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Comment by Zaskoda | Hacker News Reader

My next TV purchase will be a dumb TV.

You can put any android TV into dumb mode ("Basic TV") during setup, which disables many-most of the smart features without affecting core display functionality: https://support.google.com/googletv/answer/10408998?hl=en.

You're still greeted by a full-page ad on the main menu. But yes; it is better.

Tell me, mr. Ad-man, what good is an ad network... without an internet connection?

I recently got my hands on a "smart TV" for free because the power supply was broken and the replacement the owner had bought did not work. That turned out to be due to the fact that he bought the wrong board so I used parts from both boards to create a working power supply and there I was with a working "TCL 50DP660", this turned out to be a 50" 4K Android TV. Whatever I do with it, it won't get an unfettered internet connection just like all other 'smart' things around here. They live on their own private network where they only get to see what I allow them to see, i.e. my own media services and whatever proxy service I provide to the outside world. No auto-update, no ads, no nothing.

In Cocaine [1] Dillinger spells "New York" as 'a knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork'. Here we spell the 'New Net' as 'a wall, a block, a proxy and a lock'

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9JLen8TTJg

Totally off topic, but I have wondered for 30 years where Information Society got “a knife and a fork, a bottle and a cork, that’s the way to spell New York”, because it was clearly intended as a sample or re-creation. Now I’m one step closer.

Well, great, now I’m going to have that stuck in my head.

> You're still greeted by a full-page ad on the main menu.

The same ad every time, or is it still phoning home for new ads?

This definitely looks like what I'll use when I buy my next TV. I'll then just run everything through a set-top box like an NVIDIA Shield or my PS4/PS5.

Smart TVs are cheaper. As already mentioned in another response, just use a smart TV in dumb mode. You get the streaming providers to subsidize your purchase without you giving them any money.

>You get the streaming providers to subsidize your purchase without you giving them any money.

Exactly. My Android-based TV shows me an ad (a still one) on the home screen for some new TV show available on some streaming service, and that's it. Then I just press down-arrow a few times and another button to start Jellyfin or SmartTube.

Dumb TVs are getting harder to find. It would be easier to login on your router and deny access to your smart TV.

Not plugging your TV into the network also works quite well.

5G service channel says otherwise.

If there are devices around with cellular data access which do not require subscriptions that sounds like something which would be ripe for, shall we say, alternative use cases. Are there? I have not seen these yet but that does not mean much. I do know that if I ever get my hands on one the supplier will rue the day they decided to add a surreptitious data exfiltration channel to their products.

Yes there are. Construction equipment manufacturers sometimes buy a worldwide low data rate cellular plan, and give every machine they ship the ability to phone home.

I recall that there was also an e-reader with similar functionality.

Yes, I know about such connections in heavy equipment and cars and about the old Kindle with 'lifetime' data, what I was wondering about is whether there are surreptitious cellular links built into consumer electronics which enable those devices to exfiltrate user data even when the user does not allow them internet access. I have not heard of such devices yet but that does not mean they do not exist.

I feel like there probably aren't. It would be impossible to hide this for very long and it's expensive to implement.

I mean: It's not cellular, but crowd-sourced services like Amazon Sidewalk are things that exist in the wild, and are available for third-party use.

It's only a matter of time before the Alexa device like the one on my nightstand starts providing a sliver of Internet access to a smart TV that you have never been intentionally brought online.

https://coverage.sidewalk.amazon/

Are there TVs with it out now, or is it still Coming Soon?

Unlikely. They don't really exist any more, at least not for a price you will be willing to pay.

Good luck finding one, but this has nothing to do with Smart TVs, and everything to do with what you hook up to a TV.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but the device the story is complaining about is a TV, not a Roku device.

> On June 6th, my TCL TV’s Roku OS was updated to version 13.0.0.

Disable wifi on the TV and use an AppleTV.

Better still, use Kodi or Jellyfin on whatever you have lying around - Kodi works fine on a Raspberry Pi 3 - so you're not swapping one spy for the other.

AppleTV doesn’t spy. Downstream whatever apps you do will, but they already know what you’re playing anyway.

It’s mostly diff use cases for if you have media already or use streaming platforms.

What do you base your trust in Apple on? I don't trust them any more than I trust Google or Microsoft or Amazon or whatever other data-hungry corporate entity you may think of.

For AppleTV the hardware is far more expensive than the alternatives because it’s not subsidized by selling your viewing habits. The privacy policies tell you this, as does public knowledge. Companies like Roku which make most of their money on analyzing and selling your data do so publicly because they want people to know they should buy this info from them. Apple as a whole has had its traffic analyzed across devices by many many many security researchers; if there was a great contradiction in terms it would be public info by now.

But most importantly I work at Apple and see how the sausage is made — privacy is integrated into every step of the process. Working in AI this is quite difficult because it means I don’t have user data to work with unlike if I worked at some other bigcos. It’s funny to me when I interview people coming from such companies, it never really clicks until they ask how many GPUs I have access to and I reply “where all this data is coming that you want to process?”

I think it’s easy to become jaded, but when it’s based on assumptions then you don’t know the delta between it and reality. Overall I suspect the true distribution of corruption/valid concerns across society overlaps little with public beliefs… I believe most of the shady stuff is happening outside of the public eye and we don’t even know it exists.

You work at Apple and you think Apple is trustworthy. I'm fairly sure people who work at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and the others say the same about their employers. The mere fact that Apple products are expensive does not make Apple trustworthy, it just means they target the 'premium' market segment. Here's some food for thought for those who put too much trust in Apple:

https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-is-an-ad-company-now/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/23/apple-use...

There's more to be found on this subject, just feed a search engine with questions related to apple tracking and gathering data on its users.

Please note that '...but they are not as bad as Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Facebook/etc' does not exculpate Apple. They may well be but that is not what I compare them to. I compare them to that Google-free device running an AOSP-derived distribution connecting to the server-under-the-stairs, not to any other corporate entity. In that comparison they fail spectacularly, hence my preference for running free software.

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