuse. Think more on what OP said and don't bring the conversarion down with false accusations.

> Shouldn't be able to make money by selling things?

There's a point to be made that vertical integration is bad for the system as a whole... and there is historic examples where such schemes got broken up, e.g. by the Paramount case [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

> Are you saying Walmart shouldn't sell food?

I'm fine with it

> Shouldn't be able to sell diverse things?

Less fine with it.

> Shouldn't be able to make money by selling things?

That's some bad faith nonsense.

Superstores are bad. They hurt small businesses and provide awful service and an awful shopping environment. The prices aren't even low, they just made the quality of the goods fit the price. If Walmart wants to be a grocer, let them focus on that so that a better store for electronics, furniture, firearms (etc.) can take their place.

Stores like Walmart also commonly build outside of town relying on unsustainable highway development practices for customers to travel there. (Compared to your old school neighborhood or corner grocery store)

They're consistently one of the largest grocery sellers in the US, so I think it's fair.

They're paying less than one year's revenue from their ad business alone.

Companies don't really "buy" companies. That's just a mental model for a merger. At its heart, it's a symmetric operation. The wealth of both companies gets divided among the owners of both companies, in proportion to an agreed valuation. You could say that Vizio is buying Wal-Mart. Either way, the combined management forms an agreement on who will be on the board and management roles after the merger, and what branding to use going forward.

why would you say such a thing?

M&A is not everything you’re saying and companies absolutely get bought.

"When I go to a store and buy an apple, I am not buying an apple, I am just entering into a symmetric operation, where my money goes to the store and the store's apple comes to me, based on an agreed valuation".

Now that iOS and even Android start to actually care about privacy, smart tvs are the last bastion of hope for advertisers.

And when will Apple enter the TV market? Seems ripe for them to make a killing.

Enter? They've been marketing a physical device called the AppleTV for 17 years.

He meant the actual TV, not the box.

Yes, I did. I thought that would have been obvious....

Apple is not a poster boy for privacy.

This feels like the perfect being the enemy of the good. What other company that actually sells products people want has a privacy record in even the same area code?

It sure isn’t Microsoft, Sony, Google, Samsung et al.

You pay premium for Apple because of advertised privacy. Yet every market analyst is well aware how they are expanding their ad business with very bold plans for the future. There is only 1 direction they can go - invasion of privacy.

They are not even trying hard to make it look like they are above ads revenue streams. Which is fine, as you mention everybody else is doing it in some way, but lets be honest here.

You're arguing facts not in evidence. It's not even a very compelling slippery slope fallacy.

Google has a terrible long-term privacy record, but over the last several years they've taken meaningful steps to improve on this, to the point that they are pretty good. They are one of the only big tech companies that provide controls to allow you to tune what sort of data they keep, to download it (take out) or outright delete it. They've even rolled out default settings such as (18-month location wipe). They're far from perfect of course, and I still wouldn't consider them "private" though I don't think any tech company is that. If you really want private, unfortunately right now you have to self-host most things.

Every company that stores any data about you has to have some form of privacy controls and data takeout by (EU) law

If it is really good, it will probably hurt their Apple Cinema Display market.

If it is not so good, what's the point?

There are also many regulations and market issues with making a panel TV, everything from standby power regulations, the tuner type (ATSC/DVB, etc.), warranty, accessibility requirements, etc. And even more issues with the ASICs that run TVs from companies like Amlogic/MediaTek/RealTek; Apple would either have to make a deal or build their own silicon IP for things like ATSC/DVB decoding, image scaling, audio decoding and processing (i.e. Dolby). And ecosystem issues like HDMI CEC, HDCP, etc.

If you side-step all of those issues and just bond a really nice display to an AppleTV and have no tuners, then you probably aren't adding much value beyond buying an LG/Sony and and AppleTV separately.

Margins are so thin that the only money to be made is in ads and tracking.

it's a race to the bottom. if your ad riddled, privacy raping tv isn't free, you'll go out of business. we need legislation.

Yeah, I’m amazed that such a ubiquitous brand is worth a scant 2 billion dollars, or 1/20th of a Twitter.

