Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
It is mind-boggling that there is no uproar over this. Of course, if the EU were to make a fuss, Americans would be all screaming "it's over-regulating!".
Apropos of nothing, what other country besides the US has a law that specifically prohibits giving a bribe to a foreign government?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/28/mps-have-de...
(Off the top of my head: USB-C, GDPR, Digital Services Act, Schrems, and anti-trust fines respectively).
The other part is immature basic whataboutism that doesnt deserve a response, I am sure you can do better, and more on topic hopefully.
The EU tries to regulate things that get too dangerous to its citizens. The important part though is enforcement which due to limited resources will inherently focus on the biggest players, where the impact is greatest. Players don't get bigger than US based big-tech. It's not unreasonable at all once you think about it.
> what other country besides the US has a law that specifically prohibits giving a bribe to a foreign government?
They allow and encourage lobbying which is literally used to the same effect. So it's a bit of a moot point, more like posturing than anything else... Much like some apropos :).
Every member of the OECD (including Japan and South Korea) and 8 more countries besides [0]? At a minimum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD_Anti-Bribery_Convention#M...
ACR opt-ins are not presented to end-users with a clear statement of what the opt-in means or what will happen with your data from your device and are often presented as turning on "personalization" (generally, for advertising purposes).
The various TV or tv-related device manufacturers use different names for "ACR," so you'll need to decipher what your manufacturer calls this to disable the feature. Consumer Reports has a useful guide covering multiple brands on how to turn off ACR: https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t...
If you find that your device has already been opted-in, you can disable the selection, and submit a request to have your device's information removed in some jurisdictions. You can also select to have your device's identifier id (e.g. "PSID" etc) reset from the device before performing a full factory/configuration reset of the device and setting it up again. If you fully reset the device, you'll want to watch out for the ways the manufacturer will try to get you to opt-in during the setup process. Many people have ACR-turned on without knowing.
Adding a few more opt-out guides:
https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/stop-your-snooping-smart-tv...
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/how-to-disable-acr-and...
It's also worth firewalling, or at least using dns-based blocking, any "smart tv" type devices on your network. Some of them even do periodic scans of your network and send that information to the manufacturer when they "phone home."
So all thats left is looking for commercial panels but a lot of those have built in content management systems now too.
2) That's still a lot of potentially crash-prone crud that's running. Better to just buy a Sceptre or maybe a large computer monitor, and have nothing running that isn't dedicated to "get pixels into eyeballs".
From an ethical perspective, you will never convince me to feel bad about any "theft" of this kind, and this kind of dilution of concepts like "theft" and "crime" is likely responsible for the emotional valence of those terms reading a lot less significantly negative to people
It's a principle I'll call Kellner's Law: If a company makes a product or service available free or at a discount by involving advertisers, from the company's perspective that creates an implicit contractual obligation on the customer's part to see the ads; and any attempt to take advantage of the freebie/discount whilst avoiding the ads will be considered a form of theft, legitimizing any technical or legal means at the company's disposal to force customers to see the ads, or else to withdraw service from those who try to avoid them. Kellner's Law explains a lot of corporate behaviors in this space, including crackdowns by YouTube and other sites on Web-based ad blockers.
I named it for Jamie Kellner, a television executive who when TiVo (which famously allowed skipping ads in television programs recorded to the device) came out, said "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots" and that skipping ads with a device like TiVo was "actually stealing programming".
If Kellner wanted to make a deal with cable subscribers, why didn't he advertise cable that way? "If you buy our package and agree to watch ads when they come on in order to support our monetization model, you can watch over a hundred channels!"
But he didn't do that, of course. Instead, when his business model clashed with reality, he blamed the customers for violating an imaginary contract they never signed. Just because execs want to imagine violations of their assumptions as crimes doesn't mean that they actually are, and we should be using every meager lever of power we have access to to prevent governments from making laws to appease people like him, because every time a law like that is made, more people's rights are made subject to the arbitrary retroactive demands of delusional businessmen
From the perspective of the user tgey are violating the GDPR. Why this law is not enforced, i do not know, i presume lobby money are buying it.
I like it a fair bit, but I've still had to figure out weirdly broken things like "captive portals always look like the wifi didn't connect at all, but `nmcli c up` fixes that" which I can't imagine most non-computer-oriented-Windows-haters in my life would be able to manage...
I didn't brief them much, I just installed and configured everything that was necessary for them, and let them figure out the rest. To my surprise, they managed everything on their own! Which made me realize how far UX went in the Linux world.
In terms of maintenance, every six months when I get home for a visit, I run some updates and answer some of their questions. It's very low maintenance, especially compared to Windows.
