441–450 of 524 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as I can keep the TV offline to operate it I'm fine with it. The day it needs to be online to work is where I'll be seriously pissed enough that I'll return it without hesitation.
How can you be sure it's offline? Possibly it has wireless capabilities that work without your consent..
I tried to never connect my Smart TV to anything, but I realized one day (when someone's stuff was playing on it without me accepting any request...) it connected an open network in my residence. The only trick that worked to prevent it from connecting was putting the wrong password, and let it loop forever, trying to connect. Ugly.
Our TV is old enough that it's not smart. We mostly watch things from the AppleTV on it, plus some from our very small cable package/DVR.
Choosing a set-top-box vendor you trust (and for us, that's Apple) gives you everything you'd get by trusting Samsung or Vizio, right? What even turn ON the network features of the TV?
The number of devices I have plugged into my home network is astonishing and the chatter / discovery they do to each other is interesting to watch.
Zero trust model for everything ... I guess ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At which point I hope there will be websites describing how to take the TV apart and disable the 5G modem. Or somebody will invent a small short-range backhaul-less 5G spoof microcell you can put next to the TV that will confuse the TV's modem into connecting to nothing. Or just wrap the TV in a Faraday cage. But keeping the screen visible might make that tricky.
1% of us will take the troubles to protect themselves. We'll even marginally succeed, as long as we don't go out in public or visit a friend's house. Too expensive to circumvent protections if the other 99% have no [time to develop an] understanding of what they are exposed to.
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…
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.
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…