i_am_roberto

To be clear, I am talking about consumers having to explicitly opt-in to those things and to have a clear understanding of what data and rights they are giving up. If someone wants to allow advertising and behavioral tracking, that should be their explicitly-authorized option. And definitely not the default configuration.

The current status-quo is that TV manufacturers abuse and intrude with abandon because nobody is making a fuss about it and politicians are too busy trying to throw each other in jail.

I understand. As consumers we need to find a way to reverse this.

One of the problems is that the vast majority of consumers are not tech or privacy savvy enough to understand. Just getting them to be careful about passwords, use passwords managers, etc. is horribly difficult.

Just the other day I had a conversations with someone who is enthusiastically using an app that gives you points for scanning your shopping receipts. Receipts that have all kinds of information on them. In some cases they print your name, address, phone, etc.

I tried to make them understand the myriad risks involved in handing-over that kind of information to some random app publisher. I tried hard. They just don't get it. The responses ranged from the typical "What could go wrong?" to "The information is already out there" and "Experian gets hacked all the time, so...".

TV (and other products, but TV's seem to be at the top of the abusive list) manufacturers take full advantage of this ignorance and just blast consumers with advertising and data gathering technologies.

Not sure what the right path to a solution might be. Legal, political, technological or a combination of all of the above?

I see a lot of comments saying "don't connect to the Internet".

I think that's exactly the wrong reaction to what's going on. You should be able to buy a TV, connect it to the Internet, and only have it display what you want. In addition to that, you should be able to block all data going out.

I am talking about fighting for fundamental consumer rights here, not spending a couple thousand dollars on a product to then degrade it to the stone age.

Why over $2K? Picture quality, local dimming LED array, etc. I would not spend $2K on a crappy image. And yet, I stress, I went to the store to buy a TV, not a remotely-operated digital advertising sign with data gathering capabilities.

That's what these manufacturers are either failing to understand or choosing to ignore.

Your comment might be lost on those who might not have visibility into that industry. Digital signage displays are mostly panels with minimal driving electronics and, more often than not, external devices to handle the storage and connectivity of material to display. In that sense, yes, they tend to be just a monitor with an input.