Leveraging people’s property to trash their privacy and serve them ads is really a good way to get me to avoid an entire brand for everything.
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.
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.
For real: I’m using a 38" ultra wide, and if you had told child me that a 38" monitor would be the smallest display in the house I’d have told you that you’re full of shit.
Damn you for making me feel old by realizing my computer monitor is bigger than my childhood CRT TV.
Really. A bigger screen just gives my dog a bigger target when he flails his toys around.
Here, take it:
)Ta
Why would you ever accept this anti consumer bullshit for a slightly better screen? It might not even take a year before the current cutting edge not “the best” anymore with how fast tech cycles. I would absolutely go out of my way to get a device I can deprive of an Internet connection and still use.
This Samsung is out of stock, but there are options. You just need to look for signage displays or hospitality tvs.
Huh, I’ve heard that commercial displays are the way to go. What do you mean when you say they are over engineered?
They’re designed and built to run 16/7 or similar. If you have TV on 16 hours a day, a commercial display is worth considering.
No, I’m not joking - I’ve seen folk who turn it on at sunrise, and off at bedtime.
They’re industrial boxes with a screen. Not aesthetically what I want in my living room. The displays are chosen for their longevity, not their picture quality. They’re often actively cooled with fans, so adding a noise level to their operation.
Might wanna look around, there are plenty used as wallboards in offices that high def and whisper quiet
Get a projector. Cheaper, bigger display area, less obtrusive.
You can get them now days up to 360hz refresh rate. Gaming projectors and projectors in general have came a long way from the faded blurry shit they were 10 to 15 plus years ago.
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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 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.
Pictures are far from the only thing to worry about.
Coming soon: a screwdriver and a soldering iron
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.
How close are you to a starlink constellations orbital path, now that they can be connected to via cellular modems?
That doesn’t support data yet. Data will probably cost a fortune when they enable it. I doubt anyone will be willing to pay that much to serve ads. If they do, then the antenna will be replaced with a dummy load.
this sounds terrible
a quick reminder that the 5G standard defined a peer to
pearpeer operating mode for smart devicesPear to pear communication.
that was a good one :) fixed the typo
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?
Okay so fuck rich people destroying the planet with private air travel—however, he was still statistically more likely to die from driving that day. And so was his daughter and the other innocent kids on that flight
He was in a helicopter not a 747.
Hopefully no IBS either.
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.
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.
But that’s the thing: televisions are complex and can be very difficult to repair, so what do you do when you can’t buy a dumb replacement anymore? I have the same issue with cars. I would like to replace ours with an EV, but they are a privacy nightmare whereas my car’s peak technology is FM radio.
I was thinking earlier today about how much technology waste there is because old stuff is superseded so quickly. Maybe in future we will treasure the tech we had before it all went to shit.
Kit cars have been around for ages, and Framework offers DIY laptops. I think we should have kit displays as well. Surely, someone has already made something like that with a raspberry or something.
Yeah, hopefully we can just buy cheap panels and put it together how we want. If that also opened up options for hackers to build entirely new display applications, or in new ways, that would be the dream.
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/public wifi networks to still send the spy data if it can find any in its area.
Always asume the worst with any (tech) product and any major company, and a lot of times you will be proven right later.
With technology and politics, always assume the worst.
Maybe. If they’re following the rules they need you to agree to their privacy policies, and to do that you have to connect to the internet. I know from the time I did have it connected (before they rolled all this shit out) that they would let you use the TV without those policies accepted. They would just bother you about it constantly. Since I factory reset and didn’t let it connect, it hasn’t asked.
But that’s assuming they follow the rules. I’m not knowledgeable enough to find out if they’re doing this or not.
IF YOU DIDN’T PHONE HOME I WOULDN’T NEED A PRIVACY POLICY
It does have Bluetooth on and you can’t turn it off . But the wifi setting can be turned off
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.
They have a bunch of display ports and HDMIs. You can buy the tuner you need (SAT, OTA, cable, other streamer), or use a PC&Linux and watch YT add-free.
Why would a TV need to know about addition?
Because of f-ed up autocorrect, that’s why.
