Dan GoodinApr 29, 2024

Looks like the anti-smartTV alarmism is out in full force today on the feditubes. A reminder: connecting a smartTV to the Internet is perfectly safe as long as you take 2 minutes to follow common sense guidance:

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features-a4840102036/

SmartTVs don't collect anymore data than Microsoft Windows, Google, Facebook, Twitter or even your credit card company.

Don't be fooled by the people trying to shame or scare you. And definitely don't get tricked into the magical thinking that streaming with a Roku is somehow safer than with a TV. It's not.

How to Turn Off Smart TV Snooping Features

TVs collect a huge amount of data. Here's how to use privacy settings to limit the surveillance on TVs from LG, Samsung, TCL, and every other big brand.

Consumer Reports
Show threadJohn Wilson

@dangoodin we had a guy come in our company a few years back and give a talk about QA integration testing and he said the TV manufacturer he worked for was experimenting with adding cell modules so the TVs just connected to a cell network and transmitted their data that way.

I personally think this is something that would only be cost effective when 2G networks were still operational. I don’t think anyone ships a device like this today. But I still don’t trust the damn things

Apr 29, 2024 at 4:47pmIvory for iOS
Show threadAndrew DouglassApr 29, 2024
@crazybutable I removed the WiFi module from my tv when I opened it up to fix a panel lighting issue and it wasn’t too bad. It wouldn’t be ideal to have to remove a cell data module as soon as I got a tv, but I’d do it if I had to.
Show threadJohn WilsonApr 29, 2024
@ardouglass yeah I don’t think this cell feature ever shipped in a production TV (at least where this guy worked) but they had prototypes. He was talking about how they could do pixel sampling to figure out what movie you were watching even if it was coming over HDMI because they had hashes of the pixel values in a little database
Show threadAndrew DouglassApr 29, 2024
@crazybutable ugh, I should turn my entire house into a faraday cage