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Comment by touwer | Hacker News Reader

Funny, published on a site with 1745 'partners' who fully respect our privacy of course

I believe we should push for legislation that prohibits the sale of customer data to third parties. Websites can use the data on their customers but they cannot share it with anyone else. Because aggregators are selling it cross-border after which you lose track and all control over it.

Look at the outrage from US tech bros when the EU passed a law saying that you only had to tell people you were going to do this. Imagine how preventing it would be received.

They shouldn't be able to collect it in the first place. The big companies have 10 page agreements that say they "value" your privacy and that they don't sell your data to third parties. They do value it, highly. And they don't sell it--they just hoard it, mine it, and sell increasingly accurate targeting. Why would they give it up? I mean, besides coughing it up with little objection to national security letters.

The problem is that this includes literally everything on a cloud service. My emails and documents on Gmail/Google Drive is my personal data. My email on Fastmail is my personal data, even if they’re privacy friendly. So that service would be illegal.

Even having an account at all, and being able to see that I have a subscription, or that I previously watched that video, is personal data they collected.

So the Privacy Policy is what you “agree” to let the company do with that data. How do you even begin to differentiate the superfluous stuff they track just for ads, on a technical level without workarounds?

And then think about banning “transferring personal data to a 3rd party.” Does that mean I can’t host account data on AWS, or use a hosted database, be causing I’m transferring data to a different company which can presumably also access it? That’s what the privacy policy has to allow, and why sites have so many “partner services”

The service wouldn't be illegal because companies can store customer data and even use that information for marketing and advertising purposes. They just can't sell or share it with anyone else.

This would kill some middling parties but wouldn't do mich.

I worked for a major adtech company that bought zero third party data.

There's enough in the bidrequests.

And we had nothing on Meta or Google's ecosystems.

It also implies that Google,Meta and others can't put trackers on other people's websites. That kills about 99% of all tracking on the internet. Foreign companies would also be banned from placing trackers to close any loopholes.

Oh they can. They can offer profiling local servers/software for most important websites which, after profiling will request from google the specific ad category

100% agree. There are a million reasons people come up with for why this will never happen, but pardon me if I want to see us try first and then fix the mistakes we made after. Right now we're living in one big dystopian mistake that needs immediate pushback.

There was an American presidential candidate who ran on the platform of Americans getting to own their data and privacy like property in... 2016? I think? Agree with it or not, he was pretty forward-thinking at least.

The article is just a summary of the original reporting from Gamers Nexus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

Which is published on a video streaming website run by one of the biggest tracking and data collection companies, which is used to pay for the creation of the video (in addition to ads embedded in the video itself).

Not a valid critique when dealing with an oligopoly (YT, Tik Tok, Insta, etc.). You use the platform or you get ignored. Using the platform to criticize the platform or other platforms like it is possibly the best use of the platform.

The video is 2 hours long. A summary is not a bad thing

Respect for the consumer has long been gone generally except for a few brands.

I am still wondering why consumer respecting brands are not emerging more and thriving.

A consumer respecting brand sells products. A Consumer selling brand sells consumers so they can be profiled, analysed for weaknesses and exploited economically in the name of Surveillance Capitalism

I suspect because it's hard to differentiate between ones that actually respect the consumer vs ones that only say so, but are actually lying to your face.

That and not respecting the consumer is more profitable in the short term (only!), which means more marketing money, buying out other brands, lobbying to increase the barrier for entry, et cetera.

That is why politicians get rich.

But also, people do not generally hesitate in front of an all-you-can-eat bouffe

Because there's no incentive to do it. The consequences of being tracked are outta sight outta mind.

The point is: which brands still respect user privacy? If I were to buy a new TV today, which brands-models should I prioritize? Also, are there brands-models that in which it is possible to sideload a different OS like with mobile phones (LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc.)

I bought a projector in part because they are behind on this and only seem to have basic software

That's a great idea, thanks for sharing!

