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Your Smart TV Knows What You’re Watching
(themarkup.org)
Obviously
Honestly the least I'd expect of a smart TV.
... but it isn't able to tell anyone, as it is not connected to the Internet. Poor smart TV.
If there are any unsecured networks in your vicinity it might be telling on you without you knowing.
Pull one of your old routers from the back of closet, and use it to make a completely new network just for your TV. If you don’t connect the router to the rest of the internet, your TV is happy to connect to something, and you get to keep your privacy a little bit longer.
Not everyone has an old router. I do, but not everyone.
Why do I keep an old router?
If you have a nice enough router you could connect your TV to it and block its Mac address maybe.
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Cause it still works, doesn't take up much space, and doesn't really eat a whole lot just siting there.
Also, 2 is one, 1 is none. Good to have a fall back in case hardware dies
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I'm a little surprised we haven't heard about one of these smart TV brands using something like Amazon Sidewalk yet to communicate the analyzed data:
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/
A popular brand could totally set up their own network like this and with apartments there would probably be sufficient density to ensure that there's always at least one connected device nearby to act as a bridge.
Well that's pretty terrifying.
Need to figure out how to block that now. Sigh
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if you're this paranoid, just buy one of those mcdonalds menu screen tvs or just rip out all of the wifi electronics. i can imagine it being one of those standard modules like in laptops.
Until it doesn’t work at all since the wifi chip is integral to boot up.
Just make your own TV
What’s the funny-to-serious timeline for this comment, fifteen years?
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I'm pretty sure my Android TV powered by Google™ knows more than what I'm watching. It could probably give me therapy if I threw a LLM on there.
Good to know I'm not paranoid enough tho.
Yep.
I got a Fire Stick early on, ditched it after a year.
Have a Samsung smart TV now, working to stop using the smart part and run more self hosted, and isolate apps like Netflix and Amazon.
Worst part about this is I have an OLED, if I use a different device for features I risk burn. Netflix on the tv will show a screensaver and go black after 2 minutes. Pressing pause on Netflix on the ps5 or appletv means you get a static screen until you return.
I wish we could get what we pay for and not be products ourselves.
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My two smart TV’s are the most blocked devices by my network’s pihole. It’s not even close.
The first two are my two TVs, (one is a Samsung, the other is a Roku,) and the third is my phone that I’ve been doomscrolling on all day. The “better” TV has almost 3x as many blocked requests as my phone, even though I only used my TV for about an hour today.
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I have my old (stupid) tv from like 2013, works perfectly fine. No apps, no firmware, no ads, no tracking. Never felt the need to buy a smart tv, but I'm afraid it'd be near impossible to find a new one that isn't nowadays I'd mine broke down.
This is the only reason I have a smart TV. I didn't want one, in fact it prompted me to make an SSID and VLAN just for it, then applied a bunch of DNS blocks. Unfortunately my old 2012 TV wasn't worth shipping across the country and the image was getting pretty dim and it had started developing dead pixels.
If you want anything above 1080p that's a dumb TV you have to go commercial like the hospitality market and they charge you way more for it. And they won't even sell it to you without a corporate account in most places.
The only way to get 4K and HDR without the smarts as a consumer is to buy a giant gaming monitor... and those too ask for quite a premium, because gamers.
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"Are you watching the TV, or is the TV watching you?"
Good. Have fun uploading any information about me without wifi or an ethernet cable. Smart TVs were a mistake, even the most expensive ones are slow and trash.
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laughs in crtv and dvd player
It'll never tell anyone because it'll never be hooked up to the internet.
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So... Can someone explain how this is legal if you're watching DRM content? Capturing and uploading copyrighted, protected content doesn't seem very kosher.
advertisers spent an estimated $18.6 billion on smart TV ads
Jesus. Spend a fraction of that developing good products that people will actually want to buy so you can end this unethical, scumbag way of making a buck.
surprisedpikachuface.webp
God damn webp, why is support so inconsistent?
I am so glad I don't have a TV. It's just the Internet with even more ads, minus the Internet.
It doesn't have to be. I get everything for free, no subscriptions, no ads. I'm pretty happy with the deal.
I leave the TV on all day for the cats, I'm sure they're getting lots of useful data while they sleep in front of MASH reruns
Next up: Televisions that don't have off switches and never go to sleep.
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NextDNS has a blocklist you can enable to block telemetry for Roku TVs FYI. You can also get a dumb TV or keep your TV offline and have a separate Kodi box for your shows.
Mine connects through pihole with all LG domains blocked. I'm not getting any update request, notifications or anything. Just Netflix.
Obligatory pihole doesn't block anything if they use their own dns. You can probably force all port 53 traffic through pihole if you have a decent router though.
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Considering I don't connect it to the internet I'd be surprised if it was doing anything.
just plug a SBC running Kodi/jellyfin/whatever non-proprietary to a regular tv
It says in the article there's a privacy request option if you own a samsung tv. I went ahead and sent a request to not sell my data, although not sure if it's effective since I'm not in CA.
Doubtful, since I don't have one.
Doesn't mention what circumstances it's tracking your watching habits. If you're watching an obscure movie on DVD, is it still looking at frames? Does it have to be through a streaming service being run on the TV? Does it recognize content being run on modern game consoles? Not a very informative article.
First, a quick primer on the tech: ACR identifies what’s displayed on your television, including content served through a cable TV box, streaming service, or game console, by continuously grabbing screenshots and comparing them to a massive database of media and advertisements. Think of it as a Shazam-like service constantly running in the background while your TV is on.
All of this is in the second paragraph of the article.
Bah! Reading! But that is concerning. Looks like I'll be disabling my wifi credentials on my TV later tonight!
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this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Privacy
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