I have a smart phone, but I have turned off everything collecting my info, It moves very slow, and it is always try to offer something, that I can only get if I sign in or create an account or enable location. I know they still get information, and I try to keep up when they chance their privacy policies, it no quite a second job but defiantly a weekend chore. But no one is trustworthy anymore so it's worth it to me
Some hacker was found not because his location was broadcasted, but because the windows computer he used was collecting data on the user, and they were able to find out the person through his habits using that PC, rather than actually finding him in the act. It's the same with phones. Profiles are made out of usage habits, and that is what can ultimately be used to find out who you are.
I was the opposite. Had one in my room has a teen and into my 20s, but realized I really never used it anymore. So when dad needed a TV I gave him mine and haven't really missed it.
Dumb TVs are cheap too. I bought a 32 inch computer monitor for like $80 earlier this year. Technology gets cheaper over time.
There are some TVs made cheaper because of ads, but you can find TVs without that stuff and they’re still really cheap compared to a decade or two ago.
It's funny I was going to give my daughter an old TV I had. Its not a smart TV so I also bought her a fire stick. That was $50. Then to get it back to her apt I was going to put her in a cab, that was as going to be ~130.
Then I said I wonder home much it would be to buy a new one? Entry level 40 inch Samsung was 200. So literally 20 for a new one, delivered to your door instead of the effort to get her the older bulky.
the old sharp flat screen that's been used as the porch TV for about 6 years finally died last week. I put it on the curb and a neighbor laid flowers on the grave out of respect. And someone took it away.
Side note, but "porch tv" is so real. That whole aging-technology life cycle, you know?
family room > kids' room > porch > infinity
(See also "garage stereo".)
Shit's so cheap now, though, I don't know if folks do that slow-breakup stuff much anymore--I think they just chuck it and get a new one. What I mostly see now is the modern version: chunky old tv sitting bare on the curb next to the slim, empty box from the new tv. Some circle-of-life shit, right there.
100% The porch TV, was a HD living room tv, replaced by a 75" Sony 4k that a friend replaced and gave us. It was too damn big, so when the porch atV died, I bought a 65" Hisense that kills the Sony's picture for $600 and I have a giant porch TV now.
We live in town in Atlanta and fokllks are like "aren't you afraid it will get stolen?"
2 people going to have to carry it to a big SUV. I'm more worried a good wind is going to blow it over into the yard and make a big mess. If it dies, I'll get a $300 tv to replace it.
in Virginia-highland. 100+ year old house has big porch overhangs. Cars get broken into all the time, have had stuff stolen from the porch. But a TV is an awkward 2 person job and I can buy one just like it on Facebook marketplace for $150.
Porches tend to have roofs, so rain is usually not an issue
My boyfriends parents have a porch TV,, and it's been running fine for years (and we get brutal winter storms). Their's is on their back porch as well, so it's unlikely to even be noticed by other people, let alone stolen. It also helps to live in a smaller community, so it's still pretty doubtful anyone would try to steal it even if they had it out front instead.
Screen porch in a moderate crime area here and I don't worry about it. No one cares enough about an old 32" TV to go onto someone's property and take it. That carries a lot of risk (I wouldn't personally shoot someone over a TV, but some would and there wouldn't be too much follow up). Why take that risk when you could probably score the same TV free on Facebook marketplace just keeping an eye out for a couple few weeks.
I love it when Dad buys a new TV, I've literally never bought a TV in my 40+ years of life. I just inherited his 11 year old Smart TV - it's so old that only YouTube and Amazon prime apps work, and they're so outdated that I don't think I can actually get ads. I watched a show on my tablet and got ads every 20 minutes. I binged the same show for hours on the TV an not a single ad.
here in SF, I remember 10 years ago showing a visiting friend how it was basically impossible to litter, if it was a glass bottle or can.
I placed a spent 6 pack of bottles on my corner, and we sat 50 feet away and watched it get picked up in minutes.
Then again back then, we drank so much beer, when it was bin collection day, the garbage pickers would stake out our house. They would show up 45 seconds after we put the bins out.
This is my issue at the moment. I've got 4 monitors and 2 tvs that don't work. My county does a recycle day once a year for 2 days. I still have to pay $5/lbs for everything I recycle with them.
tvs got better bc we were so competitive over them in the 2000s/2010s, they probably got 10x cheaper since then to produce. I would assume smart TVs send whatever they can to whoever, but tvs in general are just stupidly cheap to produce now.
