Smart TVs are a curse (from a consumer perspective). A separate smart device makes much more sense.

People usually replaced their TVs when they broke, which could be 6-8+ years. Nowadays as their already slow hardware becomes even more obsolete, streaming apps are no longer updated and start to break, new ones are not released, etc. they go ahead and buy a new one.

You also have to accept all kinds of crappy agreements, so you can be spied on and get served ADS (?!?!).

Not to mention even the most expensive TVs come with baffingly slow hardware and software. $2k devices can take 10+ seconds to load the menu with 4 options, where you can modify picture settings. Incredible.

A TV should be a display with inputs and nothing more IMO.

Smart boxes are cheap and much faster than even the most expensive TVs, and they can be replaced inexpensively when eventually they become obsolete.

For a long time I pulled the network cable from my TV after I got tired of getting bombarded with changed ToS agreements, firmware updates and home screen ads. Now I have it on the network again just because I wanted to control the source from my PC, but it's still blocked from the internet on the firewall. Go ahead and make snapshots you stupid little TV.

I just want a somewhat trustworthy organization to develop a "DUMB" certification. I will pay extra for a certified DUMB TV.

Just never connect them to the internet. I just use them as a display for my apple tv.

Alphonso inc. develops the tech https://lgads.tv/site-privacy-policy/. Looked into the LinkedIn of some of the employees and it looks like a huge operation.

I'm in the market for a new TV. Is there any source that lists models that do NOT engage in this sort of spying? I am willing to pay a significant premium and forego convenience features, but I lack the expertise to review products myself.

Most of these are still dumb:

https://www.panelook.com/

This makes these screens a bit of an issue when eg accessing your bank. And it should be made clear to people that you must not connect a corporate or government devices to these screens.

(The fact that private citizens _should_ have the same security expectations notwithstanding, corporations and governments have more legal clout)

If you live in the EU, certainly you first have to give consent to that practice, right?

Do they transmit this information anywhere? A lot of this can be attributed to the anti-burn-in tech that dims your screen if the image is mostly-static for a long time.

> [...] in their automatic content recognition systems [...] Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG TVs every 10 milliseconds

I wonder how much energy it take to analyze 4k images 10 times a second?

This should be illegal

I wonder if this is a legal issue if they bypass HDCP and record or snapshot content from a privileged domain?

Someone needs to put a network sniffer on a bunch of different TVs and see exactly what traffic they're generating and how much. Sending 120 4k images per minute (or worse, 6000 for the LG) on a residential WiFi connection should be pretty obvious, and it should be fairly easy to block too.

I’m still waiting for the EU to realize this is a privacy matter that needs to be heavily regulated.

> Smart TVs from Samsung and LG take screenshots of what you are watching even when you are using them to display images from a connected laptop or video game console

By Jeremy Hsu

Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a non-paywalled link myself. This _appears_ to reproduce the article text: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/[email protected]/t/480211

Amazingly evil abuse of consumer trust, but this kind of thing will continue to get worse, not better. I’m building a Faraday cage to live in.

Frankly, I never understood why you'd ever want to connect your TV to any network rather than use an external device. Any convenience (?) you might get will be quickly offset by problems becoming inherent to your TV which doesn't make any sense to me.

Best Buy sells the "DuraPro - Partial Sun Series 43" Class LED Outdoor Partial Sun 4K UHD TV (2023)" which is supposedly a "non-smart" TV. I just ran a search and don't know anything about it, personally. They could still be screenshotting AFAIK.

Now that I found some old links... This began to be more public since Vizio published their 2021 Q3 earning reports and it was made public that their profits from advertising and users data was more than double than what they made selling devices [0]. Roku themselves have said that they are in the Ad business, not in the tech business, and they were getting around $40 per user a month (also in [0]).

All these ACR (automated content recognition) systems mix and match data from what they can see in your screen, with your IP address, with cookies you have on different devices... soy they can match different devices you own.

For example, AudienceX says about ACR [1]:

  Second-Screen Experiences: Being able to synchronize content across connected devices is vital for successful advertising. ACR lets you do this by identifying the content that viewers engage with most on a primary screen (such as a smart TV) and delivering similar or the same content to secondary devices such as mobile phones or tablets.

  [...] Automatic content recognition relies on two main types of technologies—fingerprinting and watermarking—to identify and analyze content. However, ACR technology can be broadly categorized into three main types. These include: Audio Fingerprinting [...] Video Fingerprinting [...] Digital Watermarking.

The Drum news site says [2]:

  Automatic content recognition (ACR) is a technology built into smart TVs that allow the set to see or hear what is being played on the television. [...] ACR gives advertisers the keys to go beyond impressions, to understand who is watching and when. When paired with digital ad libraries, advertisers can find exactly where their ads ran – the hour, on what network or streaming service – and understand the exact corresponding impressions for the specific occurrence of their ads. [...] You can even go as deep as zip code, reading further between the lines about the impact of advertising at a local level.

Grapeseed Media, that works with agencies to provide technology and plans, says [3]:

  For example, let’s say your client is Nike, and you’re running a Connected TV campaign for Nike shoes. When a person sees your Nike ad on their CTV, you want to deliver a specific set of display banners to their mobile devices so that the next time they open up a browser on their phone, they see these banners.

  One of the ways to do this is with ACR. You would contact an ACR vendor and give them all of the details of your campaign, and the ACR vendor would use their software to create an audience segment of people who have been exposed to your Nike shoe ad on CTV [Connected TV]. Then, they would send you that audience segment so you can target it with banners. Think of this data like a file that can’t be opened — you can see the title, but you can’t dive in. You can only upload it and target whatever is inside.

  All of this happens in real-time...

Mountain advertising software company say that they know all the devices in your household and will match your "Connected TV" ad impressions with your visits from others of your devices... [4]

So this is what they're doing with your info.

  ---


  0: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-advertising-inscape-data-privacy-q3-2021
  1: https://audiencex.com/insights/automatic-content-recognition/
  2: https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2023/05/08/acr-data-the-key-measuring-more-just-impressions-ctv
  3: https://grapeseedmedia.com/blog/programmatic-ad-strategy/
  4: https://mountain.com/performance-tv/verified-visits/

Sounds like wholesale copyright theft to me.

Is there a list of those models somewhere? The article is partially paywalled and hard to say which ones.

So what should I buy instead?

Capture everything, analyze little. Make Andy Jassy even richer.

Snark aside, it's like today's data scientists never heard of statistical sampling.