I just love it when people get all bent out of shape about smart TV data collection when the U.S. president is on the verge of stealing an election and disenfranchising millions of voters, attempting to imprison his political adversaries, and literally tearing down the White House -- and much else deeply evil. Techies in general are among the worst class I know when it comes to estimating relative risks. It's always been this way.
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@dalias They don't need to bother with such trivialities. At least not these days. They go right to the government databases, they're not worrying about your ads. Really. There's so much noise in that consumer data as to render it basically a waste of time. They're going straight to cutting off medical insurance and social security and arresting innocent people, not worrying about which scam ads are surfacing for you or how many episodes of "Red Dwarf" you're watching.
The personalized ads are a possible annoyance but just 10% of the iceberg. In some cases you can turn off the personalized ads. That hides some of the data collection visibility. It usually doesn't say anything about stopping the data collection.
Red Dwarf is probably pretty low in the data profile matrix. What news shows you watch is much higher.
I try to reduce the data collection in many different ways. I hope I have a lower profile buried in the noise. I know I'm not 100% successful. My smart TV is not network connected. My Roku sends a constant stream of data. I use it rather infrequently. I hope the microphone in the remote is really turned off, but don't currently worry about that.
I use ublock0 in my browsers. Ad blocking is a side effect. I mostly care about the annoyance reduction and some tracking protection.
And yes, there are other worries. Current politics is an issue. Mostly useless AI data centers burning up the planet is another.
@lauren Uh, this is not about ads or what you're watching anymore, that's just how the industry grew. The new shit has always-on microphones and is consuming any and every conversation it can, under the excuse of "AI training" but the real value is doing fascism.
@dalias The smart TVs are not doing this. They are not feeding all the ambient audio anywhere. On the other hand, the new Apple watches represent genuine privacy nightmares, as I will be discussing on my weekly national radio segment on Monday.
@lauren Uhh, like they're the same people. Technofascists are behind both of these things. Adtech industry taking over media is how we got where we are with fascism and spying on everyone with these stupid TVs is part of how they plan to keep the fascism train going.