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Comment by bcx | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity how many aspects of this TV could also be applied to your laptop.

1) It has a webcam

2) It has a microphone

3) You install software all the time that has access to both of these things.

3) Practically everything you do on it is tracked, cookied, and shared. (Sure some companies probably respect Do-Not-Track, but everyone?)

4) Do you realize that facebook knows your age, all of your friends, your demographics, and has like buttons on most pages on the internet. They are also about to launch a big ad platform to help others leverage that knowledge to place ads.

5) Google knows everything in your inbox.

Your Xbox has gesture control and voice command too.

If you are going to smash TVs, you probably should smash your laptop, and your xbox.

I don't think a few burning TVs in the streets are going to change anything. You'll need to think bigger :-)

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yeah, but there are answers for a laptop to nearly every one of your bullets.

I can't modify the hardware on a television reasonably, I can't change the operating system reasonably, nor can I modify the loaded software. I can't choose to run the server that it phones home to.

I can remove my laptop's webcam, or order one without. Same for a mic (lenovo/dell/hp have 'government specials' -- laptops without mics/cams/antennas), I can review the software I install, I can change it, etc. I can run my own email server.

One system enables the user to have power over the system itself, one doesn't. We need to stress the importance of users' power and ensure it for the future.

Don't buy such walled systems until the walls are removed so as to enable them to be functioning members of our user-centric society, rather than their profit-centric walled garden.

I guess I was thinking more broadly.

To most people everything feels like a walled garden, their phone, their computer, their TV. Sure you can install software on them, but very few people actually install new operating systems on anything at a low enough level that it would actually help their privacy.

As the technological elite, something like a TV that has so much embedded junk seems extra walled off. But I'd argue that most people have no clue how to stop websites from tracking them or to protect their privacy on any device. Most people have no IDEA what a cookie or an IP address is.

You happen to be familiar with software. To many people putting a piece of thick tape over the TV screen's camera, and microphone might be much easier than installing TOR. Dealing with the underlying embedded OS is probably super annoying, but hopefully you can still use your TV as a direct display using something similar to a Roku.

If a market for do-not-track devices exists someone will fill it, but I worry that the general population will have no idea that it's necessary or even care.

If you're really into avoiding these, at least on a laptop you can:

1) Use a blob-free OS like Trisquel. Heh, your webcam may not have drivers in Trisquel. Or tape over it.

2) Trisquel also.

3) Trisquel also. Another good alternative is TAILS.

4) Use IceWeasel (Firefox source code) and the RequestPolicy extension.

5) Use DuckDuckGo or another anonymizing proxy.

I agree with you though, that we must think bigger than buying TVs so we can smash them.

RequestPolicy is cool, but there's a new addon called Policeman that gives more fine-grained control. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/policeman/

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