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Grombobulous | on: Root shell on Samsung TV
One way that you probably are behind on the goings on in the TV market are that there are whole TV brands that require you to login just to use the television at all, like Roku.

These are usually the cheap models, the kind that are heavily subsidized by spyware, but the fact that this exists at all is seriously not cool.

I imagine that you can login to those televisions once and then take them offline, though I haven’t tried personally.

The other thing I would say is that here we are asking customers to basically buy duplicate products and that second product might still engage in spyware.

E.g., I’ve bought a $500 TV that comes with Roku or whatever. It already runs all my streaming apps. So the strategy now is to turn off internet on that TV and now I have to buy a streaming box and hope that it’s less intrusive. If we decide maybe Apple is the one with the least intrusive ads and tracking, that’s now $300, almost doubling the cost of the TV.

And if we buy some other streaming box like Roku or Amazon well guess what they have all the same sorts of telemetry and ads going on.

treebeard901 | parent | next
To fully remove the national spy network from your life you would have to get rid of all other devices that will collect the same data or do already. Smartphones, smartwatches, home security systems, Wifi, any computer or device you did not build yourself, TVs, any other "smart" device, anything that has electricty going to it, any car since OnStar in the 1990s, all delivery trucks and self driving cars, your neighbors security system, devices that broadcast IDs, even bluetooth devices... So many examples..

The amount of devices in the national spy network which is passed off as just advertisement data is really providing full spectrum live video and audio to third parties that can and do share it for any reason that benefits them.

BoxwoodSeed | parent
You also have to create an account to use an Osmo action cam. I almost sent the damn thing back upon finding out, but as it turns out, you can make a fake mail, fake account, and after having connected once you can treat it as if it never happened.

Still infuriating.