Also, I noticed quite an interesting side effect when installing Mint for non-techy people. They feel empowered because I trust them to run Linux, which they believe is reserved to the elite techies. This also makes them respect their computer more, which in turn makes them run into less issues as they are more careful with that they do.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/OPNsenseFirewall/comments/12h1hh7/i...
...and yet it keeps trying to connect to "logs.netflix.com" for reasons I do not understand. Granted, it could be just crappy retry logic, but still, why ping this endpoint when I'm not even using netflix!
Cynically, as time goes on, it feels more and more as though we exist to be maximally extracted from, rather than to enjoy any intended benefit (where the benefit is not a happy byproduct that exists only because it is massively subsidized by aforementioned extraction).
If it ever was. Most of these businesses are still owned by the same people--the Sam Altmans, the Brins and Pages, the Elon Musks, the Steve Huffmans--who started out with the "not in it for the money" and "do no evil" rhetoric, and now their actions show that all that was just a lie from the start.
As an adult, I took no action to make that happen; was I a big fat liar?
BTW, I like this game: 'endlessly avoid making a point'. The winner is the person who gets the other one to end up questioning something that is required for a shared reality -- thus effectively admitting they might as well be arguing with themselves.
Can you explain how your question connects to the rest of thread? I can explain the thread if you don’t understand it, as you admit.
A falsehood isn’t even a lie if it is spoken when it is actually false unless the speaker knows it is false. Arguably less so when at the time the truth of the statement couldn’t actually be known. Later it was found/determined/decided that @sokoloff would not be an astronaut. So the statement was shown to be false. But that doesn’t retroactively cause the statement to be a lie.
Notably pointing out that such statements aren’t lies is not a defense of the subsequent behavior that caused the original statement to become a falsehood.
Your response was something of a non sequitur focusing instead on whether a doctor is “allowed” to do that, but whether a doctor is allowed to do that would have no bearing on whether he lied in the past. I got the sense that you were implying that this behavior was bad behavior but to use your example, no defense was made of the doctor breaking his oath.
My question used your example of the doctor to reframe @sokoloff’s original rhetorical question. Is a doctor who breaks his oath an oath breaker? Yes. Did he lie when he took the oath? Only if he always intended to break the oath. If you believe he didn’t intend to break the oath at the time he swore it, you have to conclude that he didn’t lie, even if breaking his oath is otherwise undesirable behavior.
And my point is that if we dissect the meaning of the language long enough we end up questioning our own existence.
This isn't on the order of splitting hairs when trying to define something nebulous like consciousness. There would be quite a difference between @sokoloff saying, "I am going to be an astronaut" as a child, and if he were to say "I am an astronaut" now.
What is the 'intended meaning'? The poster made a claim that is false. There is no ambiguity about what was said regardless of presumed intent. Any concerns about questioning our own existence seem extremely premature at best.
The parent comment was making a statement about dishonesty in the sense that when an adult makes a commitment, we hold them to that unless we do not trust them, and those were people we thought we could trust. They have gone back on that and now we think they are deceitful because they betrayed our trust. Whether or not they believed it at the time they said it still makes them scumbugs for having changed their mind at a later date.
Regardless, suppose you did lend that child money and they didn't pay you back. Then suppose as young adults, they come back to you and ask to borrow money again. If they always intended to pay you back and have now matured (and maybe even ultimately did pay you back years late), you'd be far more likely to lend them money again than if you found out somehow that he never intended to pay you back the first time.
There is meaningful difference between "This person committed to something and ultimately didn't live up to that commitment," (or only lived up to it for a certain amount of time, etc.) and "This person lied when they said they were committing to something because ultimately they failed." In one case they changed their mind and perhaps knowingly went back on their word or were unable to live up to their word due to forces outside their control. In the second case abuse of trust was the entire plan. Both of these say different things about the person who violated our trust and whether and with what we can trust them in the future.
By all means castigate Brin all you like but if you want to show he lied in this instance you have to show it was always a lie.
Ugh. Such a naive and simplistic take. People change, for better and worse. And the figureheads that unaccountable nerds love to bash here are sometimes just that, figureheads.
I also don't believe for a single second, based on their past records, that Sony, or LG, or whoever, are actually properly anonymising this data
Our culture is already revolving around rehashing what's "proven". The most original and interesting ideas may come from those who oppose that trend, and these ideas are most likely to drown in the sea of slop.
Also the "content" "creators" who are most likely to benefit from tracking are the giant corporations - we're just making the rich richer.
Also somewhat related: https://rubenerd.com/stop-calling-people-content-creators/
That's actually the perfect description of why 'content creators' aren't called artists. They're not creative, they're regurgitative.
Society needs not faded, watered down, muted copies of originals. It needs more originals to inspire more creativity.
Originality is an art unto itself.
