Smart TVs are a curse (from a consumer perspective). A separate smart device makes much more sense.
People usually replaced their TVs when they broke, which could be 6-8+ years. Nowadays as their already slow hardware becomes even more obsolete, streaming apps are no longer updated and start to break, new ones are not released, etc. they go ahead and buy a new one.
You also have to accept all kinds of crappy agreements, so you can be spied on and get served ADS (?!?!).
Not to mention even the most expensive TVs come with baffingly slow hardware and software. $2k devices can take 10+ seconds to load the menu with 4 options, where you can modify picture settings. Incredible.
A TV should be a display with inputs and nothing more IMO.
Smart boxes are cheap and much faster than even the most expensive TVs, and they can be replaced inexpensively when eventually they become obsolete.
For a long time I pulled the network cable from my TV after I got tired of getting bombarded with changed ToS agreements, firmware updates and home screen ads. Now I have it on the network again just because I wanted to control the source from my PC, but it's still blocked from the internet on the firewall. Go ahead and make snapshots you stupid little TV.
While a separate smart device makes more sense from an ecological perspective, it won't save you from ads, tracking, screenshots etc., as long as the same OS that would be running on the TV is running on the device. And, if you want to install apps from streaming services, you need one of the supported OSs - AFAIK most smart devices use Android TV?
At least a separate smart device isn’t going to record everything I’m doing on my gaming console, which is connected to a different HDMI input.
With smart boxes you have much more options. I'm thinking a stipped down android TV box doesn't make screenshots and track you like most smart TVs do, they also don't serve random ads on the home page.
Apple TV is really your best option if you want privacy. Google is primarily an ad company that wants to learn as much about you as possible to target those ads.
A SmartTV is not a problem as long as it has HDMI Input.
You don't like your SmartTV? Switch to HDMI Input and use your device.
I find it very practical that my LG Smart TV has the normal core apps available and i do not want to have a second remote.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, automated content recognition and analysis and advertising will apply to anything on your screen no matter the input source
Ok but if the tv has no internet access what is the smart tv going to do with all these nice screenshots? First rule: never provide Internet access to your smart tv.
There was some talk lower in the thread about devices being able to form mesh-networks with other devices that do have internet connection (for ex. your neighbour) and share data that way, there hasn't been any links or sources to the claims yet however
Sure, it's practical, that's why most people don't have a separate smart box. That's why I called it a curse, because most people are being nagged with ads and being tracked on a level the article talks about.
Smart boxes can communicate with the TV (HDMI-CEC), and you don't have to ever use the TV's remote. If the box turns on, it turns on the TV and switches the source. Same with turn off. If you cast a youtube video to the box, the TV also turns on, etc. So it works completely seamless (at least in my case).
Oh wait, I just remembered regular TV channels exist, I guess you will still need the TV's remote for that.
Do they transmit this information anywhere? A lot of this can be attributed to the anti-burn-in tech that dims your screen if the image is mostly-static for a long time.
I'm in the market for a new TV. Is there any source that lists models that do NOT engage in this sort of spying? I am willing to pay a significant premium and forego convenience features, but I lack the expertise to review products myself.
Just don't connect it to your network and you're probably fine. Use a smart box for streaming services.
If you live in the EU, certainly you first have to give consent to that practice, right?
If they process personal data without explicit user consent, in violation of a privacy policy that outlines the types of data collected and how it is handled, it could be a GDPR violation. For example, if I cast photos of my children via Chromecast or entered my email into a Netflix app, and they send those images or my email sent to a server without my consent, this might also constitute a GDPR violation. It would be great if Max Schrems or a similar privacy advocate took up such a case.
Just never connect them to the internet. I just use them as a display for my apple tv.
I think Apple’s strategy here is going to pay off. Provide a box with an actual fast processor in it, a simple Home Screen with no ads, and an OS with no tracking. Somehow this is a revolutionary idea in this industry.
But slowly I’m seeing more people recommending the AppleTV, even amongst enthusiast circles which tend to be rather anti-Apple.
How would that help? You plug your AppleTV into a smart TV (to be able to use it) and the TV takes tracking snapshots anyway.
You don't connect your TV to the internet.
A report of a Samsung TV automatically connecting to a nearby unsecured network: https://web.archive.org/web/20210912135232/https://forum.dev...
