Submitted 2 days ago by CatZoomies@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
This tech has been in TVs easily for the past ten years.
Did you know this stuff is in most modern cars, too? Fuck. EVERYTHING listens to you now.
I hate to use this phrase, but, back in my day, we used to call this SPYWARE and it was treated as a virus - it was highly unacceptable by people.
This is still your day
So what im hearing is never buy an LG TV. Got it.
I have an LG TV. Absolutely love it.
However, it’s not connected to the internet so it doesn’t do any of this shit. It’s just a really nice dumb TV that has the potential to spy on me if I ever gave it a chance to be smart, and I still get to take advantage of the various picture improvements that come from having the processing power of a smart TV.
Just need something else to do streaming if that’s what you want. Like an Apple TV, nVidia Shield, Roku, or game console. Some of those will also advertise to you, but I’ve had good experience with my Apple TV.
I wouldnt be surprised if it randomly connects to unsecured wifi networks to still send the spy data.
Continue to never buy LG products again?
Gotcha. The advertising works, i guess…maybe not how they wanted to, though lol
Oh, they do have products without all that shit. They offer large screen monitors that are basically their TVs without the “smart” part.
i wager it has all the TV stuff gutted out, including the tuner… Which admittedly is only a problem if you use OTA and not cable.
My next TV will be either a business/signage monitor or a computer monitor.
At least something without any connection outside. No network, no anything.
At most something like a Chromecast or similar.
“I dont want it to have anything, except google, the biggest invader of privacy there is” :p
I recently bought an LG TV. I didn’t connect it to the Internet, I just use it with my Chromecast or Switch. Works great, no ads, no AI BS.
Coming soon (if not already): TVs with utility cellular connections or corpo network (like Amazon sidewalk) access that your neighbor may have not opted out of.
I find it highly likely that TVs cease to function without an internet connection, complete with some BS explanation about protecting your privacy or security.
I mean, a camera is an easy thing to block, as long as you’re aware of it, understand the implications, and have the desire to block it. Just obstruct the lens. Roll of black electrical tape, put a strip over it, done. Now, most people out there may not actually do so…
Only becomes an issue if other services that you actually want are tied to the camera, or if the TV refuses to operate without a usable picture of the viewer or something.
Coming soon: a screwdriver and a soldering iron
a quick reminder that the 5G standard defined a peer to pear operating mode for smart devices
Luckily my neighbors are way out of WiFi range and there is barely enough cell service here to send a text from inside the house.
Some TVs already have the ability to connect to sidewalk. More worrying is that every newer “Smart” TV has the ability to cast to it so if anyone ever does that using an internet connected device like a SmartPhone then bam…your TV just got an internet connection and can now send out stored data and potentially grab a firmware update.
Surprise!
This is the way to do it
I blocked my lg from the Wi-Fi after i got a “Kobe Bryant memorial” ad, while playing on my switch… TF?!
Do you think he thought avoiding all that traffic was worth it as he plummeted?
I’ve heard this line many times from so many people.
So basically just Nintendo and google profit off your personal information? And doesn’t Chromecast serve ads? In the background, but still?
I fully support your decision to not connect your LG TV to the internet. I do the same thing but it’s often just for convenience. I get better performance from my devices rather than from the TV itself for whatever application.
Just was thinking about that recently is all.
Hopefully no IBS either.
I got a Samsung TV a couple of years ago. I use it with a Roku. It’s not on my network. I’ll keep it until it stops working because I think eventually TVs will refuse to work without an Internet connection.
So I’ll buy a monitor.
but why
Sad people buy more to try to make themselves happy. Retail therapy.
People who serve ads have a vested interest in knowing when you’re unhappy and what makes you unhappy, so they can capitalise on it.
If they ever make this a standard feature in all TVs and make it where I can’t just disconnect it from the internet, I will be using old TVs for the rest of my life.
My TV is there to display a visual output. It does not and should not do anything else.
