We have finally arrived:
“You turn on your smart TV. It is probably identifying everything you watch and sending the data to the manufacturer, third parties, or both.
“If you had time to read the privacy policies of the objects you buy, you would also have noticed that your TV picks up and records your spoken words and reserves the right to transmit them to other organisations.
“Intelligence agencies such as MI5 and the CIA can make your TV look as though it is off while they record you. Your digital assistant Alexa may be listening too.”
Read the whole article over here
Thank you for this info and article! I am sure it is watching and recording. Shutter and shivers~~~~
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm glad my TV is like 15 years old:)
ReplyDeleteYou'll probably have to upgrade your TV at some point for yet another upgrade after DVB-T2, so get used to televisions aging like pets.
ReplyDeleteIn North America, we have this horrid thing called ATSC that makes the original DVB-T look like it's completely genius, but they're starting (slowly) to upgrade away from it to something that may actually work properly.
Here we're less than twenty kilometres from several digital repeater sites for ATSC and yet our neighbours can't reliably receive most of the signals.
Naturally, the North American cable companies had a hand (or some other appendage) in creating the original ATSC standards, and you can tell because you truly do need cable or IPTV service to get North American TV reliably.
Our North American TV with integrated region-free DVD player is still packed away, but when we unpack it, we'll stick an F connector terminator on the coax input and use it as a 1080p HDMI monitor for the MP4 media stick player.
Also, we're not plugging in the infernal Roku again because it deliberately interferes with our 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi by presenting an ad hoc mode interface on the same channel as our main router, regardless of whether we change it or not. Apparently Roku designed it that way so the ad hoc mode interface would be on the same channel as the strongest router it sees, and even putting a metal shield near it that blocks its view of the router didn't help.
We can watch most of what we still want to watch online through a router that dumps the connections into a data centre in another time zone, and I may yet hack up something that drops the connections to the Giant Covert Surveillance Apparatus into Tor, which would work for 360p and 480p.
Most people put up with the surveillance because they don't have the tech skills to engineer their own solutions, and the VPN companies aren't really coming to anyone's aid.
BTW, I don't know why there are so many people who absolutely want extremely high TV resolution.
That sort of thing fakes you into believing too much TV much like how highly personal YouTube vids trick people into parasocial behaviour.
I can easily put up with 720p or even 480p because it's still better and more stable than old PAL, let alone North America's NTSC standard, plus that lower resolution doesn't do weird things that try to trick me into believing it's more than just a screen.
It's all Greek to me!:)
ReplyDeleteWe have digital TV now and our provider company sent us a receiver. We hardly ever use it anyway, as you can watch TV on your computer now. We do have smartphones, unfortunately:)
I just recently deleted a weather app which was constantly trying to get my location and had a million cookies. I also put in in a flight mode when I take it out of the house.