48-page report urges FTC, FCC to investigate connected TV industry data harvesting.
The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a “surveillance system” that has “long undermined privacy and consumer protection,” according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers have resulted in connected TVs (CTVs) being a “privacy nightmare,” according to Jeffrey Chester, report co-author and CDD executive director, resulting in calls for stronger regulation.
Not enough people are talking about the SFC v. Visio case currently being heard in California. Depending on the outcome of the case (and it’s looking fairly good for the Software Freedom Conservancy, not to get anyone’s hopes up), we might have fully-FOSS distros for existing consumer smart TVs sometime in the somewhat-not-too-distant future. Like we have OpenWRT and dd-wrt for routers and Graphine and LineageOS for smartphones. And there are potential implications for other types of consumer hardware devices.
That’s a good thing, but Smart TVs should only be a limited option in the first place. Most people do not need them or like them.
I shouldn’t have to understand how to install a different OS on a TV in order to take the useless “smart” features away.
One even worse thing about smart tv’s - they come with a bunch of free “channels” you can watch. If you have streaming services or cable, who cares?
Except the people that don’t – rural folk who never would pay for cable – gobble it up. And it’s all right wing propaganda garbage. From Fox News to Newsmax, they’ve got every kind of anxiety-inducing conspiracy-laden “news” you can watch.
I’m honestly surprised there isn’t some successful startup that markets itself as the “dumb TV company” by now. You can buy dumb TVs if you go out of your way to look, but if you knew there was the FutureCo DumbTV Plus or whatever out there and you didn’t have to do a bunch of searching…
Because selling the data your SmartTV collects, is a massive revenue stream for these companies. Selling only dumb TVs wouldn’t be as profitable as a SmartTV would be.
Also the ad space that could be projected to these, based on collected data is another massive revenue stream.
I’ve honestly looked for dumb TV’s for a while. My TCL Roku TV has gotten so slow it’s almost unusable. If I could find a good one I would probably buy one. Instead I got a Raspberry Pi and put Kodi on it. Paired with a Flirc remote, it works great.
Buy a commercial tv.
I recently purchased a new computer monitor; an LG Ultragear OLED. It’s as dumb as a bag of rocks - which is why I bought it.
And let me tell you: it’s quite the search to find a monitor that DOESN’T have smart bullshit features built in. Most of them are now set up as if they were a TV first instead of a monitor - as in, you need to go deep into menus to find actual monitor settings.
I’m glad I was able to find a dumb monitor, but I fear it might not be possible anymore when this needs replacement…
I have seen that Dell has some huge monitors, might be worth looking into
I just wish there are options. I love to have one of those newer LG OLED without all the smart capabilities & additional hardware. Just a good screen that I can hook up to my PC and direct play all my shows and let the GPU handle all the necessary upscaling/tone mapping.
Does commercial displays also has “smart” bs on it?
Not generally, no. And they are becoming quite popular with consumers because of it.
There’s a reason the saying “the S in IoT stands for security” exist.
Just done connect them to wifi. I’m sure that eventually, they will all start shipping with a built in modem to report on data just like cars do now.
