We need legislation which deals with the reality of the PII loophole. While the ACR data on its own may not identify me/my household, it absolutely does once it's combined with the rest of my fingerprint in the cloud.
Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
271–280 of 316 posts
Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
#272The sooner GDPR and CCPA and others outlaw practices like this, the better. I use my TV as a big monitor, and if I happen to have accidentally agreed to something whose fine print allows this, it could have sent some really sensitive information.
Could you imagine if your smartphone screen or your computer monitor did this? I think samsung makes the iphone screens. What if they randomly sent screenshots with personal identifiers back to samsung? Who in their company possibly would possibly think this is okay?
Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
#273For now, at least, you can turn off ACR in a Roku TV's settings (tested on a 43" TCL Series 5).
Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
#274Is there any good 4k tv on the market with zero smart features? I would love to buy a high quality display that can't connect to the internet.
Most Sceptre TVs come with no smart features. Price is good, too.
Be careful most of the Sceptre tvs are RGBW panels so they aren't true 4k.
Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point I wonder if we might not just start whitelisting domains instead. I think that it could be possible to design a UX that wouldn't be much of a hindrance to using your computer and phone on the same network. Eg any websites you deliberately visit get added to the whitelist, same with the other services you choose to use. The amount of mostly unintentional (by the user) data transfers is out of hand.
And then everybody starts collecting data via AWS or whatever.
Even then, can't you tailor the whitelisting in a way where it only whitelists specific services on AWS? You could even make it timed so that other IOT devices can't exploit it.
Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
#276I 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…
Just one humble non-lawyer's opinion but I'd love to see merchantability and fitness laws updated to explicitly bar reduced functionality without the forced exchange of consumer data, which is what's happening here. Manufacturers claim they are subsidizing the TVs via data collection, assuming that's true then banning the reduction of features unless the consumer opts in then raises the bar on every manufacturer. If TVs go back up in price so be it.
Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you do any market research? You can very easily go to any store and still buy dumb TVs. I don’t know where people get the idea that 100% of tvs are smart tvs, but that is false.
Rtings pretty comprehensively catalogs and reviews mid and high end TVs. The only TV released in the last two years without WiFi or associated smart functionality is a pretty mediocre 49" TCL. While you can certainly still get smaller 1080p TVs without smarts, you shouldn't have to choose between getting a decent size and panel quality or not having a beefy OS built in.
So you're saying he didn't do his market research? :D
Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
#278Roku scares me when I'm watching movies on my Rapsberry Pi. They are .mp4 files. I'm not using their software at all... and about 2 minutes in I get a pop-up "You can view this move elsewhere at XYZ." How do they know what movie I'm watching? They are analyzing the feed. Scary.
> They are analyzing the feed. Scary. More likely just looking at the title of the file and matching that against themoviedb.
I think they are just fingerprinting the video and audio. They shouldn't have access to the actual file that is being played if you are just connecting the TV to the raspberry pi. I think I saw another thread where someone from Roku confirmed this (I had the same thing happen and it annoyed me so I looked it up).
Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
#279Nice, my smart TV has been peeping on me playing Peep Show on repeat.
More seriously, our privacy has been nullified by ferocious marketing and advertising tactics. Data collection has weaved its way into the design of most of the products we use, it was only a matter of time.
I know you can opt out of all of the collection on a Samsung. Just have to not agree to all of the Terms and Services. That being said, I've heavily isolated the Samsung in the house. It sits on its own VLAN that cant talk to anything else on the lan and use some heavy white/blacklisting at the DNS level to limit what it can get to on the internet. I'm sure it's still uploading something about me to somewhere though.
Re: Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making devices that just don't work without a connection home seems a lot easier.
How? Bricking a device on purpose is a huge liability. Much easier to install a cheap 5G modem and keep it on as long as data collected is worth more than the peanuts 5G connection will cost to bulk buyers.
"Doesn't work without a connection" is not bricking, and even actual bricking through shutdown of related cloud services happens all the time and doesn't seem to cause that much trouble for companies.