Technology

Don't connect TVs to your network.

"We own the glass, we own the TV, we own the living room. We know who is in an LG home." --LG President of Ads

These are the Gamers Nexus videos these articles are referencing btw. Support them and their work. Get some cool shirts and physical media while you're at it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5KnFmKjFTA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

Really makes one wonder...How many fucking data points do these assholes need telling them we're too fucking broke for their game and want their heads on pikes?

It’s not just LG. It’s all of them.

And, the cheaper the TV, the more often and intrusive these settings are.

It’s honestly better to just have a bare wall and a projector.

I was at my parent’s house, trying to add some items to the smart TV. They started listening to these awful AI interpersonal dramas read by AI, on YouTube.

My thought was to add some podcasts and their Audible account, for more selections. Maybe they’ll still only listen to that, even so. You can’t add much to a smart tv. No podcasts. No podcast app. A pretty spartan selection of apps. Even something as large and mainstream as Audible. No go. Libby? Yeah, right.

I don’t get it. What’s the point? Just buy a monitor, jack it into a PC for media, and have everything you want minus this telemetry.

Fuck LG, this is creepy AF

It's hard to find a dumb TV.
Monitors and projectors are going the same way. Not connecting them might not be enough.

Time to learn how to use a soldering iron.

Bosch fucking dishwashers do this, once connected there is no way to disconnect them so I sink all its outgoing traffick at the router level

Complete garbage

I don’t care that companies thought they’d get away with this, the problem is have are the people buying this shit! This should’ve been enough to get people to just refuse to buy it but no.

And the bigger problem isn’t what we know they can do, you have to think about what it ‘could’ do.

Even if you never connect this stuff to the internet, they could still track all this stuff locally. Once that happens, which no doubt it will if not already, what happens if suddenly you get arrested for something, they confiscate the TV, download all the stuff tracked, and oops, something even more incriminating… maybe you watched an illiegal movie on jellyfin! 😲

Look at all the “People will never let it happen” that has happened pretty much unchallenged… you’ll have no privacy, and you’ll all be paying for it!

Imagine when it's turned on...

... Well great, now I have to check whether my television has a goddamn microphone for some reason. I didn't think to check because it's a television.

Never connected it to the Wifi though.

There's no "might" here. It's why high-end TVs are cheap.

If you are going to have smart devices, put them on their own VLAN. They should not have access to the rest of your network. TVs shouldn't be connected at all. Use a PC or android box if you want to stream stuff.

My LG TV is blocked from my network and always has been. However, the andriod tv connected to it is a different thing, so it's more or less lost cause anyways and I haven't had enough incentive to block the android box from the rest of network since it'd need some tweaking so that casting and other occasionally used features still work. And even if I'd block the android tv box there's still our cellphones gathering all the data, so I'm pretty much just running things on hopium that EU offers at least some protection on my data.

Others do too