What you are right about, however, is the profit inherent in bland copies, which means there's a market out there consisting of dumb, easily satisfied cattle, to be milked by the lazily regurgitative bottom feeders that know only 'what's trending' and have said subscribe! more often than they've had hot meals. Those saviours of society.
Most things we do are in the end just burning energy to create, move and destroy things in the process. The guys who benefit from ads buy salad from shops employing people. It’s arguable that anything that increases economic cycles is of at least some benefit to society. That’s the advantage of capitalism.
I'd like another querty productivity phone as good as the BB curve 9320 or Q10 was, and willing to pay, but it probably won't happen.
'The market is the solution' is true only as long as human factors are seen as market distortions and mitigated through regulation.
Can it do foreign titles?
Adult titles?
Can it OCR onscreen text, e.g. a computer desktop?
Can it identify video conferences?
Why do advertisers care what I watch? If I watch PBS mystery theater do I get ads for rich people?
Thats precisely what’s happening and it’s nothing new. The only difference here is that the TV is the input vs your browsing habits.
"We find that: (1) ACR network traffic exists when watching linear TV and when using smart TV as an external display using HDMI"
> Netflix prefers to have ACR deactivated during its streaming “in order to preserve the integrity of its subscribers viewing experiences and maintain sole control over measurement of its viewership” (Verance, 2020). The same reasoning applies to FAST channels, which LG and Samsung consider to be ”aggregator apps” (Wolk, 2023), where providers may have agreements restricting ACR usage.
In other words, FAST comes from other providers, who may complain. Random content over HDMI doesn't. However, this doesn't explain why they ignore video streamed from phones (tablets, laptops, etc) wirelessly.
Pair with a Chromecast with Google TV or a PC for best results.
How does that square with "privacy"? Google is an adtech company that makes money on tracking our usage patterns, Chromecast requires logging in, there is no "privacy" around these devices at all.
If you already want an off the shelf solution at least get an Apple TV instead of a Google product? At least it’s not an advertising company then.
(That’s also why they are often very bad and not relevant, a common complaint from app developers)
[0] ex https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24666968
[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/tvs/commercial-tvs/pcmcat160199...
So in addition to the complete destruction of personal privacy and the normalization of the panopticon, it's also making you materially poorer. But hey, at least ads are more relevant, sorta, almost, sometimes!
In other words, an advertising dollar doesn't disappear: it's paid to someone.
Window breaking gangs could make a similar same claim about their activity boosting GDP might they not?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
I do remember it being about how a window maker paying people to break windows not being a productive contribution to GDP.
Just thought it was curious seeing it again.
Yes a common misconception about economics so much so it has a Wikipedia page to explain it.
... I'd rather not pay for the "service" they're providing.
Can a capitalist society operate without advertising? How are people to learn about products and services that are available? Yet today poorly targets ads waste the time of everyone involved. If ads could be made relevant without invading your privacy would you be against that?
Search. Easier said than done, thanks to SEO and business models like Google. So maybe I should say "paid search". We get what we pay for.
If you do not know a product / service exists why would you search for it?
If "search" is your answer what do you suppose advertisers are doing? Are they not searching for customers?
Advertising is an expensive search with many externalities on society. These externalities are wasteful hence the search for a better way to do it. Google / Facebook / ... I think are funded by solving this problem.
If I don’t know a product or service exists, why do I need it?
My life is fine as it is, I don’t need stupid advertisements for stuff that won’t enrich it.
Do you not purchase things / services you do not need?
> My life is fine as it is, I don’t need stupid advertisements for stuff that won’t enrich it.
How might you reply to a someone from a few thousand or few hundred or even few dozen years ago that has your attitude? Might you be tempted to advertise to them what they are missing? Would they not be interested?
Exactly, I would NOT search for a solution. No sale. Less consumption.
In most cases if you do not know a problem is a problem, then it is actually NOT a problem.[1]
Advertisers' jobs are to convince you otherwise. e.g. You need our pill. You need our gadget. You need our clothing or cosmetic. Advertising does not care about your best interest. Advertising tries to make a sale and advertising is considered successful if a sale is made even if no problem was solved.
[1] There are some exceptions. Serious medical conditions, for example. I don't think most people object to altruistic advertising campaigns to educate people about genuine health problems and their solutions. But I don't think that's what we're talking about here.
What makes "Less consumption" a good goal? What are biospheres if not cycles of consumption? When our planet becomes sterilized due to some disaster will you celebrate "Less consumption"? Obviously not. EFFICIENT consumption is a good goal so we maximize what we desire and minimize the undesirables.
> Advertising does not care about your best interest. Advertising tries to make a sale and advertising is considered successful if a sale is made even if no problem was solved.
Yes. In a capitalist economy all act in self interest. This is clearly s bad system except if you have experience living under other systems and there the direction of migration should be a clue about what people prefer.