Our Android TV (Sony) has an option to basically make it a dumb TV. Not sure whether that still exists. We use that + simply don't plug a network cable or set up WiFi. As long as they don't add cellular modems, this works.

An Apple TV would be the best for privacy you can easily use but not perfect. Don't use streaming services. Torrenting with a VPN would share the least data but Nuvio/Stremio wouldn't share much with adtech. Can't use those on an Apple TV without sideloading :(

> which brands still respect user privacy?

does anyone know of a reputable site which rates companies by things such as trustworthiness?

are any companies at all trustworthy anymore? like literally any?

rtings is starting to cover some of this stuff now.

Machiavelli's flexibility: evil has more options to achieve its goals than good, and therefore it always wins. (The invisible hand of the market is a myth - people don't choose things on principles unless they have money to burn).

The bottom of the line TVs are basically commoditized and are sold at a loss. There's few tv manufacturers and they mostly compete on price, only the top of the line models have pricing power and only for 6-24 months for new models. A supermajority of consumers don't care if they're tracked all the time and a large fraction don't mind ads everywhere either (they're used to it).

A new display plant costs multiple billions.

They would care if they understood it. They shouldn't have to care–they deserve consumer protection regardless.

Well you can say this about dozens of products. People basically only care about price and perceived status for some products. Repairability, privacy, sustainability ... are not important for 90% of people, when government tries to they get pissed annoyed having to pay more.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/07/only-4-of-ios-use...

> A new display plant costs multiple billions

To be fair, most TVs on the market are buying panels from the same few manufacturers. For example, Hisense sources panels from part of LG. I think Samsung is another manufacturer.

So a new company could theoretically access these panels to make a privacy friendly TV without as much capital.

But like you say, it wouldn’t be able to compete on price, because the ad tech lets other companies sell at a loss.

> only the top of the line models have pricing power

And they still do it anyway because why wouldn't they? My $4K+ TV still wants all sorts of "personalized viewing experience" access.

We're in a recession, in all but official numbers (which are decreasingly credible by the day). Big companies weather a recession and use it to ransack countries, becsuse smaller/mid-size companies are struggling to do the bare minimum, outright shut down, or cannot start up to begin with.

There's a lot of moving parts that makes it really hard for ethical newcomers to disrupt in these current times. And that's just one angle.

As always - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

There is a very I-am-very-smart aspect to these predictable sorts of comments. And weirdly they always seem oddly intended to diminish the core concern being addressed.

"Oh your TV is listening to you and mapping your network and exfiltrating your data? Yeah, well, look at that website that has some ads on it! Boom!

Give up. The future is lost. Don't sweat the wiretapping TV."

> And weirdly they always seem oddly intended to diminish the core concern being addressed.

No they don’t. OP says it’s funny, that’s all.

It is 100% diminishing the concern. If someone were paid by LG to try to manage this revelation, they would post exactly what touwer posted. Like, there isn't a better way to try to normalize and excuse bad behaviour than doing the incredibly boorish tactic seen above. The "everyone is doing it" excuse is a go to.

I mean, LG would probably also pay someone to run around going "it's just funny, is all" in support if anyone noticed this pathetic astroturfing.

No I disagree here. I would argue that a TV doing this 30 years ago would find themselves in court, whereas now they are all skirting the edge of the law and we accept it because that frog has been boiling for decades.

The idea that logging audio is bad, but cars logging your weight, tvs logging your watch history, scales sending your wifi details, android and apple both mapping your access point to create a pseudo-location tracker without GPS, my mobile network sending me location-based adverts based on tower proximity via sms to a dumbphone are all very very bad.

LG have slightly overstepped the line here, legally, but in my opinion they've overstepped what is OK by a long long way. A website reporting on this while sending your details to hundreds of tracking sites are doing the same thing - abusing what is allowed and I assume only printing the report for more engagement and not because they actually care.

LG need to go a lifetime shit list for this behaviour - there should be outrage like there was about Sony's root kit. But websites like this also need to find out that this behaviour is not ok

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