Smart TVs take snapshots of what you watch multiple times per second
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
People usually replaced their TVs when they broke, which could be 6-8+ years. Nowadays as their already slow hardware becomes even more obsolete, streaming apps are no longer updated and start to break, new ones are not released, etc. they go ahead and buy a new one.
You also have to accept all kinds of crappy agreements, so you can be spied on and get served ADS (?!?!).
Not to mention even the most expensive TVs come with baffingly slow hardware and software. $2k devices can take 10+ seconds to load the menu with 4 options, where you can modify picture settings. Incredible.
A TV should be a display with inputs and nothing more IMO.
Smart boxes are cheap and much faster than even the most expensive TVs, and they can be replaced inexpensively when eventually they become obsolete.
For a long time I pulled the network cable from my TV after I got tired of getting bombarded with changed ToS agreements, firmware updates and home screen ads. Now I have it on the network again just because I wanted to control the source from my PC, but it's still blocked from the internet on the firewall. Go ahead and make snapshots you stupid little TV.
When companies have a privacy policy that says they won’t do that, and then they do, that’s an entirely different thing. They lied, and that puts them in legal jeopardy. It also hurts their bottom line.
Is it possible Apple is sneakily spying on you and selling your info to third parties in secret illegal deals? Sure, I guess? But I don’t think it’s super likely.
Sure, it's a "random" identifier, ... tied to your exact location, soooo random.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...
And also: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-privacy-data-collection/
You don't like your SmartTV? Switch to HDMI Input and use your device.
I find it very practical that my LG Smart TV has the normal core apps available and i do not want to have a second remote.
> Amazon stated that more than 90% of the U.S. population was covered by the Sidewalk network.
> Amazon Echo devices have Sidewalk enabled by default and do not inform their owner about it.
Smart boxes can communicate with the TV (HDMI-CEC), and you don't have to ever use the TV's remote. If the box turns on, it turns on the TV and switches the source. Same with turn off. If you cast a youtube video to the box, the TV also turns on, etc. So it works completely seamless (at least in my case).
Oh wait, I just remembered regular TV channels exist, I guess you will still need the TV's remote for that.
I don't think I have watched one in almost a decade.
Yes it's really curious how much worse technology has gotten in some dimensions in recent decades. Analog TVs would respond to inputs effectively instantaneously - if you changed the channel, the very next frame would be drawn from the new channel. My TV now takes multiple seconds to change channels.
Digital tvs are cursed to wait for the next key frame in the video to start displaying and providers are a-okay with very long waits for key frames as it improves their encoding efficiency and thus allows them to squeeze more channels on the lines.
It's apples to oranges sadly.
They'd get a little confused, as the next vblank (and hblank) would come at unexpected times, as channels wouldn't synchronize frames.
> Digital tvs are cursed to wait for the next key frame in the video to start displaying
This is very annoying.
If they chose too, couldn't TV decoders pretend to have a all-gray keyframe as a starting point and apply the streaming diffs to that until the next true keyframe came? That would at least give some garbled image before snapping in. I'm sure most consumers would consider this "broken" though.
I otherwise completely agree with everything else you've said.
But yes, a smart TV programmed to do the same is even more unscrupulous given that it can 'spy' on everything it displays, to presumably include the input of connected devices.
Shouldn't be that hard to build a replacement board for popular sets. There are replacement electronics for analog CRT-based TVs.
We used to call them monitors [1], but a dumb TV at TV prices would be very appealing. Even more so because, with the smaller board brains, it might have more space for different inputs.
[1] https://www.dell.com/en-ie/shop/dell-86-4k-interactive-touch... seems a little bit too smart. It's funny when you need to get rid of a monitor because it "knows too much"...
BTW: why a smart TV? Because for only an extra 50 Euro I got a much better screen (subjective assessment) than the best dumb TV on sale when I went shopping for them years ago.
For nerds, brilliant. I love such setups myself but for the household consumer it's an no-go.
I'm more than happy to help as this is an area of interest but man, what I would do to be able to set my father-in-law up with a TV, streamer, remote he can use consistently. When I bought an Apple TV I thought that would solve his problems when they housesat for us but his motor issues get in the way and he always forgets Siri. I raised this question of how do we better serve older adults a few times at an assistive tech conference and no one seems to have cracked the code yet.
