This showed up in my YouTube feed today.
Your smart TV is taking screenshots of everything on your screen 7,200 times every hour and sending that data to advertisers. Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense, and TCL are all doing it through ACR technology that’s turned on by default. Texas just sued all five companies for illegal surveillance.
Pretty gross. I’ll say I’d never connect a display to the internet, but I’m sure manufacturers will start building in mobile network modems (if some of them don’t already).
My smart tv hasn’t been connected to a network for over a decade.
I’ve never owned one.
ACR is turned off on our TVs. Who knows if they take notice of the setting.
More TVs here are now using Hbb TV services, so they need Internet for that. One of ours upstairs, for example, has no aerial but gets all the live free-to-air channels streamed in a very user-friendly way with channel numbers, catchup, guide etc.
similar situation here. We used to get freeview satellite, but the new flat only has cable, which we don’t pay for, so we get everything via the waipu.tv app over our fibre connection. But we don’t use the TV, which is an aging Sony, I use an Apple TV for the “smarts”.
Sony stopped providing security updates in 2017, we bought the TV in 2016! There is no way I will buy another smart tv, or at least, I won’t buy it on the basis of the smart features, I will leave it disconnected and just carry on using something like the Apple TV.
I don’t have a lot of experience, maybe 4 TVs between mine and my mom’s, but in every case the UI on the TV is slow and clunky. Yes, it does technically have the smart features they advertised, but they certainly didn’t spend a dime they didn’t have to on development or the hardware inside (CPU/RAM) to run the features. On that basis alone, you’d be way better off with some other add-on box. That, and most of the capabilities keep ending support or needing better capabilities anyway, so you’re better off being able to update/replace the box on the outside than “needing” a whole new TV.
Ours is built into the TV, though. There is no app you can put on a separate streaming box.