LG's recent software update has forcibly installed Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant, on smart TVs without removal options, sparking widespread user backlash over privacy, bloatware, and loss of control. This highlights growing tensions in smart devices, where monetization often overrides user preferences.
Meet ACR
Holy shit, I had no idea that exists. My next TV will be a monitor with no internet access.
I’m in the process of making all our media sources and tech independent, starting with my dad’s laptop. I’ve already set up easy remote access so I can always help him with anything. I am NEVER using mainstream shit from now on.
Thrift stores usually have some older dumb TVs if youre okay with 1080p, and Sceptre still makes dumb consumer-grade TVs if you are willing to shop on Amazon or at Walmart
What i don’t get is there is clearly a market here. Why doesn’t some lesser Known TV manufacturer make a dumb TV and steal all those customers from the big ones.
The common “why doesn’t someone just make a ‘dumb’ TV for people who don’t want this crap?” question has an easy answer. Dumb TVs do exist, they’re called “commercial monitors” or “commercial displays” and just show the audiovisual signal given to them by whatever else you hook up, in the manner of old TVs before additional apps or spyware were a thing. As implied by the name, stores and other businesses use them to show what they want without the added guff of the apps and ads they wouldn’t be able to fully control.
Important detail: commercial displays tend to be fuckoff expensive compared to smart TVs of comparable size, quality, and feature set.
“Hey,” you may be thinking, “how do they get away with charging so big a premium for an appliance with fewer features?” And you wouldn’t be out of line to think that. However, what’s going on is more insidious.
The higher price of a “dumb” TV is more correctly thought of as the real price of the appliance. The reason you pay so much less for a comparable “smart” TV is because the companies behind all the apps and spyware, the preinstalled shovelware apps which get you interested to subscribe to their services (Netflix, Hulu, Prime, etc.) and/or send you advertisements, as well as the spyware companies who profit from all the data about you that gets phoned home as you use the thing, pay the hardware manufacturers to put their shit software onto the device at the factory. That money made by the manufacturer from the shit companies goes, at least partially, toward lowering the price of the TV to entice you to pick it up at the store instead of a competitor’s TV.
Look at that big chunk of money you save buying a smart TV over a comparable dumb display, and consider that the shit companies are paying the manufacturer that amount or more for the opportunity to monetize you and your household.
Then, if you have the wherewithal to pay what is now easily considered a ridiculous amount more for an appliance that isn’t part of a system meant to take permanent advantage of you, you can just buy the commercial display instead. Alternatively, you can find clever technological ways to buy the cheaper “smart” one but counteract the ways in which it monetizes you, whether technical ways like jailbreaking or installing alternative OSes (some very early-stage efforts to get this sort of thing going are out there, but still very scattershot compared to the scene for doing so to smartphones) or simpler methods like just never letting the thing onto the Internet no matter how much it begs or enshittifies your user experience (a strategy which will stop working once it becomes cheap enough for the shit companies to just include their own connectivity hardware in the device which uses its own wireless and doesn’t need your network.)
It’s a continuing battle.
A common refrain I’ve heard about those commercial monitors is that they can’t really do gaming due to input latency, since they’re not built for input, they’re built for commercial display and what commercial display customer cares about input latency. But I haven’t verified that.
That was an excellent explanation. Thanks.
Thanks for your kind words! I’m happy to help.
Build your home as a Faraday cage. They can’t bypass physics.
P.S. Holy crap. The guy on the radio is on lemmy?
Hi! I’m just one guy on the radio, there may be others.
Like I just said, Sceptre does. :P
Because they can’t see past the profit generating potential of selling your data.
Even monitors are having smart TV antifeatures added. Soon you won’t be able to find a “dumb monitor” — and this is why.
I know it’s not a fix all
But a Pi-hole prevents a lot of this collected data from ever leaving your network to begin with.
If for some reason someone turns on the wifi on my LG tv (I have teenagers and their friends), I have the device itself blacklisted from the network.
But that’s not a reasonable level of granularity for a typical user. We need privacy protection laws to end this sort of behavior from manufacturers.
Could not possibly agree more.
These companies need to be held accountable.
There are ways to keep yourself somewhat safe for now.
Good luck getting either party to do so with the amount of corporate money thrown their way. :/ You might be able to shout at the Dems to do something but it’ll be a half measure of allowing an opt out system.
Yeah, my smart TVs are the noisiest devices on my network, by far. In a day of heavy usage where I’m doomscrolling and constantly scrolling past ads, my phone may log ~2500 blocked requests. My Roku and Samsung TVs both average around 7000 blocked requests per day, even when we haven’t used them at all. That’s a request to their data-harvesting and ad servers getting blocked every ~12 seconds, even when they’ve been turned “off” all day.
Do not connect it to your network. It cannot do spying if ot cannot connect.
Oh geez I just went and disconnected my TV from WiFi, I dunno why I had it connected in the first place, I use a separate box thingy for all the services. I’m getting so sick of constantly being perceived and surveilled by stuff all around me.
Yup. Make sure it’s not a “smart” TV with a WiFi connection. LG was one of three TV companies (Visio and Samsung were the others) that got caught spying on their TVs HDMI connection and sending usage data on connected devices back to their manufacturers through the WiFi connection.
A wifi connection to where? Were people using unprotected networks?
Vision TVs have built-in WiFi to promote their own, garbage tier streaming service. So you need to connect it to your home WiFi network to use it. But they can also monitor the TVs HDMI port.
So if you have a Roku or a DVD player connected to it, the TV can monitor what’s coming into the HDMI port and then use your WiFi connection to send that info home.
I noticed the Visio is very aggressive about you enabling the WiFi connection even if you just want to use it as a monitor. (i.e. if you disable the TVs WiFi, it will nag you to turn it back on every time you turn the TV on and not let you use the TV until you do it). I’m guessing this is deliberate because Visio values collecting the HDMI data more than their streaming service.