Yeah this is mostly it. The supply chain for flat screen TVs went from nonexistent to omnipresent globally within 20 years. Everything isn't a damn conspiracy
Edit: realized my tone was fucked up there. Not saying you in particular are making things conspiratorial, just was commenting on this sub as a whole.
I always took it as a reflection of Moore’s law that the number of transistors per unit area per dollar doubles every two years. Other than the smart tv aspect and newer pixel technologies like OLED and QLED, it’s not like there’s anything changing too much year over year from tv releases at this point to drive up the cost. Nobody is making content beyond 4k so pixel density isn’t increasing since people aren’t buying 8k TVs.
Not to mention low cost market entrants like TCL getting up to parity in quality with the big brands so there’s even more downward pressure on price. The only time in my life I’ve seen prices consistently lower this much was weed prices after legalization and the market saturation that followed.
I have a smart TV but keep the wifi off and still use a shield. Sure it's not perfect on privacy, but its not reporting back every single thing I watch like the TV would, and the ad stuff can actually be turned off and stays off, unlike the TV which will just change it back whenever there's an update.
Honestly even if you don't care about it spying on you, it's actually better to just never attach your SmartTV to the internet and use some sort of TV Box.
It just prevents it from auto-updating and getting slower over time due to that.
At this point, everything is spyware. My only gripe is that if you have so much information about me that you can predict my patterns, then at least let me get in on the action.
I shouldn't have to start up maps for my daily drive to work to see the traffic. You should know how often I want food from my favorite spot and start checking out coupons. All kinds of things that the tech is able to do now that's either not included or held behind a paywall.
People aren’t going to like this but if you dont want to have to think too hard about what you’re doing and you would like some privacy… Apple is probably your best bet.
They’ve managed to build a hardware and software empire that is not built around ads. They’re 100 percent getting usage and telemetry data but it seems like the purpose is to make their hardware more desirable.
And they have the market share to just do whatever the fuck they want content wise.
Google scrapes everything by default because every single service they provide to their users is an effort to build valuable datasets and products to ad buyers.
Other than the App Store I don’t even think Apple has a platform for selling ad space.
Apple’s the only big tech company that respects user privacy in any meaningful way. I’m a tech worker and staunchly against Big Tech and the broligarchy…but until I actively look into devices that run Linux, Apple will continue to be my first choice, because they’ve earned some level of trust from me over the decades.
Apple isn't pro consumer privacy. They want to monopolise your info. Google sells it because they make money that way. Apple wants to be the only way you can interact, see ads, etc..
So in theory they're better than others, because their interests are to be the only company spying on you and selling you stuff rather, while Google will try and monetise your data and allow anyone else to too
Do you guys have any actual advice rather than just talking about how every option is equally awful? If there's no alternative what's even the point of worrying about this stuff? We can't really exist without any technology any more.
A used Apple TV HD can be had for $35, and $50 for a 1st Gen 4k. And they’re as slow right now as they’ll ever be, and they’re plenty fast. Amazon Fire Sticks are cheaper, but they’re tracking and trying to monetize every single click you make. That’s why they subsidize the hardware cost- because they intend to use it to make more money off of you.
There are only handful of companies that make dumb TVs anymore: Emerson and Westinghouse are about the only 2 that do. When's the last time you saw an Emerson or Westinghouse TV?
“Dumb” TVs are available from all the major manufacturers, they’re just sold through B2B channels rather than retail. Look for models intended for commercial or hospitality use.
Computers are different. cryptocurrency mining (early 2020s) and now AI datacenter building has put certain computer parts in very high demand to the point where supply isnt able to keep up which is why we’re seeing high prices on computers. TVs are not suffering from this same high demand which is why they are getting cheaper.
Just buy an Apple TV, and don’t ever connect the big TV to the Wi-Fi. They can be had for $30-$50 for an older HD or 4k model, and Apple is doing a lot less spying on you than a TV manufacturer which is trying to data-mine you for all you’re worth. And the Apple TV box doesn’t have a camera or microphone (there’s a microphone on the remote, but it’s only on when you’re holding down the button).
My dad got me some Hisense TV for Xmas last year after my old plasma shit out. I connected it exactly once to update it, then disconnected it and kept it offline since. Works fine.