Not as common as I thought though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275350
no obviously apparent tracking*
Do you have a source for the hidden tracking in Apple TV you’re referring to?
This is a very fuzzy memory, but I remember a report of a smart device that "helpfully" automatically connects to other devices nearby, forming a mesh network.
In other words, even if you never connect your TV to your WIFI, it might be enough that your neighbour does.
If anyone has any more info on this I'd be very interested in seeing it
My TV is a Raspberry 3B+ with a TV Hat and TVHeadend on my Android phone and tablets. My disconnected LG smart TV sits in a corner connected to an old PlayStation. I can use it to watch movies with friends if I want to: I connect to it either my laptop or my tablet with a HDMI cable.
BTW: why a smart TV? Because for only an extra 50 Euro I got a much better screen (subjective assessment) than the best dumb TV on sale when I went shopping for them years ago.
Meanwhile my 70 year old something mother wants to watch TV not having to rely on me for tech support when she does.
For nerds, brilliant. I love such setups myself but for the household consumer it's an no-go.
the bane of my existence. I have some older family dealing with serious cognitive decline and when it comes to my parents or in-laws I'm "the guy" so they will ask for my help navigating the TV because they are still understandably clinging onto satellite/cable while being forced to learn streaming.
I'm more than happy to help as this is an area of interest but man, what I would do to be able to set my father-in-law up with a TV, streamer, remote he can use consistently. When I bought an Apple TV I thought that would solve his problems when they housesat for us but his motor issues get in the way and he always forgets Siri. I raised this question of how do we better serve older adults a few times at an assistive tech conference and no one seems to have cracked the code yet.
the google software comes integrated now, with one fewer remote, one fewer device and port needed, all peripheral connections direct to same device with native 4k120 connections without a $1000 receiver. my receiver is only used for audio return channel now, which has reduced tv/receiver sync issues, that remote is used for volume only. and google does still know how to deliver working consumer software, the content provider apps all work and integrate with the home screen.
Alphonso inc. develops the tech https://lgads.tv/site-privacy-policy/. Looked into the LinkedIn of some of the employees and it looks like a huge operation.
This should be illegal
Most of these are still dumb:
This makes these screens a bit of an issue when eg accessing your bank. And it should be made clear to people that you must not connect a corporate or government devices to these screens.
(The fact that private citizens _should_ have the same security expectations notwithstanding, corporations and governments have more legal clout)
Sounds like wholesale copyright theft to me.
I think they are just generating fingerprints of the video data on the device. Then they send it to the cloud where they compare it with a huge database of TV shows, etc.
Similar to what Shazam does for music.
> [...] in their automatic content recognition systems [...] Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG TVs every 10 milliseconds
I wonder how much energy it take to analyze 4k images 10 times a second?
I have to think that whatever they're using this for, it could be done at a much lower data resolution.
They do this to match what you're watching to a database. Think Shazam but with video.
They find what movie, show or whatever you're watching and send it to advertisers with all your metadata, so they can match and track you from an ad impression to you visiting their site to get information and buy.
There's a lot of metadata there to match. If you access their site, for example with your phone, from the same internet connection, they can probably match the information from the TV with one of the tracking cookies on your phone, and then keep tracking you in all the commercial "journey".
This has been already discussed around here because this is one of the reasons smart tvs are so cheap right now, because they're being subsidized by advertisers. Some of the advertisers had in their sites information about their tracking capabilities. I'll try to find that link.
10ms is 100Hz not 10Hz.
A conservative assumption would be that they use all spare cpu time for spyware? Maybe 1-10W extra if small arm processors?
Someone needs to put a network sniffer on a bunch of different TVs and see exactly what traffic they're generating and how much. Sending 120 4k images per minute (or worse, 6000 for the LG) on a residential WiFi connection should be pretty obvious, and it should be fairly easy to block too.
What if any traffic is encrypted? Taking snapshots is not sending them in the meaning that software can delete similarly looking images by their own definition of similarness. And BTW that kind of testing is more needed for some industry critical equipment - processors with ME, routers, etc. TV is a brainrot thing for dumbs, nobody needs a TV which doesn't spy you.
They could be looking for watermarks or match some 'frame hash' versus a database. The spyware traffic could be measured in single digit bytes.