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
You can still set up your own HTPC in your living room and configure it yourself.
And there are more solutions like from Apple (but they absolutely fucking track you as well) or other streaming box/stick solutions I am not aware of.
Unsure how good an Nvidia Shield is in regards to privacy. Your best bet for privacy is probably to just build your own solution on Linux.Nvidia is huge on producing AI and is certainly data-hungry. Without actually knowing, I would bet it’s about as bad as anything else. Since all your data is passing directly through their servers it’s trivial for them to do whatever they want with it.
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
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
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I tried the YouTube app exactly once. Since then my TV doesn’t have an internet connection any more.
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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.
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.
it’s not talking about tracking emotions from looking at the viewer, it’s tracking the emotions in the script of the thing they’re watching, so it knows what they like.
Don’t connect a computer monitor to the internet?..
It gets its internet connection from the PC; both HDMI and DisplayPort allow this.
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?
uBlock Origin on Firefox-based browsers.
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.
I just… don’t connect the TV to the internet. Never had an issue with anything like that.
This is the best way, really. Generally, you have much more control over what you plug into it.
A display shouldn’t have anything even approaching what can be called an ‘OS’ on it. Yet here we are.
Sometimes even that’s not enough. I’ve had some questionable kit before that would just ignore the DNS settings fed to it if it thought they were no good, and fall back to something else preconfigured.
pfSense is a wonderful tool for situations like that. Anything intended for local use only here just doesn’t get outside at all. Handy for stuff like a fire stick that only needs to be calling up a local media library.
It can also mangle any DNS requests going out to a different server and redirect them to itself instead. You could do this without it with iptables/nftables on a generic Linux box, but pfSense makes it much friendlier.
There are other packages that can do the same, but physically all you need is one piece of hardware as a bouncer that manages connections between inside/outside.
what can it do if the TV uses DoH, DoT, or something else similar? I expect that it can do nothing. unless the TV is on a separate vlan with very strictly only access to internal services
Don’t connect it at all and just use an Android TV box or dongle.
well that’s what I’m saying to the parent commenter
At that point I would expect control of it, or at least for it to respect the configuration it is given. If neither are true, then it just doesn’t go online at all. If that’s part of the main function, then I find an alternative or live without it.
Nothing on the inside should be sending anything to the outside that can’t be inspected before it leaves, with the exception of stuff that is directly driven by a human (guests browsing, etc).
I got an LG OLED a few weeks ago. Hands down the best TV screen I’ve ever owned.
Fuck knows what the stock OS does because I’ve only watched Apple TV through it.
Literally TV from 1984
We’re on the cusp of the panopticon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
The framework for an authoritarian tech surveillance state is in our pockets.
Luckily, not if you actually read the article. The headline is misleading. “Emotional advertising” is a marketing gimmick term by LG for guessing your personality from the shows you watch.
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 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.
most firmware releases will be to fix something with the online service anyway. If it displays stuff coming down a wire from your PC when you buy it, it probably never needs an update.
I will say I had 1 time i needed it. It was my Samsung Odessey monitor. It supports freesync but I noticed when it was on there would be a slight flicker. Dealt with it for probably 2 years before looking into it. Low and behold online comments all said firmware fixed it. It worked, fixed it and now it’s been fantastic ever since. One of the only times an update on a screen did something amazing. It’s not the norm but the excception.
I’d rather just not have a tv
Just don’t connect it to the internet.
Aren’t some companies thinking of releasing TVs that won’t work unless connected to the internet?
I’m sure they’re thinking about it. Anyone who buys one of those deserves no better.
Sure 4x the price of a good one and you get a bottom tier Walmart panel
Don’t some try to locate public access points nearby? Or is it just an internet myth?
I have an open access point and my neighbour’s TV is on it. I’m not sure if it was deliberatel.
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
As if someone published a book featuring this very technology…in 1949.
It was noted with memes when the ToS of one such television suggested not having private conversations in front of or otherwise near the TV screen.
Good idea, though, this isn’t actually about cameras watching you as the title looks like.
Yep, this is just a standard market segmentation.
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.
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.
Look at commercial sets
