Hacker News Reader

Comment by lurchpop | Hacker News Reader

Went through this recently at Best Buy. The salesperson said by next year they may no longer carry any "dumb" tvs. Currently, those options are almost gone. I didn't see any dumb tvs over 40" and there were no 4Ks without "smart" features.

I plan on just blocking it in my router, but who knows if the TV scans around for open hotspots. If I were a "smart" developer Id store everything locally if offline, then dump to the manufacturer if it ever does get a connection. Not my problem if the feds happen to be "selecting" for that dump somewhere upstream...really not my problem if they have a dragnet FISA warrant for the data.

Where is that noble hacker who'll make a tutorials on how to destroy smart TV WiFI radios?!

View on HN

Most of the "smart" features aren't going to be used anyway, so I assume that they are dirt cheap to put in or that most manufacturer tries to add them to differentiate from the competition. Since most TV manufacturer put in "smart stuff" it isn't really a differentiating factor, at least not to the extent that they would like.

Most of the features are also stuff that I don't even know what does, it's just confusing. The plan might be to confuse customers into buying the most expensive TV, so they don't feel like they're missing out on something.

The first manufacturer to produce a cheap TV marketed as "HD TV, it does Netflix too" should in my mind be able to get a good number of customers.

Have you looked into screens marketed as monitors? You might be able to find one of sufficient size with sufficient inputs, and they tend not to be infected with the "smart" garbage.

Simple solution is just don't log it into your WiFi.

It just takes one neighbor to temporarily create a public WiFi connection for your regularly-scanning-for-open-hotspot "smart TV" to dump its entire cache of logs over HTTP.

(Now it may not be designed to do that, of course, but we're both responding to <lurchpop>'s hypothetical.)

This is what I was going to say. Do you guys really find the "smart" features on your television to be useful? I just, you know... use it as a television.

I find Netflix and YouTube built into the TV extremely useful. Also the fact that it has a half-decent DLNA client (which I connect to Plex on my home server), and can accept screencasting from my phone. I considered building a HTPC, but realized these features cover 99% of what I would use it for, and for the rest I can just use a laptop.

I've had all these features for years thanks to a netbook with a busted battery and a projector I got off some business or other closing up shop. The netbook runs linux mint and runs what I wants it to, and no more.

This stuff doesn't need a butlerian jihad, it needs a DIY surge.

Certainly I could hook up a netbook or raspberry pi or whatever to my tv and get this stuff, after some amount of configuration and likely some amount of debugging now and then. And indeed I've gone that route in the past. But when the TV does it all for you, it's hard to argue that that isn't more convenient.

Of course, one could certainly rationally choose to forgo that convenience in favour of increased privacy. I'm just saying the smart features aren't worthless.

Normal folks are simply going to want this stuff integrated into the TV. It's convenient and doesn't require any more assembly.

Heck, I can DIY it myself but I don't, because smart TVs have the apps and features that are baseline useful. And because it's integrated, I don't need to make sure to turn on some other device to get access.

I bought a Raspberry Pi for 40$, configured it for my needs and never use the features of my Smart TV.

That's a good point. I have an HTPC, so I don't need any of that.

Or plug it in to a dumb network so it thinks it's connected and just never succeeds, or log everything that it saves about you, so it thinks it's connected AND is sending traffic, but doesn't get anywhere. There's plenty of options

Open it up and take a pair of scissors to the camera/mic cables?

I was wondering about this. Is there the potential it could cause the TV to throw an error?

The market would produce privacy TVs if people would not buy spy TVs. I would think there is enough of a market to produce such TVs and advertise them that way.

But what matters is if someone that is in a position to actually provide such TVs (and do a decent enough job producing and marketing them) to let the market decide. I know the HackerNews community has much more awareness of this issue than most people but it is something a fairly large number of people care about.

>The market would produce privacy TVs if people would not buy spy TVs.

Bear in mind the vast majority of consumers never even glance at a privacy policy, and would only interpret a "privacy TV" as "a TV with fewer features"

A manufacturer only needs to provide an opt-out on these smart tvs for the few people who care about their illusory privacy anyway, and that 'privacy tv' market dies before it's even born.

You can already buy non-smart tvs anyway. I have one. It cost ~$100.00 and was made by some company I've never heard of. The only selling point for such things is their cheapness.

The vagaries of the market are not a substitute for morals and policy.

Seiki makes decent, affordable 4ks at large size and no smarts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com