1. If I have an interest in a field (say, electronics) and then I attend a conference or gathering that's relevant to that field (say, CES), and then you buy a booth at that conference in order to hawk your wares, that's A-OK. The crucial difference is that I willingly understand the context--I'm going to be going to a place that's all about having people sell me things--and that advertisers are not running roughshod over a space where they don't belong. Consider this "pull-based" advertising rather than the "push-based" advertising where ads get shoved in your face every second of the day everywhere you go, even when you're just trying to live your life.
2. Organic word-of-mouth referrals. In an online, AI-infested world, the "organic" part is increasingly hard to come by, but if someone that I trusts tells me that a product is good, that's great and welcome. Crucially, their reputation with me is on the line if they turn out to be wrong or financially compromised.
3. Simple indication of presence. If you have a shop, you're allowed to have a sign on the front with the name of your shop... within reason. Don't push it. Billboards should be banned.
When you "visit" Google / Facebook / YouTube / other online properties do you think you are "going to a place that's all about having people sell me things"?
In other cases such as buying a shoe or a can of beer or a fridge or a car, I just go to the website or the physical store that sells it and I compare the products and buy the most suitable one.
This way purchases would be prompted by an actual need, like when my shoes are worn out, I look to buy new ones instead of it being pushed on me through ads when I don't even need it.
Usually the existence of the ad doesn't mean that it's the best in its category. Why would it be in my interest to be following ads instead of my own research?
Also this gotcha is decades out of date. Today's ads are rarely about the features or suitability of the actual product. Instead they sell a vibe, a lifestyle feeling, they create positive emotional associations in ways orthogonal to the product's attributes. Think Coca Cola with celebrities etc. After all, how would I otherwise know I need a can of coke if the trendy singer didn't tell me about it, right?
Consider that you should never accept cold-call sales or offers under typical circumstances; I make notes on the ads I see in order to blacklist them, essentially.
The good deals are found by my seeking them out, doing research, asking questions. Knowing a brand reputation apart from marketing. Discerning things like corporate culture, attitude, politics, intended market or audience.
So many products and services are made on the basis of shoveling crap to make a profit, or supporting some cause or crusade, and the more I can pierce the veil, the better I feel about where my money's going.
Remember Yellow Pages?
And if that is not good enough, perhaps you can opt in to an advertising service that shows you ads when you want to see them (as opposed to when they want to show them to you).
Some TV operating system manufacturers give away their OS to TV manufacturers, and in some cases they even pay TV manufacturers to use their software.
Some streaming service companies pay the TV manufacturers to have a shortcut/launch button on the physical remote.
I am not going to try to argue that advertising is good or anything, but I don't think your economic argument is accurate.
If a company didn't have to spend anything on advertising, they wouldn't use that money to improve their product or to reduce the price; the money would go towards profit.
So many people seem to think that prices are set at "expense + fixed profit margin = price" but that is not how any company sets their prices. The ONLY reason a business is going to lower prices is because they think that is the way to increase their profit. They aren't going to lower prices just because some cost goes away.
Still, even if there is no immediate price decrease for the customer, I would be much more satisfied if all the money went to the maker(s) of the product and well-investing shareholders than someone who provides no value and could have been working on something productive instead.
The commodification of screens from both the production side (i.e. newer entrants to the market from Chinese manufacturers) and from the content portal side (i.e. Roku, Google TV, Fire TV, etc) is a major strategic problem for the television brands you are probably most familiar with. The forementioned examples of content portals are coming from companies that are fundamentally based around advertising, and the companies that were traditionally about manufacturing realized that the advertising revenue opportunity was too good to give up. They are trying to grow their revenue, and profitability, and see that they won't be able to do so from their original core businesses. This is also why you're seeing all of these "FAST" (Free, Ad-supported Streaming Television) services popping up from the tv manufacturers themselves.
Vizio, for example, was a value-oriented producer of televisions and related products. In 2021, as Vizio became a public company, they disclosed that they make more than twice the profit from their advertising/service business than their device sales (https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-adver...). Walmart is now acquiring Vizio for that business and the opportunity to collect customer data (https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/02/20/walmart-agrees...).
Roku is another good focused example because they are a publicly traded company and you can analyze their income statements and business model. Their hardware devices are basically being sold at cost or at a loss so they can seed the market and create an audience (i.e. their inventory) for their high-margin advertising services business.
Google and Amazon also want a large piece of this pie. Apple is starting to show that they want advertising money too.
We are also seeing cases where the television devices themselves can be produced cheap enough to be given away to users that opt into advertising (e.g. Telly: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/15/23721674/telly-free-tv-st...). When this dynamic is economically viable (i.e. give away the hardware, make the money via ads), you can see how big of a problem traditional television device manufacturers have.