And it will probably stay feasible as long as the number of people who do it is relatively miniscule. But economics being economics, we’re freeloading off the customers who hook their smart TVs up to the internet and provide manufacturers with enough revenue that they don’t care about us.
But should the practice become widespread and manufacturers notice a material impact on their revenues, or should growth stall and manufacturers start looking to squeeze more revenue out of customers, they will start embedding SIM cards in TVs that can’t be disabled, and work out deals with wireless carriers to have a private data channel as Amazon does with its kindles.
my 4K “smart” TV is the first I ever bought, and I believe the last. By the time I will want to replace it, I believe manufacturers will have closed this “loophole” and it will be impossible to keep a new TV from phoning home.
> they will start embedding SIM cards in TVs that can’t be disabled
Open up the TV and solder the antenna to ground. If the TVs refuse to work when there is no Signal, good luck with customer complaints - here in Germany, we have huge black-spots with no reception whatsoever (mostly rural areas, but people still live in those).
If the % of people who don't connect their smart TV to internet is small, then the % of people who will go through the trouble of soldering their TV (and voiding their warranty) is essentially 0%.
The whole "void warranty if any changes are made" is mostly not enforcable in Europe and as I understand it in some part in the US. In Germany, you would just have to proof that your change is not the culprit of the damage. I.e. if your OLED panel breaks, you can still claim warranty.
they will start embedding SIM cards in TVs that can’t be disabled
The real reason we "need" 5G, instead of better 4G, isn't so our cars can suddenly drive themselves and every hospital with be magically populated with surgery robots. It's so that every item we ever buy can spy on us.
If I try to reverse engineer the requirements for IPv6 and 5G it really seems like they are just key pillars of a world surveillance apparatus. Certainly IPv6 is completely unnecessary for most cases -- but if you criticize it you will get the hysterical tell tale vax or 'climate' treatment -- you are a bad person for stealing the last IPv4 from children or something!
Samsung and other manufacturers have already announced 5G-enabled Smart TVs. You’re right there’s no need to jump at shadows, but if this looks like a shadow, well…
The news of Samsung's upcoming TV will likely be a blow to Huawei, which is reportedly working on its own 5G 8K TV. Sharp is also working on its own 8K+5G initiative – both companies will need to hurry up if they want to beat Samsung to the punch, though.
5G TVs may not be in our homes yet, but they're on our doorstep.
And this comment is late to the conversation, but with 5G TVs, all of your streaming will go over 5G. No opportunity to use tooling to block ads or inspect what is being "phoned home." There are a good number of people whose primary uses for home internet are streaming and web browsing.
If these same TVs have a "WiFi hotspot app" that turns on a hotspot for an extra subscription, the TV manufacturers and their telecom partners will execute an end-around on the wired connectivity business.
Competition is good, but not when it's offering cheap internet in exchange for stripping consumers of any control whatsoever over their privacy.
TVs will soon, if not already, come with cell phones; the ad revenue is larger than what they are charged for the cell phone IP traffic. TVs also reportedly use any open WiFi they can see, and use DoH to make DNS-based ad blocking impossible.
The "they use any open wifi they can see" myth has been brought up on HN multiple times, and never did anybody provide any credible proof of this rumour (that started as a single reddit comment).
Worth noting that these articles are from 2019 and there hasn't been much talk of 5G TVs since. Aside from plain old 5G hype, SK Telecom wants 5G TVs as part of their envisioned ATSC/5G convergence that would bring more OTT services to broadcast TV (using their 5G network, naturally). This is mostly for the Korean market, since in North America broadcast TV is less popular and 5G networks have less capacity.
I would be surprised if modern TVs didn’t connect to open WiFis; there is literally no reason for TVs not to do this, and every incentive to do it. Even if we discount the ads as a motivator, it’s still a simple solution to get people’s stuff configured automatically.
Legal issues aside, there might be loss of company image and also privacy related matter (I can run an open wifi to see the data that my neighbour TV sends).
And to add to this: There has been no proof ever that modern TVs do this, and it would be quite easy for anyone/journalists/reviewers to check this (just run an open wifi and monitor it).
And I would be surprised if they did... the belief in these sorts of tech urban legends/conspiracy theories that some seemingly techie people have is cringeworthy.
And no, Facebook/Instagram aren't listening to users either, it would need too much bandwidth/server power to process all those conversations, and if you say "they can do the speech recognition on the users' phones", the majority of users use budget phones that don't have that sort of power.
This reminds me of the pre-Snowden times, where people often assumed that governments widely recorded internet traffic, since they had both the capability and the motivation, but people like you dismissed it as “urban legends/conspiracy theories” because there wasn’t any hard evidence.
How do you know what I did in regards to the Five Eyes?
I wonder what's easier to check and verify, a secret government tapping of the Internet, or if the TVs in millions of people's living rooms are trying to connect to open WiFi networks...
(I did not mention or claim anything about you personally.)
You’re right in that this should be easier to find. But I haven’t seen any concerted effort to buy N number of smart TVs and do security analysis on them in order to find something like this.
The asymmetry between the costs for the returns process and the 'happy path' of sales is such that even a relatively small percentage would throw a giant spanner in the works. You need to sell three more to make up for one return or so.
I have a Philips smart TV. I didn't connect it to the internet. Every week it nags me with a popup message telling me how much I'm missing if I don't connect it.
Technically, it's not defective; it still works without the internet. But think about it... What if the nag would pop up daily? Or every hour?
Some vendors are also just less scummy in turning it off and the extent of ad services. Sony TVs are Google TV-based and explicitly ask for Samba (not SMB) TV analytics (and can be declined), and you can just outright disable the APK in settings. No ads in menus like Samsung (you do get the Google TV "recommendations" but that's a whole other problem).
