Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything

#1

Post by lsh » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
washingtonpost.com

Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything

#2

Post by AdamJacobMuller » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

I had a very nice Sharp Aquos TV for a long time. One of the first reasonably priced 1080p 65" TVs. It had absolutely no "smart" features, which was perfectly fine with me. I have my TV hooked up to a home theatre system and have my devices (PS4/AppleTV/XB1/Nvidia Shield) hooked up to that.

I recently upgraded to a LG 4K OLED TV. It's an absolutely gorgeous TV, but, I absolutely lament the "smart" features of this TV. I get software update prompts on a regular basis for software I don't use (I'm sure there would be some for the base system anyway, but, an order of magnitude less). The prompts when setting up the TV to accept myriad EULAs are obnoxious. Pop-ups advertising "features" on my TV which I don't want? Ugh.

I really want either a manufacturer who resells these panels with 0 features, or a mode from LG which disables all of this. "Lock to HDMI1 and disable everything but color management features".

More on-topic with the article: I'm a pretty tech and legally-savvy guy, but, even I'm not sure I've toggled the correct order of knobs and declined the correct EULAs to disable that tracking. Moreover, I'm exactly 0% sure that someone else didn't try to watch Netflix (via the TV and not the AppleTV/Shield/PS4/etc) and wasn't prompted to accept EULAs to do that. My point is, if I can't even do this properly, normal people have a near 0% chance of disabling tracking.

That said, it's a fantastically gorgeous panel. I've had a lot of fun re-watching older favorite movies in 4K.

Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything

#3

Post by unstatusthequo » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #2

I had a very nice Sharp Aquos TV for a long time. One of the first reasonably priced 1080p 65" TVs. It had absolutely no "smart" features, which was perfectly fine with me. I have my TV hooked up to a home theatre system and have my devices (PS4/AppleTV/XB1/Nvidia Shield) hooked up to that. I recently upgraded to a LG 4K OLED TV. It's an absolutely gorgeous TV, but, I absolutely lament the "smart" features of this TV…

Yeah even when toggling options to stop tracking, I don’t trust it. I will usually find what it calls out to and block it on my home network with Pi-Hole. I also am moving to projector which may have less “smart” bs crammed in there. But, I haven’t researched that yet to see if that’s true or not.

Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything

#4

Post by dawnerd » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

I stopped connecting my TVs to the internet when Samsung started pushing notification ads for GameFly on a (at the time) 3k dollar first gen 4K tv - and they lied and said no they’d never do that. They’ve all lost my trust.

Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything

#5

Post by AdamJacobMuller » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

unstatusthequo wrote: post #3

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #2

I had a very nice Sharp Aquos TV for a long time. One of the first reasonably priced 1080p 65" TVs. It had absolutely no "smart" features, which was perfectly fine with me. I have my TV hooked up to a home theatre system and have my devices (PS4/AppleTV/XB1/Nvidia Shield) hooked up to that. I recently upgraded to a LG 4K OLED TV. It's an absolutely gorgeous TV, but, I absolutely lament the "smart" features of this TV…

Yeah even when toggling options to stop tracking, I don’t trust it. I will usually find what it calls out to and block it on my home network with Pi-Hole. I also am moving to projector which may have less “smart” bs crammed in there. But, I haven’t researched that yet to see if that’s true or not.

I don't think the options are blatantly false, the legal teams at these respective companies would never allow them to be demonstrably false. I do think they are as confusing as possible and designed to be as difficult as possible to place in "max privacy" mode and as easy as possible to place in "max tracking" mode.

> block it on my home network with Pi-Hole

That's a really good idea. I just configured my firewall (Palo Alto) to block the TV, I'm not sure why I didn't think of that.

Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything

#6

Post by makecheck » Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

The smarter a TV is, the stupider it breaks too.

My parents had a TV with a built-in Skype app, and at some point the TV maker stopped supporting it. After that, every single time the TV was turned on the TV popped up a vague modal error message (that didn’t even mention Skype, just “an app” or something). I verified that it is impossible to turn off this message or do anything about it. Think about the stupidity.