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I hope you're right, but the TV market gives me pause. There's plenty of competition, but all the major brands include advertising and spyware in their TVs.

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Because most people don't think "is there spyware or adware on this smart TV" before they choose to buy one. In fact most people don't even really think a lot before buying a TV. This is the kind of thing that indeed regulation could be awesome, even though from a purely financial/objective point of view removing all of this would be kind of bad, I think it would be in the best interest of humanity.

Here's the problem: the same problem that caused consumers to not care about smart TV antifeatures in the first case (apathy) also causes them to not care about what their representatives are doing.

Because of this, any "regulation" that will actually happen is regulatory capture and/or performative regulation (there's probably a better term for this, but the idea is "regulation that looks good but doesn't actually do anything), because the citizens don't pay attention to these things, contact their representatives, or vote based on these issues, which is a necessary prerequisite for good regulation.

You can't spy if u don't have internet. I disabled internet (no router access) on all my smart TV's. So far they are working like a charm.

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