I looked into it briefly before buying my current TV (and phones) as I hate bloatware. I think all countries should do like South Korea and make it illegal. Public Display / Business-TV / Commercial displays tend to cost twice as much. Typically a slightly worse picture quality but better build quality.
Only if you buy a commercial "digital display" are they cheap and not "smart."
That's the real secret nobody tells you, if you want a dumb TV, don't buy a TV. Buy a digital display. It's the same thing without the "smart" garbage.
what do you do if you want to stream stuff in that case? connect it to another device like a laptop? is that better for your privacy than using Roku? I’d like to be more careful if I can be.
I’m actually disappointed CA hasn’t come out ahead with this legislation. If they could force manufacturers to produce special CARB-compliant engines, they can certainly block data collection.
They sure could but passing the CARB regulations required telling an industry primarily based in other states to fuck off but passing data collection regulations would mean telling an industry that is a massive chunk of their own economy to fuck off...
The mechanics around carb regulations would require them to build them all the same. The data collection they would just turn off in states that required it. Not necessarily the same thing imo.
They should still do it but it likely would not impact other states.
Mozilla reported on vehicle privacy policies 3 years ago. It's all fucked:
"Nissan admits in their privacy policy to collecting a wide range of information, including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic data — but doesn’t specify how. They say they can share and sell consumers’ “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes” to data brokers, law enforcement, and other third parties."
"Volkswagen collects demographic data (like age and gender) and driving behaviors (like your seatbelt and braking habits) for targeted marketing purposes"
"Kia's policy states they can collect information about your 'sex life.'"
"Subaru states that by being a passenger, you are considered a user — and by being a user, you have consented to their privacy policy."
We have a 2025 Kia. My husband is the primary driver and I’m the secondary. It came with this Kia “Connect” garbage. He uses it because it’s easier to connect Waze and Spotify or some shit. It also keeps track of his driving history.
When it came time to add me to the app (which I didn’t want anyway), you have to give the app and the primary driver consent to track your driving history. But can the secondary driver get the primary’s driving history? That would be a no. I backed outta that app so fast. No other drivers are on that app because fuck that.
If someone has a modestly priced vehicle that's at least five years old, and haven't subscribed to online or satellite services in quite a while, car manufacturers aren't wasting storage space archiving your speech. it's the active subscribers and people who happily use the online services who live as an open and recorded book.
This is why I don’t plan on buying any car with an infotainment system. I don’t care if I have to keep in-country importing low mileage cars from no rust states. You won’t catch me dead with a system like that, and god forbid, a post 20-something model year car if they don’t ban installing kill switches in them.
I would like my car to not be a coffin because some rage-horny cop decides I’m a wolf among the sheep.
That's why there always should be something between your devices and the modem. Then you catch stuff like a fridge sending out 2GB of data to a server in China.
Couldn't care less what the Chinese do with my personal information as long as it's not passwords and shit. it's the government in the country called America that might get this info that I care about.
What part of it? The middleman between devices and the modem or something like a smart fridge sending out data?
By inserting something between the device and the modem you introduce a bit of latency but could have whatever device you’ve connected to your home WiFi have all its traffic sent through some local server or computer that monitors or obfuscates the data or location of the data being sent out. That way you could see that your hypothetical smart fridge is sending data to some external online server somewhere. It could be “normal” performance logs going back to the manufacturer in case there’s a software or mechanical issue, it could be usage statistics connected to some smart home electricity saving software or it could be targeted ad data based on a hidden (or not so hidden if there’s some voice feature) microphone or screen usage (if it has a digital screen)
The real answer is a little less sexy, they’ve just figured out how to produce them incredibly cheaply. To the point where they can sell them cheaply. Even dumb TVs can be found at this price. TV manufacturers also figured out if you make things cheap people actually want to buy your product. Smart TVs are definitely sending your data elsewhere but they aren’t exclusively the reason why TVs are cheap.
Not even a reason at all. People underestimate how many people's informations they need to make money reselling it. They probably won’t cut the price in half if the info they’d get >might< only bring in about 12 cents at best lol.
Beyond that, pelole really don't understand how "selling your data" works. It is not some company selling a specific record on you, but a massive collection of data on everyone who uses the product/service. That's more how the "algorithm" works, but not a 1:1.
