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.
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’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.
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.
There’s some good free stuff out there. PBS Kids for example. But yeah that doesn’t negate the harm from the deluge of conservative rag media.
I hate our TV so much.
I have a HTPC but it takes forever to turn the TV on and switch to HDMI input.
Also my wife refuses to use HTPC.
Use the HTPC as a Plex or Jellyfin server and plug an Apple TV or something in over HDMI. Much more user friendly
That’s what I’m doing?
Just that I have a shitty TCL TV.
Oh, I thought you had the actual PC plugged into the TV and your wife was struggling with that.
Now I’m confused. I do have the actual PC plugged in to the TV. Isn’t that what you were suggesting?
I have a Lenovo M700 running LibreElec (just enough OS to run Kodi), which passes a HDMI signal to my surround sound receiver.
When you turn on the TV, it takes about 2 minutes for android to boot up. Then you have to switch it across to HDMI input so you can see the signal from the M700 / Kodi.
Kodi is pretty great and I do like it. The reason my wife doesn’t like this set up is because she likes to watch things on youtube and just let the algorithm choose what to watch next (I know right). You can watch youtube from Kodi, I even scrape youtube channels to my home server for the things my kids watch, but it just doesn’t work in this “let the algo feed me more” kind of way.
I’m saying I’d just turn the PC into a headless server and get an Apple TV or something and plug it into the TV. The apps on a streaming box are going to be optimized for couch use, and then she can use the YouTube app with her algorithm if she wants.
That’s essentially what I have, a Plex server in my office and Apple TVs on each of the TVs around the house. Whether you like Apple or not, their 4K box is powerful enough to decode any media I’ve thrown at it and it supports pretty much all codecs without issue. The remote control is nice as well, but you need an Apple account to set it up.
How are you controlling Kodi from the couch? Do you have a remote control, or a mouse and keyboard or something? Having to use traditional PC controls in the living room is probably enough friction to turn most people away. You can have the best of both worlds if you get a “normie” streaming stick/box and connect it to your offline media server.
Yeah. All good points. Sorry you threw me earlier when you said something about connecting via HDMI.
I respect anyone’s freedom to choose whatever hardware they want and accept that Apple may be a very good solution, but I just couldn’t stomach it myself.
You can control Kodi from an app on your phone. It’s just like a tv remote. I think the UI is pretty great honestly. Hard to imagine anything significantly better or more user friendly.
I think the basic problem is that we bought the biggest cheapest TV we could. The manufacturer had no budget for UX, so we ended up with a dogs ass.
This is awful, but our non-dumb TV (we have two TVs) is so damn slow to start and switch over that if we know we’re going to watch something on it the next day, we just don’t turn it off.
But that one gets a lot less use, so it’s not left on all the time at least.
Yeah. God forbid you have to navigate the UI, it’s like wading around in a swamp.
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.
