Campaigns Can Now See What You Watch on TV | Hacker News Reader

Campaigns Can Now See What You Watch on TV

notus.org

19 pointsajdude12 comments

The solution is simple: Don't hook up / connect your TV to the Internet.

This has been discussed many times on this site in a continual basis for years :).

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

My setup with a 2020 LG OLED and both Apple TV and Google TV devices attached is stable and works great. The extra $250 for the external devices was worth it (Apple TV - $200, Google TV - $50).

Now I'm curious - For anyone here who's attached an LG OLED television to the Internet and received webOS updates: Does the unit now work better or worse than when you first purchased it new?

On a related note, how many people have applied the LG webOS jailbreak? I remember reading about it on HN a few years ago and then not thinking about it again until now. The project got repository (https://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io) looks pretty quiet these days.

RootMyTV is a user-friendly exploit for rooting/jailbreaking LG webOS smart TVs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33016217 (September 2022, 417 comments)

I doubt most TV users would consider that option when e.g. wanting to watch a streaming service, especially when price and tech awareness are taken into consideration.

You don't attach the television to the network; the Apple TV or similar device IS attached to the network to function, but the TV itself is disconnected. This is what I presently do.

I understand the solution, I’m saying most people won’t use it.

Most people spend less on tech and have less tech awareness than a hn reader.

This article focuses on the sets but don’t fool yourself; every streaming device and every app on those devices is capturing as much telemetry as possible and selling it

I have even heard of some WiFi enabled sets which will surreptitiously connect to any open WiFi and phone home. They can detect programming that they display.

> People are spending more time with streaming than broadcast or cable television

This isn't about the television sets. It's about watching programming from streaming services. If you log on to Hulu, Roku, Youtube, even AppleTV, that's when you're feeding the data brokers. Don't want that? The only choice is to pirate. Or don't watch anything.

> In some cases, ad services claim they can follow a single person from their television to their smartphone and even to digital billboards at bus stops.

But really we have no choice. The propagandists are making the choice and forcing us to watch.

not sure which has me more gobsmacked. That anyone is surprised smart TV's are tracking their viewers, or that we accidentally exposed political campaign interactions with their constituents and the voting age population as a whole to be exploitative and not interactive.

pro move: i don’t have a TV! (i have a screen in my living room, but it’s a repurposed monitor)

Friendly reminder: you can buy an LG OLED and use it as a dumb TV by not connecting it to the internet. It still works, it doesn’t nag you about it, and it doesn’t try to sneak its way onto local WiFi. I don’t know how long this will last, but can confirm that it’s currently true as of this date.

You've still got a TV with an operating system though. A TV shouldn't need to boot up.

Don't really need to update the firmware either, if it never connects to the Internet.

Joke is on me, because while I have a disconnected TV, the Roku I use for streaming likely tattles on everything I watch.

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