In my opinion you should not use ANY of the smart features of a "smart" TV. Don't give it your wifi key and don't put it on your LAN.<p>I have about 400% more trust of Microsoft and Sony than I do of random smart tv manufacturers. I also have a fairly high degree of confidence that the xbox one and PS4 software will remain up to date with security patches, and address critical issues quickly. I have no confidence for TVs.<p>Microsoft and Sony have teams of lawyers who've drafted the data collection/data sharing/opt-out policies for what their current generation game consoles track and phone home about. I've seen entirely too many reports of "smart" TVs that start reporting your entire viewing habits, and/or displaying unwanted ads.<p>Use the TV as a dumb display and hook it up to a PS4, Xbox One, and/or home theatre PC.
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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>That said, it's a fantastically gorgeous panel. I've had a lot of fun re-watching older favorite movies in 4K.
The smarter a TV is, the stupider it breaks too.<p>My parents had a TV with a built-in Skype app, and at some point the TV maker stopped supporting it. After that, <i>every single time the TV was turned on</i> 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 <i>impossible</i> to turn off this message or do anything about it. Think about the stupidity.
I wish that if they are going to insist on making their TVs smart, they would take the time to <i>think</i> about what people who use some of the apps would want.<p>For example, my Samsung has apps that can stream radio, and apps for Spotify and other music services.<p>But it evidently failed to occur to anyone at Samsung that since these are <i>audio</i> apps and do not need to use the screen while playing, I might want to blank the screen once I start the stream.<p>I'm particularly irked at Samsung because when I searched online to see how to blank the screen (I assumed it was obvious that they would include such a feature, and I was just being dimwitted when it came to finding it), I found that they used to have that feature, and they dropped it starting with the model year of my TV!
Earlier this year my company pitched anonymization solution for smart TV and smart home appliances to LG and Samsung representatives in Korea.<p>Their reaction to a proposal was, to put it kindly, terrifying and highly defensive. They said they are doing nothing wrong, no data has been leaked snd that there is no future for our solution, sensing huge discomfort.<p>Quite evident they have zero interest to gamble status quo on current situation.
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.
I use the PCWRT router, and it allows me to block the spying by blacklisting the relevant domains.<p><a href="https://www.pcwrt.com/2018/08/how-to-use-your-router-to-block-smart-tv-snooping/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcwrt.com/2018/08/how-to-use-your-router-to-bloc...</a>
Roku 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.
You are discussing here how to isolate the TV into a separate firewalled network, but for an average consumer this is too difficult. What an average consumer wants is to watch Youtube and Netflix and not bother about settings. If I was a TV manufacturer I would install a video camera and microphone and record everything and people would still buy my TVs.
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.
A “Dumb TV” is something I’m exploring developing. There is a gap in the market for a TV with a great panel, no internet connection, and only the processing strictly required for various types of signal processing and format conversion. The closest available solutions are large commercial monitors that cost an arm and a leg.
Run a Pi-Hole, use it as the DNS server for your "Smart" TV.<p>Too lazy? Shameless self promotion: <a href="https://windscribe.com/features/robert" rel="nofollow">https://windscribe.com/features/robert</a>
I kinda have a felling that in a future not to far, iots devices collecting our data will be mandatory... and if you want a device that do not collect your data you'll probably end it up having to pay 3-5x more for that product. Its kind of an addiction and companies need rehab already.
Has anyone successfully hacked any of these TVs to disable the smart features? I would pay some money for this kind of firmware patch on a future purchase. It seems crazy that the software is so terrible and yet nobody has found a way to disable it.
Which is the reason why Apple should enter the TV market. The argument against it from the likes of Benedict Evans to Horace Dediu has been TV is a low margin business, but so are all the Android Phones in the bottom 60% of the market. I still dont get it.<p>And since Apple TV sort of means 5 to 6 different things [1], they might as well make an actual Apple TV set to make it even more complicated.<p>If there are two things that I think Apple should really do, are Wireless Router and TV. I dont want a Google Nest WiFi or Amazon Eero.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21438152" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21438152</a>
Once again, a problem that could easily be solved by requiring a right to root as part of the right to repair. I hate how so many of these are running linux on the underside but you can't do anything with it. I had a friend who got a Samsung smarttv and when I looked up rooting it, the chances were high of bricking it, so we decided not to do it.<p>I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the way we prevent this is in right to repair legislation that includes the right to root.