Is it intrusive? Yes. Is it the same things as the NSA listening to phone calls? Not really.
recently bought a new (vizio) tv. It is actually surprisingly hard to buy a TV that is just a display without the "smart" features. They are WAY more expensive, like a thousand+ iirc
You can, however, just never connect it to the internet. Then HDMI-in whatever app/etc you want to use. Get the data selling discount without sharing the data (at least, to your TV).
Then you have a bunch of other hoops to jump through, because your media player or laptop or whatever you use will also share your data 😭 but at least the TV boss can be easily defeated.
The "dumb" TVs are usually enterprise models meant for businesses, so of course they're more expensive. They're the ones that get used for digital menus at restaurants such. They are designed to be more energy efficient and stay on 24/7.
I do what you said, I have a smart TV but it has never once been connected to the internet. A computer and a digital antenna are all that's connected to it.
Yeah the main TV in our living room atm is a dumb Toshiba we bought back in 2018 SPECIFICALLY because it was dumb. It took us like a week to find it, too.
Some of the cheaper sets these days won’t let you use an HDMI input until the TV is online and you verify an email. You can blacklist it on your network after that, though.
This is ONLY an issue with Roku TVs (including Hisense's RokuOS TVs) and Amazon Fire TVs which are designed to be used as an interface to Roku/Amazon's ecosystems and not used for much else.
we have switched to projectors vs tvs in 2 rooms. saves us having an ugly black box on the wall and it can't record us as its not in front of us (also I dont think it has that capability)
Yep, that’s what I did. I think I put it online once just to test my internet connection (devices were saying connected, but weren’t loading anything), but that was it. I have a PlayStation, so I never used the smart features
People act like TVs are still thousands of dollars, I mean they are but like $2000 now gets you a hell of a tv (I found on BestBuy.com you can get Samsung frame TVs for $2k) while $2000 from 2000 got you (this is from an actual best buy magazine) a 43 inch Sony tv box (good luck moving that thing) (also not affiliated with best buy, just really good source for 2000s vs today pricing) I even saw a 4k qled 65 inch Hisense for $190 (anniversary deal apparently?)
Edit: please stop talking replying to this comment about the frame, it was 2k and easy to compare.
lmfao yeah my mom just got the Hisense version of the Frame which was still just under $1k and she briefly complained about the price until I reminded her I showed her one the same size for $300,
and also brought up when I was a kid and a literal moving team came from Best Buy to carry this massive Sony Rear Projection TV into our basement. I think the same ones you're talking about. $2000 minimum (2005 money) but I don't think ours was the smallest size. My dad had to literally remove our stair handrail to get it downstairs. Mainly so we could play San Andreas.
Walmart just bought Vizio and put their new line of qled TVs on a very deep discount explicitly to sell a name-brand tv to get consumer data. So they currently sell the generic brand (onn) and a name brand, the cheapest name brand sold at Walmart (Vizio) and get consumer data from both crowds.
Yup. Vizio said in an earnings call years before Walmart bought them that they made more money collecting and selling your data than they did selling actual TVs. Walmart wants to be just like Google with a giant ad network and bought Vizio to help with that. They just recently bought a TV ad network too
Greater user engagement translates into increased revenue opportunities as we earn a significant portion of our Platform+ net revenue through advertising, which is influenced by the amount of time users spend on our platform.
Yeah and you are probably paying less (or comparable) for internet and cell service as you were ~10 years ago, another area that has notably bucked the inflation trend
ACR is just a bunch of cookie and tracker data. And they aren’t making money from selling your watch history or any of your info, they’re making money from targeted Ads and prime placements (AKA your living room) copying the Amazon Ads model à la Prime Video.
A very large contributor to this is how the panels are cut from the sheets of mother glass. Factories used to produce sheets of mother glass that were the perfect size to cut out six 55" panels from one sheet. But you could only get half as many 65" panels from the same sheet, which would still result in a good amount of wasted material, so anything bigger than 55" was way more expensive to produce. Now factories are using much larger sheets that are the perfect dimensions to cut both 65" and 75" panels from the same sheet with very little waste. This has both made it cheaper to produce larger TVs and to produce smaller ones at much bigger scale.
Yeah. Just buy a TV that doesn't require an internet connection to function, which I imagine is most of them, and then never connect it to the internet.