Luckily digital signboards will always be an option to replace TVs with if the situation becomes truly dire. The sorts of no-frills displays corporations buy to display whatever media they want in store.
Might not come with sound, but you can pick up a cheap sound bar and it will still be better than whatever cheap speakers commercial TVs try to cram in there.
The future is great!
As long as my 1080p plasma tv works, there’s no need to upgrade. Going 4K would also mean I would have to upgrade my HTPC hardware, because that old APU probably can’t handle resolutions like that.
In the meantime though, I’ll just keep on watching online videos in my living room without ads or interruptions. It’s been great even though all of this hardware is cheap and ancient.
Simple solution I use: Fuck television sets, get a computer monitor and basic speakers instead. A display should do only one thing and do it well.
Look at commercial sets
That would certainly be ideal, although there’s great difficulty in finding 50"+ monitors, and they cost a huge amount more
I guess that would beg the question, how much is it worth to you pay extra to not have additional spyware in your home? Or as others have said in this thread, there is at least one brand of television that still sells dumb tvs.
This is why you block the camera with a little diorama that shows a single white male viewer…frantically masturbating.
Close. This is why I mastubate frantically infront of the cameras. It satifies they kink for surveilance and my kink in exhibitionism.
It’s really an ecosystem, if you think about it
Wait, TVs have cameras now? That sounds super creepy
And an array of microphones. But it’s not like they have a clear view of their surroundings. Wait
Good idea, though, this isn’t actually about cameras watching you as the title looks like.
Yep, this is just a standard market segmentation.
Never connect your tv to WiFi
Don’t buy connected anything
Just buy things that do the thing you want.
No consumer ever asked for a smart tv
For the lower tech people, smart TVs are just OkAy. They allow an end user to use Netflix etc. It’s the fucking cameras mics and sensors illls in my Tv that’s fucked up
If it makes a sound you don’t recognise, use the gun.
The printer lol
Smart TVs are tools of the demiurge
Let’s be honest: I, as a customer, want to make informed buying decisions. I want to buy food that is tasty and maybe is healthy, but not based on some image that some marketing guys want to push. I want to choose the car which is best (and cheapest) for my purposes, and don’t want to be hearded into buying something else. I want to choose the best insurance for me and not be mislead by some emotional ad showing me a happy family.
And I really do not want to be manipulated in an emotional vulnerable moment so that I buy something. That’s shady as fuck
HOW EXCITING…
said no one ever.
Can we please ban electronic advertising already? And billboards? Society would be better off without them.
Buying a TV should be a one time cost. These companies trying to create a continuing income where none exists is just rampant greed. Don’t want to pay the cost of updating and distributing your software? The open source it and get back to making better TVs.
If we ban people from “earning” over a certain amount, they’ll get round it through “gifts” or exchange in-kind or something, right? Same with ads. If we ban them, then product placement with plausible deniability will be rife, paid through essentially money-laundering methods, worse than it is now.
Holy shit there were so many ads in that article that I just stopped reading. It sucks LG is going down this route. They make really nice displays but now I dont ever want to buy an LG tv if its spying on me to serve me these ‘better’ ads. Fuck advertising. Its turned into a complete monster
I’ve owned one of their 850UK 4K LCDs and currently their C4 OLED. I can say unequivocally that their software is ABYSMAL. They make great panels. No doubt. But they really have no business deploying them. The worst I’ve ever used.
I tried the YouTube app exactly once. Since then my TV doesn’t have an internet connection any more.
You can’t hardly even buy computer monitors without them anymore either. Every one of the higher end Samsung or LG monitors is starting to include “smart” bullshit.
You can probably just cover the camera with tape or smth.
Sounds like you need an ad blocker. I didn’t see any ads on the article except text links that were relevant to the story, which arguably aren’t ads.
Yeah I could really use one. Do you have any recommendations of ad blockers that you like?
It’s just the addition of “AI”. We’ve been doing the same thing for a long time. I used to work for an advertising data company over a decade ago, and they filtered all the ads for one of the big channels’ streaming services in exactly the same way just with regular algorithms rather than AI. It’s what would make ads for men’s razors appear in the middle of a soap opera at 11PM because it knew the user was a man getting home from the pub.
