I asked every TV manufacturer 17 questions about how they spy on you
theverge.comI was impressed LG answered every question and quite directly, assuming they’re telling the truth.
I was quite disappointed in Apple for dodging so many of them and giving non-answers. They need to tone down the corporate speak and take a lesson from LG.
When asked if a user can erase everything the correct answer is not a thesis on privacy, it’s saying “Choosing Erase all settings and data will remove everything on the device back to factory fresh state”. They already have the perfect answer.
Apple has good answers for many of the questions they skipped too. But they look bad by not even trying to answer.
Interesting that in the beginning it says 'We know that many TVs use automatic content recognition (ACR)' but according to answers none of those manufacturers do.
So which TVs do the ACRs, and why Verge did not send those questions to them? Hisense?
None of the manufacturers who answered that question admitted to using ACR via screenshot. LG uses audio samples, which is basically the same. Google admitted that some of their hardware OEMs may install ACR. Sony and Hisense didn't answer, but have both been reported to use ACR. The TCL TVs that come with Roku I assume do it as well.
Or they could just be lying. I honestly expect it at this point.
The problem is the regulators in the US are in bed with the companies so they can say whatever and do the complete opposite and then get fined a trivial amount of money and just keep doing it
Not only that, but most of the public is oblivious or unconcerned about this topic.
Because the news is in bed with them too.
Because most people don't give a shit until something negative happens to them from that direct source.
The worst thing for privacy advocates is that there has yet to be a general public reckoning with the ad-economy of the last 20 years.
For all intents and purposes, the person who has paid no mind to their privacy over that time period is really no better or worse off than the person who has devoted hours to combating all forms of invasion.
If there was a mass scale visible event of privacy loss, i.e. Meta somehow ends up in a shamelessly evil sociopaths hands who decides to start very publicly embarrassing random people with privately collected data, there would be very swift and immediate action.
Just look at datacenters. The public didn't even know what a DC was 6 months ago, and now politicians are getting elected to ban them. What happened? AI gave the mass public common sensation of fear.
Yeah. This is exactly the problem. There is too much of a disconnect from the action to the impact in this case. I think if most people saw precisely what data is collected on them and how it is used (and how often it is part of data breaches from these identity resolution platforms and third parties), I think they'd care more.
But nearly everyone has more urgent and pressing concerns like making monthly rent or a medical bill or gas money. So ACR on a TV doesn't register.
> if most people saw precisely what data is collected on them and how it is used (and how often it is part of data breaches from these identity resolution platforms and third parties), I think they'd care more.
What are the chances of an individual being negatively affected in a serious way?
Intuitively, I expect it to be so negligible that it isn't worth losing sleep over.
I would say the chances of a negative impact is on par with the chances of negative impacts on most of the hottest debate topics such as guns and abortion. Identity theft, swatting/doxxing, and stalking can have serious impacts and are not that uncommon. They're just uncommon enough that most people don't care until it happens to them.
I really don't think most people would care more when you show them examples of others. Some people would, but most would not. We see this all the time with legislation around rights in the US. Much of the voting population lack the capacity for deep critical thought and don't care to practice empathy from even a devil's advocate perspective. Stuff like tracking speech/identity online, abortion debate, gun debate, etc. Nobody cares unless they are directly affected.
Take guns for example. If you use guns, then you see a value to them and generally oppose mire restrictions. If you have been shot or robbed with a gun (or know people who have), then you dont see the value of guns and want more restrictions. If you are neither of these things then its easy to not care and say sure to more restrictions because they don't impact you and aound like they might provide some benefit, especially if just looking at the surfqce level stats. Same concept for abortion and online tracking/identity, especially once you mix in the think-of-the-children arguments in each of these.
And something negative hardly ever happens to them, or anyone, from that direct source, so why spend a brain cell on it.
Because they have other things to worry about. Certainly you realize how privileged a world you have to live in to be able to spend time worrying about whether your TV is spying on you, right?
Sure, but I would hope food, shelter, clothing, and not being spied on would be available to most citizens, and not just those who are privileged.
On the flipside, how fucked up the world is that TVs spying on you had become normalized.
The problem isn't with people being too busy, it shouldn't be up to the people, it should be a government regulation problem. There's a lot of 'todo' around potential breaches of PII, so why not do something about the ridiculously large and seemingly increasing trade in exactly that from almost anything you purchase nowadays, including the place you purchase it from. And they're all selling it to aggregators and advertisers and any other shady c*nt with enough cash to buy it.
... and now it's all going to be fed into AI for additional pattern matching and de-aggregation and re-identification, because that's where the return on investment is. And once it's in there, there ain't no cleaning it out again. You're in the corpus, all your personality fingerprints, forever.
Gross governmental negligence across the entire West.
> unconcerned
One would think that should cause more people who are paranoid to reconsider their assumptions and calibrate their concern-level.
I was disappointed that the article described Apple's answers to some questions as not direct. They should have published the indirect answer. Let the reader judge the answers.
Disagree - when a company responds with mealy-mouthed corporate gruel, designed in bad faith to obfuscate and distract, there should be no obligation on the part of the investigator to propagate it.
Why not both? Have the reporter editorialize in the article itself but link to sources and references including the full response as a way of showing their work and letting readers validate.
I'd argue that this just descends into sophistry. If the journalist isn't as convincing as the corporate speak, the company could potentially pull the wool over a reader's eyes.
I think "chose not to provide a direct answer" is pretty clearly "technically they responded, but they waffled about in such a way as to have provided no meaningful information".
The article isn't sponsored and so is under no obligation to reproduce what likely amounts to ad copy.
Because companies like Apple pay spin doctors to wordsmith it so that it sounds harmless to the lay person when in fact it may be the total opposite.
And?
Asking for a journalist to please protect me from the direct truth has been a big fuck up in the last century.
Because the traditional press believes their readers are idiots that cannot think for themselves and so they require "the reporter" to interpret for them and tell them what to think about whatever topic the article concerns. This is also a big reason why traditional press outlets never link to original sources on their websites when such sources actually exist (despite the entire point of "the web" being to link together disparate sources)[1]. Doing so would mean their readers are not dependent upon them, the priests in the high castle, for learning what the priests want them to learn.
[1] The other part of the reason, and the one they will admit to publicly if pressed, is to maintain their ad revenue by not providing exit paths for their readers.
Ironic how two opinions can be completely opposite, yet both valid and well-founded, and unverifiable at the same time.
I personally believe that journalists should do their job and decide what gets written and how, and save readers from drowning in information we have too much of anyway.
Dell isn't in the list, so I guess we keep pretending that monitors and TVs are somehow different.
I’m sure this would be a lot more compelling if the site wasn’t unusable.
> looks at TV, forgetting its brand.
Toshiba.
Hmm. Not in this list.
Toshiba don't make TV's anymore, haven't for a long time (around a decade). Unless it's very old your TV is some other brand rebadged as Toshiba.
If you're in the US it was almost certainly made by Hisense. If you're in Europe it'll be Vestel.
Same with Philips for me. Would have been interesting to know.