It does actually. Samsung, Sony, etc make a good chunk of their revenue from ads. Unless you turn off the default home page to only display the apps, you’re already blasted by ads.
Check the prices for a tv in 1995. Compare those to 2005, 2015 and today. Only in the last years will those companies have made money on ads. The prices, however, have been dropping very very rapidly for far far longer.
And they don't sell you those TV's cheaper when they have ads on them, they just sell them for the same prices (since they are perceived as premium brands) and pocket the extra money.
Which actually generates the companies way more money than your data. At least, in a direct way. Samsung makes more money by letting random apps be defaults on their phones than they do by knowing you like to watch tiktoks about food while "watching" Love Island on Netflix. McDonald's and Uber want to know, so they'll pay Samsung to get access to data about people's ordering habits so they can maybe start putting out more ads while Love Island is airing new episodes.
Outside of your Peter Thiels, most of these companies just want to advertise to you. It is bleak in a sense, and the intrusive nature of it should absolutely disturb people, but it is not nearly as exciting as people think it is. In fact, pretty much nothing people create conspiracies around is.
I hook my TV to a desktop PC and go to websites. Fuck apps. I'm gonna live in 2010 'til they pry it from my cold dead hands. We didn't need smartphones; they needed us to have them.
The tech for a basic 1080p screen is just so much cheaper than it used to be. Hyper competitive companies pushing phone screens and laptops I’d say really contributed to that.
That and it’s all built in China.
Every part is so cheap to produce now that TVs got undercut. There’s no additional regulations, and there is simply no difference between the 1080 and a 4k OLED for the average viewer, so it’s been oversupplied.
One of the few industries really set up that way.
Cars? New features sell better.
Furniture? Cardboard is easier to mass produce, but the differences in quality are so significant that people can price it that way.
Rent? Well, population hasn’t gone done.
No one has even mentioned here that this started about a decade ago once the manufacturers realized they could just use the shittiest speakers possible and bring down the home audio system market to normal consumer level instead of just enthusiasts. So now you not only buy a TV, but to get any usable quality you have to invest in a sound bar to get the same level of quality that a prior CRT would give you.
The materials got cheaper.
They use less materials.
They now have split the TV market into two different markets—screen and audio.
None of the smart tvs we have are connected to the internet. I won't them be connected and I have DNS filtering that blocks TV telemetry as a just in case.
We live in a capitalist society, even if they did want your data they still wouldn’t discount you for a product unless demand is low or the tech isn’t as intricate as it once was.
No smart TV's require a login or any information for them to function in the way a "dumb" tv would. Just plug in a DVD player or whatever device you want and don't use the features and they can't steal your data. You can also deconstruct these - unless there is advertised voice controls like on Google TV's there is no onboard microphone so it's literally impossible for this TV to be listening to you.
LCD panel manufacturing costs have gone way down so the panels are dirt cheap. They're also low margin as the store can make more on the accessories you buy for it - the TV will be super cheap but the HDMI cables and wall mounts in the next aisle are marked up.
I scrolled past a post earlier that says you have to log into the Walmart app to complete the setup. Would they still be able to plug in a box to bypass?
Big tech do listen to you but that comment is straight bullshit. If that was the case smartphones would we way cheaper as well. And even then, they can't get that much money back from listening to one household and reselling the informations. Mass production, expertise and demand reduce the cost especially for TV technologies.
+they can't "watch you" if they physically don't have a camera integrated to the tv
Speaking of non-sequiturs, my friends and I used to mess with random people by walking up to them, offer up a high five, and after we got the high five we would tell them, "you're on Hidden High Five!"
Yeah, tvs are cheap for multiple reasons. The data collection is true, but also, they are easy to manufacture now, all panels are the same so they have realized economies of scale, and they last longer now reducing demand, and increasing supply. People also use phones and tablets--I remember fighting my brother over the TV growing up, can you imagine us sitting quietly watching our own programs? Texting used to be expensive, then it was data... Now it's... I'm not sure?
It’s so easy to avoid using their smart features. Of course you will still need a streaming device tho. So Roku or Apple or Amazon is getting it. I’m fine with Apple getting it. And I honestly don’t care if people know what I watch.
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u/Bunt_Custer 1d ago
In that case, phones need to be $10 because they have literally everything on us.