Privacy

There's a bunch of products that clearly aren't selling to consumers anymore. Cars were the first one I noticed, about 15-20 years ago. When I was growing up, cars came in an absolute rainbow of colors. Ever since the early '00s, all the colors have disappeared, except corpo friendly colors like white, grey, gold, silver, tan, black, and the occasional blue or red. Almost no green, orange, or yellow cars even exist anymore. The car manufacturers don't care about us consumers buying a single car. They'd rather sell a fleet at a loss of profit per unit, but so many units they don't care.

The same thing is happening to electronics, TV's, and to a certain extent, housing. If you want a "dumb TV," search for a "commercial display panel." You'll pay like 3 times more, but those don't have the intrusive data collection crap.

Don't discuss novel IP on Teams.

Because my company forces us to use it, and because I know they're both watching every conversation and believe it's kept only within the company, I feel no compunction to keep company secrets off of there.

They had Mattermost set up and working well, but somebody in the C-suite got FOMO.

Any device with a speaker can be retasked to use it as a microphone.

I have a "smart" TV. It wouldn't let me get past setup until I put it on wifi, so I spun up a hotspot, then immediately killed it and just plugged in a micro PC running Linux to the HDMI port.

Occasionally, I'll sit on the remote and a pop up happens saying I'll need to connect to the Internet for to work, but that's about it.

2011 TV here, it thankfully is 1080p capable, and I'm clinging onto it for dear life. If anything in it fails, I'll definitely be attempting a repair.

That link isn't complete.