It also is extremely hard to fix a smart TV once it gets infected with a virus.<p>Just don't buy smart TVs. Buy a dumb TV, attach a RaspberryPi or an Intel NUC, install Kodi and enjoy.
I shifted house 3 years ago and sold old TV at that time. Thought going to buy new Smart TV. But 1 month passed and I didn't missed TV (also skeptical about tracking thing).<p>I realised after spending working hours in front of Monitor/Laptop, my eyes can use some rest. So NO TV in weekdays.<p>I have bought 30 inch monitor, connected to home desktop and use it for entertainment - Netflix, sports etc.<p>NO TV is an option. Some day going to upgrade to bigger monitor.
TCL says you can disable the internal Roku and make it a dumb TV. <a href="https://support.tclusa.com/televisions-setup-configurations/189404-can-you-turn-off-the-roku-feature-and-use-it-as-a-regular-tv" rel="nofollow">https://support.tclusa.com/televisions-setup-configurations/...</a>
Nice, my smart TV has been peeping on me playing Peep Show on repeat.<p>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.<p>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.
Here is the actual Samsung screen that you can't opt out of:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/fulldecent/status/1067258123545661441" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/fulldecent/status/1067258123545661441</a>
Not just tvs. All appliances are getting "smart". Refrigerators, washers, etc are or will track you too. You'll have the convenience of connecting to your fridge to see what you need to buy at the supermarket. Eventually, the fridge will just send you notifications of things you need to buy. Very convenient, but the fridge manufacturer will also know what you eat, when you shop, where you shop and everything you do in your kitchen. I suspect sooner or later, there will be period of consolidation amongst the appliance companies so that they will be able to see everything you do in your house.
I own an Samsung smart TV and will so in the future but I wonder if this is only true if you activate the "smart hub" or if this is this true if you just connect the device to your network.<p>I personally use a Chromecast for my smart TV needs, which of course Google knows everything about. But the chromecast can't see anything else I do, no broadcast TV or if I use the DLNA function.<p>I wonder when right holders demand those information to sue people who watch "illegal" content on their TVs.
Not connecting to Wifi doesn't really seem to be an option for me. I bought my Samsung smart TV purely with the intention of using it for Netflix, Blu-Ray and Youtube (which is already tracked). It sometimes connects to television if the source gets switched, but I've randomly had it on the same German nature channel since day one. I'm not even sure what the rules are for TV tracking in Germany though.
Can anyone recommend brands or models for a fun and hackable TV? Something to let me run my own software on it and remove any ads or unwanted features from menus (I don't want any big Netflix or Hulu buttons). Maybe something running Android. Preferably something with an existing community around it, like an equivalent to OpenWRT or LineageOS for TVs.
Sadly, few people are likely to pay more for a TV that doesn’t track them. There’s research on this.<p><a href="https://www.datainnovation.org/2019/01/national-survey-finds-few-americans-willing-to-pay-for-privacy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.datainnovation.org/2019/01/national-survey-finds...</a>
The 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.<p>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?
every 2 seconds all devices speak to google, if you have one amazon echo, one fire tv, google chrome cast , roku then your entire life of every moment is in google hands.
So I have a samsung tv, and I like the apps - I use the youtube one every day, and several others several times a week. How do I leverage the gdpr to find out who knows what about me?
Every 2 seconds all devices speak to google, if you have one amazon echo, one fire tv, google chrome cast , roku then your entire life of every moment is in google hands.
If you have one of these types of TVs, may I suggest trying to make a simple YouTube video showing clearly how to navigate the menus to disable these tracking features?<p>That way, people with less technical know-how (like, say, my parents) can follow the instructions and get more privacy.<p>At least, I assume they can be disabled? I don't think it would fly with the GDPR otherwise?
It's why the device can be so cheap. Pity they don't offer two variants though. I always did like the way Amazon let you opt in to ads for a cheaper Kindle price.<p>In a past life, I actually helped bridge ad attribution for a bunch of these. Funny.