So what happens if you just don't plug in the network cable or setup WiFi? How does it gather anything?
I’m Terrified of My New TV
11–20 of 346 posts
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#12> In the meantime, I’ll be in the market for a new tinfoil hat and cone of silence. I know this is meant as a pseudo-joke and I know there are going to be a ton of comments here on why the guy is overreacting, but is the tin foil hat really useful anymore? We have demonstrated proof that things like this have been exploited on purpose in the past few years. Instead of the tin foil being representative of the crazy pe…
If anything, the tinfoil hat conspiracy wackos of yesteryear were far too conservative in their paranoid fever dreams. They'd never have believed this.
I wonder sometimes: if things like this had existed in the 50s and 60s would we ever have had a Martin Luther King? Or would such things have been picked up at their earliest stages by the data miners and nipped in the bud? Would Ginsburg have read Howl in Golden Gate Park? Would there have been a summer of love, underground basement punk shows, raves? What new civil rights movements or fascinating spontaneous emergences of culture are being silently suppressed today? Is that kind of culture jamming really going on? I really do wonder.
I also wonder about the seeming asymmetry. I see protestors in Hong Kong using mobile phones to organize, yet over here it seems as if the same technologies are being used to enforce the most toxic aspects of the status quo instead of challenging them.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#131984, 30 years later.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#14Something I've noticed about this however is most tech-literate people who actually care about their privacy tend to leave the wireless disconnected and simply attach the TV to their HTPC device which is from there connected to the internet.
Disconnecting it from the internet and possibly even sabotaging the wifi module will ensure that prying eyes will not have access to your information.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#15I think the always watching/listening thing is the major hurdle a lot of these devices are going to have to overcome before a lot of people feel comfortable inviting them into their homes.
I think you overestimate how many people are even going to be aware that their shiny TV is doing 1% of this stuff.
Non-techie people assume a TV is a TV -- which is to say, a dumb video terminal. Even "smart" TVs are understood this way, in no small part because most people never bother interacting with their "smart" features. It's all just items on a checklist full of marketing blather, safe to ignore.
I fear it's going to take a serious hack of these devices (or twelve) before people start to understand that their new TV is more like a giant, poorly secured PC that happens to be wall-mountable than it is like their trusty old CRT.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#16Sounds like there would be a market for an openWRT-like firmware hack for these TVs!
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#17> In the meantime, I’ll be in the market for a new tinfoil hat and cone of silence. I know this is meant as a pseudo-joke and I know there are going to be a ton of comments here on why the guy is overreacting, but is the tin foil hat really useful anymore? We have demonstrated proof that things like this have been exploited on purpose in the past few years. Instead of the tin foil being representative of the crazy pe…
But tin foil hats were really designed and promoted by the government to help them spy on the paranoid. http://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csai...
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#18This if a fluff piece.
They write an entire article on why we should be terrified but then they don't even mention the make or manufacturer of this scary new TV, so we can't check the details of the TOS. It's the hypothetical smart TV that everyone owns.
They also neglected to mention you could just not connect it to the internet - you know, like the ancient TV he just turned in?
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#19I'm probably not normal, but frankly I would just leave it unplugged from the Internet.
At the end of the day my current tv does what I need to do (ie act as a big monitor) without an internet connection. Given the number of devices already floating around here for browsing the web, I don't really need my tv to do that. For streaming I have Chromecast or whatever.
I get that tv makers want to sell me something, but they're really bad anyway at the convergence - so the best option for me is just to use it as a screen and get devices to do what I want.
The only real motivation to get a new tv is if the current one breaks. I replace all the other living room devices a lot more frequently than the tv.
But the point of bothering to read the terms is well worth knowing so I appreciate the article.
Re: I’m Terrified of My New TV
#20No mention of which TV?
Searching seems to suggest it's a Samsung device, but I haven't tried to locate the manual in order to verify that notion.