411–420 of 1001 posts
This sort of blanket data collection needs to be made illegal in every single jurisdiction, and have _very_ robust penalties for anyone found in breach of them.
Legislators in every jurisdiction seem to have more to gain with the data collection than without.
As an owner of 2 LG OLEDs, I am not surprised at all. I neutered these things the first day I was past the return policy. Opened the back and unplugged the WiFi/BT chip, bought a cheap dumb universal remote with no mic in it, disagreed to all T&C in the TV, updated the firmware via USB and just use an AppleTV over HDMI for streaming. Kind of silly to have to go through all of this but hey thats where we are in 2026 i…
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Obviously, as an advertising company, Google should have your utmost scrutiny. But as far as I know, their TV boxes don't ACR your content. If they were the only two options, sticking with your smart TV software instead of using a Google TV box would be a privacy mistake.
Typically you will get sambatv or such installed, and technicians for whatever reason tend to click accept/approve during installations. Happened to me n my Google TV thing
examine your network when you plug a roku in. then read their privacy policy if you want to see someone give LG a run for their money.
then there's our pocket PCs...
and don't forget about the biggest customers of this "advertising" data.
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillanc...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/targeted-advertising-g...
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I never understood why any of the smartness had to be built into the TV in the first place. Sure, it's useful for the first year, and then the seriously underpowered hardware they installed into it will have trouble with just about anything. I bought a Philips Ambilight OLED TV probably over 8 years now. Brilliant tv, great quality, I still see no reason to replace it at all. But its built in AndroidTV is garbage.
It's so you buy a new one every few years instead of keeping the same TV for a decade or two. Capitalism cannot survive when products last a lifetime.
This is totally backwards; capitalism would do fine in such an environment (in the same way that evolution does fine in an environment where organisms live more than just a few seconds; the whole reason we have the notion of a "lifetime" is that our germ line comes from a long line of ancestral DNA that made organisms that outlasted their competition.)
Individual companies might have to hustle to innovate or die, but that too is good for capitalism.
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This seems quite hyperbolic to me. Newspapers were leveraging sensationalism and attempting to capture attention by any means long long before targeted ads were a driver of revenue. I'd guess there are plenty of pre-newspaper examples as well.
Interestingly, there are many laws against launching precision guided missiles, despite the fact that people were throwing snowballs at each other long before missiles were invented.
A handful of newspapers that controlled 95% of the information was much more of a "precision guided missile", in terms of ability to control information, than social media is today.
(That's not to say it's good today, it's terrifying, but at least it's possible to hear different voices, including voices on the ground)
Okay. This is insane. First the monitor that uses a windows feature to automatically install a small helper tool with root permissions and then starts showing adds in certain regions. Now a tv that is actually actively snooping around on top of the known fingerprinting. What else is next? In the previous topic I got ridiculed for not wanting to buy LG anymore because I could use an agent to modify to strip out the of…
It's insane, but it's not like it's not known, personally, each time we have a party at home with friends, we always unplug the TV for this reason, it's out of doubt but it's normal to doubt as it's proprietary and has a microphone, so it's a bit obvious that it might be recording and processing data somewhere. The same as I would never trust an average phone around if I'm having a private conversation. Blackbox+Mic…
During the Soviet era, not everyone could afford to have a landline phone, but the system kept hunting down its dissidents one by one. If you are a person of interest (which I believe doesn’t apply to you), there are way more important signals to adversaries than your microphone.
It's important to choose your threat model. If your plan is to resist surveillance capitalism or just a random Bob and his grandmother snooping on you online, luckily, there are some effective methods. Otherwise, I would say it’s always a question of time, not 'if' or 'how.'
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Its always speculation that would be trivial to actually test. 1. Do not connect to network 2. Create unauthenticated WiFi network 3. Monitor WiFi network Strange no one has ever done this simple af test to backup their claims
If TV manufacturers wanted to be underhanded then they could actually make this much harder to detect by delaying the connection to new unauthenticated networks for e.g. months or only after seeing another device connect and then using that device's MAC when it is not around.