But slowly I’m seeing more people recommending the AppleTV, even amongst enthusiast circles which tend to be rather anti-Apple.
https://www.groovypost.com/howto/limit-ad-tracking-on-roku-a...
Not as common as I thought though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275350
In other words, even if you never connect your TV to your WIFI, it might be enough that your neighbour does.
But "meshing" with other apparatus from the same manufacturers is a clever and evil idea - perhaps another TV from the same brand is in range and has Internet, then they can proxy that way.
All these probably break some regulations or laws.
But I can't find anything now, so it might be best to consider it apocryphal.
Having said that I added this block list to my router https://github.com/mboutolleau/block-samsung-tv-telemetry You can add it to a pi hole or to your router of it supports black listed domains. Sadly I can’t confirm if this blocks all Samsung tv’s shit. You can also never connect it to the internet and use an apple tv or something over which you don’t have more control.
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...
(The fact that private citizens _should_ have the same security expectations notwithstanding, corporations and governments have more legal clout)
The default option from the TV controller is to give it quickly and easily, maybe it could happen by sitting on the controller.
It's hard to see how this would be informed consent.
I do wonder exactly how the EU and UK market models from the US and others, anyone got info?
Most of them by default push you to accept and I guess that they are illegal under GDPR (the same happens on the web) but until we start seeing fine going down heavily the situation won't change.
I wonder how much energy it take to analyze 4k images 10 times a second?
They find what movie, show or whatever you're watching and send it to advertisers with all your metadata, so they can match and track you from an ad impression to you visiting their site to get information and buy.
There's a lot of metadata there to match. If you access their site, for example with your phone, from the same internet connection, they can probably match the information from the TV with one of the tracking cookies on your phone, and then keep tracking you in all the commercial "journey".
This has been already discussed around here because this is one of the reasons smart tvs are so cheap right now, because they're being subsidized by advertisers. Some of the advertisers had in their sites information about their tracking capabilities. I'll try to find that link.
A conservative assumption would be that they use all spare cpu time for spyware? Maybe 1-10W extra if small arm processors?
Hard to see this issue move forward, when the population considers corporate rights more important than personal privacy.
Heck, tons of people appeared out of thw woodwork to complaining about Right-To-Repair, but now that several states have required it, everyone loves having the manuals/parts.
While the latter allows remote party to gauge what you're looking at it most likely doesn't infringe copyrights. But, as you mention, it might very well violate some of the HDCP fine print.
Yes, obviously testing should be ubiquitous.
> TV is a brainrot thing for dumbs, nobody needs a TV which doesn't spy you.
No, TV is nigh-universal and everyone deserves privacy.
Definitely not users (useds?) of proprietary software. Use monitors for privacy they do not have any urge to phone home.
I agree that the testing should be ubiquitous but if the device is crooked it is no sense in trying to figure up how exactly crooked it is. Maybe it uses steganography, maybe it is able to detect MiTM devices, some TVsets cease to keep working if the internal memory is 100% filled with pictures of what are you watching so no extra knowledge about the crooked device is useful if you have already agree to have Pavlik Morozov with microphone and videocam right in your bedroom.
What's worse is if they decide to encode the tracking data as something that looks innocuous so that nobody even notices it.
By Jeremy Hsu
Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a non-paywalled link myself. This _appears_ to reproduce the article text: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/480211
All these ACR (automated content recognition) systems mix and match data from what they can see in your screen, with your IP address, with cookies you have on different devices... soy they can match different devices you own.
For example, AudienceX says about ACR [1]:
Second-Screen Experiences: Being able to synchronize content across connected devices is vital for successful advertising. ACR lets you do this by identifying the content that viewers engage with most on a primary screen (such as a smart TV) and delivering similar or the same content to secondary devices such as mobile phones or tablets.
[...] Automatic content recognition relies on two main types of technologies—fingerprinting and watermarking—to identify and analyze content. However, ACR technology can be broadly categorized into three main types. These include: Audio Fingerprinting [...] Video Fingerprinting [...] Digital Watermarking.
