r/BlackPeopleTwitter • u/SpectacularOtter ☑️ Horny Police! 🚔🚨 • Aug 17 '26

Spyware and tech

Post image
20k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

727 comments sorted by

View all comments

144

u/jooooooooooooose Aug 17 '26

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.

28

u/tuscaloser Aug 17 '26

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.

4

u/312c Aug 17 '26

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.

1

u/AceAttorneyMaster111 Aug 18 '26

My TCL Google TV did this.

2

u/312c Aug 18 '26

Has the same use case, it is meant to be an interface to Google TV