> Smart TVs from Samsung and LG take screenshots of what you are watching even when you are using them to display images from a connected laptop or video game console
By Jeremy Hsu
Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a non-paywalled link myself. This _appears_ to reproduce the article text: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/480211
Here's the paper:
About that, some previous information from a year or two ago shown that they took screenshots even when playing video files from a usb drive.
Best Buy sells the "DuraPro - Partial Sun Series 43" Class LED Outdoor Partial Sun 4K UHD TV (2023)" which is supposedly a "non-smart" TV. I just ran a search and don't know anything about it, personally. They could still be screenshotting AFAIK.
All TVs are non-smart TVs if you don't give them internet.
Is this even possible nowadays? Maybe they already have an embedded 5G radio? (subsidized by advertisers)
Frankly, I never understood why you'd ever want to connect your TV to any network rather than use an external device. Any convenience (?) you might get will be quickly offset by problems becoming inherent to your TV which doesn't make any sense to me.
For me it's home automation. I turn down the lights or switch to a movie scene whenever the TV turns on. Oh, and my external subwoofer also gets its power turned on/off the same way.
I wonder if this is a legal issue if they bypass HDCP and record or snapshot content from a privileged domain?
Echoing from comments, most likely the image is scaled down and / or only fingerprints (think: Shazaam) are uploaded.
While the latter allows remote party to gauge what you're looking at it most likely doesn't infringe copyrights. But, as you mention, it might very well violate some of the HDCP fine print.
Is there a list of those models somewhere? The article is partially paywalled and hard to say which ones.
I think, at this point, we can assume if it has a camera, microphone in the controller, connects to wifi, etc, it will be spying on you in some way. No list needed, just look for displays without those features.
I get around it by using PC displays as televisions, usually hooked up to a thinclient or SBC that I've purpose for media delivery. So, when I shop for a display, any feature beyond an HDMI port becomes wholly unnecessary to me.
If it has any smart features at all, you can be pretty sure that it's spying on you in all sorts of ways.
Now that I found some old links... This began to be more public since Vizio published their 2021 Q3 earning reports and it was made public that their profits from advertising and users data was more than double than what they made selling devices [0]. Roku themselves have said that they are in the Ad business, not in the tech business, and they were getting around $40 per user a month (also in [0]).
All these ACR (automated content recognition) systems mix and match data from what they can see in your screen, with your IP address, with cookies you have on different devices... soy they can match different devices you own.
For example, AudienceX says about ACR [1]:
Second-Screen Experiences: Being able to synchronize content across connected devices is vital for successful advertising. ACR lets you do this by identifying the content that viewers engage with most on a primary screen (such as a smart TV) and delivering similar or the same content to secondary devices such as mobile phones or tablets.
[...] Automatic content recognition relies on two main types of technologies—fingerprinting and watermarking—to identify and analyze content. However, ACR technology can be broadly categorized into three main types. These include: Audio Fingerprinting [...] Video Fingerprinting [...] Digital Watermarking.
Automatic content recognition (ACR) is a technology built into smart TVs that allow the set to see or hear what is being played on the television. [...] ACR gives advertisers the keys to go beyond impressions, to understand who is watching and when. When paired with digital ad libraries, advertisers can find exactly where their ads ran – the hour, on what network or streaming service – and understand the exact corresponding impressions for the specific occurrence of their ads. [...] You can even go as deep as zip code, reading further between the lines about the impact of advertising at a local level.
For example, let’s say your client is Nike, and you’re running a Connected TV campaign for Nike shoes. When a person sees your Nike ad on their CTV, you want to deliver a specific set of display banners to their mobile devices so that the next time they open up a browser on their phone, they see these banners.
One of the ways to do this is with ACR. You would contact an ACR vendor and give them all of the details of your campaign, and the ACR vendor would use their software to create an audience segment of people who have been exposed to your Nike shoe ad on CTV [Connected TV]. Then, they would send you that audience segment so you can target it with banners. Think of this data like a file that can’t be opened — you can see the title, but you can’t dive in. You can only upload it and target whatever is inside.
All of this happens in real-time...
So this is what they're doing with your info.
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0: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-advertising-inscape-data-privacy-q3-2021
1: https://audiencex.com/insights/automatic-content-recognition/
2: https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2023/05/08/acr-data-the-key-measuring-more-just-impressions-ctv
3: https://grapeseedmedia.com/blog/programmatic-ad-strategy/
4: https://mountain.com/performance-tv/verified-visits/