Automatic content recognition (ACR) is a technology built into smart TVs that allow the set to see or hear what is being played on the television. [...] ACR gives advertisers the keys to go beyond impressions, to understand who is watching and when. When paired with digital ad libraries, advertisers can find exactly where their ads ran – the hour, on what network or streaming service – and understand the exact corresponding impressions for the specific occurrence of their ads. [...] You can even go as deep as zip code, reading further between the lines about the impact of advertising at a local level.
For example, let’s say your client is Nike, and you’re running a Connected TV campaign for Nike shoes. When a person sees your Nike ad on their CTV, you want to deliver a specific set of display banners to their mobile devices so that the next time they open up a browser on their phone, they see these banners.
One of the ways to do this is with ACR. You would contact an ACR vendor and give them all of the details of your campaign, and the ACR vendor would use their software to create an audience segment of people who have been exposed to your Nike shoe ad on CTV [Connected TV]. Then, they would send you that audience segment so you can target it with banners. Think of this data like a file that can’t be opened — you can see the title, but you can’t dive in. You can only upload it and target whatever is inside.
All of this happens in real-time...
So this is what they're doing with your info.
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0: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-advertising-inscape-data-privacy-q3-2021
1: https://audiencex.com/insights/automatic-content-recognition/
2: https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2023/05/08/acr-data-the-key-measuring-more-just-impressions-ctv
3: https://grapeseedmedia.com/blog/programmatic-ad-strategy/
4: https://mountain.com/performance-tv/verified-visits/ Roku themselves have said that they are in the Ad business, not in the tech business, and they were getting around $40 per user a month (also in [0]).
If someone watches anime/Hallmark/cooking genre content, do you need to know which specific shows?
Do they get less money per user because they can't legally do the same things in other markets or maybe advertisers pay less for data or reach to non US markets?
What I see from their 4Q2023 report [1] is that they sell devices at a loss. Their gross revenue in "Devices" is negative $20K. And I guess that also includes any expense on advertising or promoting the devices, not only the hardware price.
I can't find if there's any mention anywhere about what percentage of their platform revenue is advertising and what is subscriptions, but they say:
We generate Platform revenue primarily from the sale of advertising (including direct and programmatic video advertising, M&E promotional spending, sponsorships, and related ad products and services), as well as streaming services distribution (including subscription and transactional revenue, the sale of Premium Subscriptions, and the sale of branded app buttons on remote controls).
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0: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/roku-80-million-active-accounts-earnings-1235826274/
1: https://image.roku.com/c3VwcG9ydC1B/4Q23-Shareholder-Letter-Final.pdfSnark aside, it's like today's data scientists never heard of statistical sampling.
Similar to what Shazam does for music.
but if you read the https://www.disneyplus.com/en-gb/legal/disney-terms-of-use terms of use (which you can't copy and paste easily):
> you may download one copy of such Content to a single computer or mobile device (as applicable) for your personal, non-commercial home use only, provided that you (a) keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices, (b) make no modifications to, and do not rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute, copy (except to create a single copy for your own back-up purposes), or create any derivative works based on a Site or the Content, in whole or in part,
I would say thats commercial derivative works.
I think shazam had to agree permissions to sample works for fingerprinting.
I get around it by using PC displays as televisions, usually hooked up to a thinclient or SBC that I've purpose for media delivery. So, when I shop for a display, any feature beyond an HDMI port becomes wholly unnecessary to me.
If it's so "easy to assume", surely you can point at some exact models?
It's more a capability of the TV OS than the hardware model, although of course, more processing on the hardware gives you more ACR capabilities and it isn't usually listed on the device features.
Also, some of the brands have ACR under features named like "Samba TV" or "Live Plus", making it more difficult to find it on their setup menus.
There are sites that tell you how to deactivate ACR for different TV brands.
https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/stop-your-snooping-smart-tv-how-to-turn-off-data-collection-for-every-brand
https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features-a4840102036/
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/how-to-disable-acr-and-greatly-reduce-ads-on-every-tv-model-and-why-you-should/