I just use a pi-hole to block my LG TV from connecting to any services I have not approved. So it can connect to YouTube but not lg.trackingservices.brainscanner.com. Never seen an ad on my TV.
I just don’t connect the snoopy bastard to my network 😂
I’m about to live in a camper full of paper books. I hate everything tech has done in the last twenty years.
I would make an inappropriate Ted Kaczynski joke if I didn’t know everything we do is being constantly monitored at all times by a bunch of turds with zero sense of humor.
Even Hannah Montana Linux?
Counterpoint, we have the Cosmic Desktop (or at least an alpha for it) and tbh its pretty cool :3
I have a TCL Roku TV and holy shit it was engineered to deliver ads. If it is not connected to the network, the power LED blinks and is very annoying. The power LED is right next to the IR receiver and can’t just be taped over. Assigning a manual IP and DNS is blocked so traffic can’t be routed through a pihole. I use the Jellyfin app on the TV so it needs local network access. At this point the damn thing needs to have traffic managed at a network level firewall. I don’t have the hardware for the firewall at the moment but now that Roku has pop up ads for simply moving around the app menu (yes really), I may need to get on that.
Literally TV from 1984
I’d rather just not have a tv
I was describing this to my partner and she thought i said “LGBT”. Yes. The LGBTQ community created this technology and weaponized it. Next on Fox News.
I’ll never connect a TV to the internet again.
Enshittification in progress. Sadly their OLED TVs are amazing, if not for the intrusive ads. It is really crap what all those companies are doing shoving ads our throats.
I am trying to block everything using ad blockers, DNS filtering, Pi hole, etc.
You know back in the day they were like easily half a dozen custom Android ROMs for any given phone. I’m pretty sure that there’s still a diversity of ROMs available.
Why is this not the case with televisions?
I wish there was a TV with absolutely no built in smart features and a slot in the back for a compute module (like a RP CM5).
So we pay them to do this to us? I stopped putting tv’s on the internet once I realized it offered me nothing useful. Firmware is about it and if that’s the case I’ll either usb it or put it on the internet for 5 min to do the update. Even then Samsung sucks so much with firmware the release notes for every single update are “bug fixes and improvements”… thanks Samsung.
If I am forced to put it online or it comes up with a way to phone home on its own, I am done buying those kinds of tv’s, and I’m sure some other brand will offer one that doesn’t, even if it isn’t the best one to buy.
If you want a serious mind fuck read “stand On Zanzibar” a science fiction novel from 1969.
One of the things that the writer predicted was Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere, a gimmick where your TV would insert your family into advertisements.
The novel is full of other, equally accurate predictions…
No.
Nope.
Don’t like that.
that was always my beef with ads, they just didnt speak to me on an emotional level
TON618@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is really a good way to get me to avoid a brand.
wewbull@feddit.uk 1 day ago
I agree, but with TVs (or large displays" we’re at the point where there are no good options. Commercial displays are over engineered for the home and lag in technology Vs home TVs. So they’re not an option. Lg and Samsung are the display technology leaders, but their TVs are full of crap— so no. Monitors don’t go large enough for the living room.
Guess I’m stuck with what I have.
knatschus@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Monitors are still bigger than TVs our parents had in our childhood, no way I’m buying such a surveillance machine just for a bigger screen.
tauren@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Here, take it:
)sinceasdf@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If that is even true, why would you ever accept this anti consumer bullshit for a slightly better screen…? You do not need the absolute newest and best of everything. It might not even take a year before it’s not “the best” anymore with how fast tech cycles.
Bwilder@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Huh, I’ve heard that commercial displays are the way to go. What do you mean when you say they are over engineered?
Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Get a projector. Cheaper, bigger display area, less obtrusive.
brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
This Samsung is out of stock, but there are options. You just need to look for signage displays or hospitality tvs.