That valuation of Twitter was just way too high. Even Twitter is worth like 1/4th of a Twitter.

A brand is only valuable if the brand is valuable. What consumer gives a shit about the Vizio brand? No one says "Oh boy, I'm so happy I bought a Vizio!". It's cheap and nasty and always has been.

The cheap and nasty brand is merging with Wal-Mart.

Right. What I'm saying is they could slap either the "Vizio" name on any other cheap crap, or slap any other random name on the same TV and the people buying them wouldn't care.

I wonder if there's any way to cause an oversupply of ad information and tracking so data itself would become useless? I'm not sure if I'm making sense, but was thinking in terms of supply and demand. If everyone's data is available for free and everywhere, would that anyhow affect the ad-tech companies?

For your own advertising there's: https://adnauseam.io/

Right, that's mostly for making your data useless, but what I was thinking is like the opposite. Over-supply of real "valuable" data so its value and ad-tech that makes money on tracking becomes semi useless. I have no idea how it would work, just a post-very-heavy-dinner thought.

It would kill data brokerage and move the profits to advertisers. It would increase targeted advertising. It might make products cheaper by making ads cheaper, but would probably just lead to more advertising.

Selling all the data for $0 does the opposite of what you want. The data is still useful, you're just making it cheaper to acquire.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but as long as it doesn't require me to connect to the internet and I can just plug an HDMI cable or two into it and treat it like a monitor, I guess I don't mind so much if the price of a smart TV is supplemented by other people having to look at ads. I get the lower price benefit without the negative side.

I've got a couple Vizios right now that are basically just glorified monitors because they stay offline, and they work just fine for me.

Please keep in mind that it might just be connected to the internet over HDMI, even if unlikely (see: HDMI Ethernet Channel)

I was freaked out how nosy Vizios TV OS is. Got an Apple TV make it stop spying.

If it is internet-connected without the Apple TV, it's likely taking screen captures an identifying what you're watching.

This kind of behavior seems entirely anti-consumer. There should be legislation that limits how much literal wattage can be used of a consumer’s device that does not serve the purpose of the consumption and benefits the company financially.

Why do you assume that would that stop it spying?

Likely because they took away the internet connection from the TV and got their smart features from the box.

Yep.

Goddamn. Vizio used to have a reputation as a good TV for people that don’t want unnecessary extras.

Really? It might just be my social circles, but we always thought of Vizio as basically the Walmart special that was somewhere, somehow, going to find a backdoor way to make up the profit margin.

Vizio was known for good value on price. However tcl and other Chinese brands took over that spot lately and Vizio never managed to recover.

Admittedly, I'm a little bit of a snob when it comes to screen quality due to my specialization, but Vizio panels never seemed that good either. It was obvious they were using cheap panels to meet the desired price point.

With that said, most people were upgrading from either a CRT or an early 720p flat-panel and to them even the cheap Vizio panels were a big step up, so I don't dispute that there was a lot of value.

I think this may have been ten years ago. During the era of 3DTV and curved displays.

I thought they were reasonably well known to be cheap, so cheap infact that the hardware was sold at or below cost.

Thus the actual profit came from advertising and selling usage data.

It was 15 - 20 years ago. For a short period of time tech reviewers where all Vizio fans. Basically all recommendation heavily favored Vizio, then they pretty much disappeared and now they are back in the press, but not for being amazing.

Hah maybe I'm older than I realise.

I'm going to contest that statement.

Do people still let their TVs connect to the internet? I had to factory reset my LG tv to get it to stop trying to connect to the WiFi.

I’ve also got a block using my router, since my wife connected it to watch PLEX at one point, and it updated the OS, then it “helpfully” started showing ads in the bar AND auto connected to my network share that I had forgotten was sharing some adult content (luckily I caught it before anyone else did!)

I use a PS5 for a media center now, I figured it’s the most powerful commodity media machine you could get. Overkill but hey, it doesn’t lag, and it has PLEX on it. It’s a bit annoying that the remote has non programmable buttons for media services we don’t use, but you just can’t win them all these days.

