It is not clear why we should necessarily be suspicious of smart TVs based on the findings here. The lines seem to be blurred between what data is being sent by the TV OS itself versus a third party app that someone may have decided to use during the period that the researchers watched outbound network connections. If someone is using the Netflix app, this necessitates that the TV must communicate with Netflix. How e…
Because it interferes with the idea of a TV being a display. A TV should not have apps. If it does have apps, these apps should not communicate data to the manufacturer. It shouldn't send back data about the operating system because a TV shouldn't have an operating system.
When can I buy a TV without smart features? I don't doubt that my smart TV is reporting some data about my usage, but I barely have a choice in the matter.
I disabled WiFi on my Samsung TV after they were injecting ads into the home screen. Spend $800 to get ads served in their shitty/slow UI.
I can't watch more than 5 minutes of any YouTube video on my Samsung smart TV before an advertisement interrupts the video. Often several times for short videos. The ads are the same ones over and over too at the moment it's the J-Lo Hustler movie. If not that it's an ad from my local tourist board advertising my own home town.
It's getting to the point where it's not even watchable. I click back to exit and maybe go back later but I have hundreds of partially watched videos I've forgotten about.
Flight mode exists because the FAA applies unsafe-until-proven-safe methodology to everything flight related (as they should). If flight mode mattered at all planes would be falling out of the sky on the regular, many people just leave their phones on the whole trip. The only reason I turn my phone off is because it wastes a lot of battery as it tries to manage tower hopping the whole time. Planes are getting blasted…
IIRC there isn't a problem for most of the flight; but right as you're ascending/descending your phone can end up getting a very weak line-of-sight connection to a whole bunch of cell towers at once, which causes a few different problems, but all of which come down to "it makes both your phone, and all the towers, shout really loudly at one-another to try to achieve a circuit." Which, sure, means that there might be…
Uh, wouldn't the same thing happen as you enter a dead zone, or go underground? I'd sure hope that my phone isn't at risk of exploding in those circumstances...
My Samsung SmartTV randomly turns on itself. Sometimes, we can't turn it on and I have to remove the batteris from the remote, plug them back then it works. The UI is sooo sluggish. I just wish they make a dump TV with superior image quality and let the other streaming devices handling the "smart" features. I will not buy another Samsung electronic product.
> "I just wish they make a dump TV with superior image quality and let the other streaming devices handling the "smart" features." They do, but from what I understand you'll pay more for such panels. As I understand it they're intended for commercial use.
So a commercial display at a commercial price, but with a commercial warranty and support.
This is a pretty open secret within the industry. Geographic data can be provided via setup (a lot of TV's ask for a zip code on setup) or usually simply via GeoIP lookup. Dig a bit deeper and you get into service provided by Samba TV and or Inscape and you can find that they're sending back frames of video in a lot of cases to track what you're watching. This data is becoming a huge mechanism for subsidizing TV sale…
Roku enabled TVs very clearly send back frames of what you are watching. I've been watching YouTube casted via chromecast plugged into HDMI (NOT the built in chromecast, I have verified multiple times) and the Roku will give me a full width toast saying to press `*` to watch the full movie or some similar contextual option I was pretty put off the first time this happened. That said, I don't even know if I looked thr…
Are you sure about this? If the TV really is phoning home with whatever is on the screen, including anything personal the owner might happen to be displaying, that's a vast set of lawsuits waiting to happen. The GDPR fines alone could be staggering. I could easily imagine spyware logging whatever TV shows you're streaming and the like, but it's hard to imagine any business in this industry having lawyers dumb enough to allow sending actual screen images like that.
An acquaintance attempted that with Kindle, by keeping it in flight mode. After some days it popped up a message kindly asking to give it some network access. After a few more days it simply ignored the flight mode and connected to get fresh ads. Edit: I've checked with my wife who has an ad supported Kindle for over a year and keeps it in flight mode for months at a time. It never did that to her. So either Amazon c…
I had the same thing happen. I rooted my Kindle and kept it in flight mode to avoid tracking and updates. After not using it for months I recharged it and when I turned it on it had auto updated to the latest version, killing root. So not only did mine exit flight mode it somehow re-enabled updates and updated itself.
It's possible that it may have cleared its settings after being away from power for that long.
This is a pretty open secret within the industry. Geographic data can be provided via setup (a lot of TV's ask for a zip code on setup) or usually simply via GeoIP lookup. Dig a bit deeper and you get into service provided by Samba TV and or Inscape and you can find that they're sending back frames of video in a lot of cases to track what you're watching. This data is becoming a huge mechanism for subsidizing TV sale…
How do Doctor's that use TVs like this in meeting rooms get around HIPAA? or other places with PII, etc? With so much stuff being thrown to TVs now, a lot of times they are inheriently monitors, and there are very few people who think taking a screenshot of a monitor is not invasive.
I disabled WiFi on my Samsung TV after they were injecting ads into the home screen. Spend $800 to get ads served in their shitty/slow UI.
I can't watch more than 5 minutes of any YouTube video on my Samsung smart TV before an advertisement interrupts the video. Often several times for short videos. The ads are the same ones over and over too at the moment it's the J-Lo Hustler movie. If not that it's an ad from my local tourist board advertising my own home town. It's getting to the point where it's not even watchable. I click back to exit and maybe go…
> ". If not that it's an ad from my local tourist board advertising my own home town."
And they're paying for that. Well, more like, and YOU'RE paying for that.