My samsung TV's (one from 2018, one from 2022) are used for Youtube 99% of the time. I don't know if I'm just numb to them or something, but I don't directly see ads on them. I'm sure it's phoning home a buncha stuff though.

I suppose I tolerate it if it's in the background, but the moment random stuff pops up on me I'd definitely make sure the TV never connects to a wi-fi.

Disconnect that 2022 model as soon as you can. Samsung can and does deploy permanent, unremovable ads on the system menus that are cached even if the connection is lost. It’s terrible! The only way to avoid them is to not receive one in the first place.

Do they hang on after you "factory reset" the TV?

I've got a TCL TV and wanted to see if I could stop using the Amazon FireTV. It was a laggy mess and started showing ads, and kept showing placeholders and crap like that after I disconnected it. But this all went away after a factory reset.

Who do you define as “people”? Because there are the HN people who probably could even install a separate firewall to block/monitor all outgoing traffic, and then there are normal folks who don’t even know that their TV collects data. The majority of people are technologically illiterate who certainly can’t go into all the trouble of blocking ads and changing dns servers and installing firewalls and what not.

This is the same sort of feigned ignorance you use to see on Slashdot.

“Do people still watch TV? I haven’t owned a TV in 15 years “

Yes most people these days have a Plex setup, a PlayStation as a media player and their router configured to block ads…

I connect my TCL 4K HDR TV to the internet because that's how I use the remote. It has a Roku TV interface and when I turn it on it automatically goes to the input that has my m1 Mac mini (8gb RAM 256gb storage) connected to it. I hate using Plex and all I do is open up finder and go to my network attached storage (3950x with 32gb RAM and 9tb of solid state so far of mixed sata and nvme running rockstor) and load movies and TV shows and anime off of that. If I need to play PC games I use parsec to stream my windows desktop (5900x with 128gb RAM and 2080 Ti win11 pro for workstations) which is in my bedroom to the m1 Mac connected to the 4K TV and that all happens over lan and has zero latency essentially and I could play games at 4K for the most part sometimes I have to go down to 1620p. You most definitely can win these days. Having a full-fledged computer hooked up to my big TV lets me do everything from my living room with no compromises at all and my Smart TV doesn't do anything untoward. Most likely I'm not seeing anything going wrong concerning ads or excessive traffic because my router is my old retired computer, 9900k and 32gb RAM, running PF sense and I have PF blocker running on that.

Do these spyware type TVs require an internet connection to start working? For example, can we just buy the spyware TV and connect a Linux computer to it, or will it refuse to function without exfiltrating data?

No, they don't require Internet.

BTW Google TVs have a dumb mode if that's what you want. The other brands will probably annoy you with menus even if you don't want to use the smarts.

Apple TV is an option. Then all your data is going to Apple instead.

They have HDMI input. So you can pipe in what you want.

Honestly, different parts of your life being snooped on and recorded in different silos is less of an issue. The real issue is when all aspects of your life are being collated by the same entity (dammit Google stop creeping) and so they can reconstruct your entire life in minute detail.

I bought an LG over a year ago and haven’t connected it to any network ever. Works pretty great. Hasn’t asked me once to connect. Haven’t seen a single ad.

It won't be too long until "cheap" TVs start to ship embedded LTE modems...

if you own a vizio and its connected to the internet, disconnect it. mine made my pihole work overtime redirecting all its phone home requests. hate to think why it wants to call home all the time

How many times will the same story make it's rounds on the frontpage from different sources?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39440354

For future reference:

[dupe]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39440354 (optionally tagging dang depending on the severity)

That's all that's necessary. Mods here do have the ability to combine and collapse comment threads into the larger post, so this is a fixable issue on HN.

> (optionally tagging dang depending on the severity)

There's no such thing as tagging anyone on HN; if you want to get mod attention, there's an email address listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks, that's good to know. I didn't think those @ tags did much, but there's so many hidden features of HN that I can never be truly sure.

I always assumed dang has a filter for his name, bec he’s usually pretty prompt in responding.

> p.s. (@dang doesn't work - I only saw this by accident. Well, not by accident because it ended up at the top of the thread)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39426902

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