Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, and should be treated accordingly.

The CEO is responsible for what their company does. If a major breach can occur through the oversight or "incompetence" of one worker, the CEO has already failed, whether through negligence or malice.

At some level, and certainly at the level where you get paychecks of 10 million a year for the "huge responsibility you are bearing", then incompetence IS malice!

2. It doesn't really matter if you opt out, because _other people around you don't_: they take pictures in which you show, they tag you, they talk about you, they send you links, etc. Which means they (Meta) build a shadow profile of you anyway.

The "personal responsibility angle" is pure fiction.

There is obviously a fine that could bankrupt the company: this would be a clear signal "do not do this".

There are also many cases where people have been doing everything they should have been, and still got hacked (zero days, for instance).

Now, I do not think people should only be slapped on the wrist in that case: it still needs to be significant so companies carefully decide to store only the data they really do need!

Or, if that does not happen, when enough people rise up in revolution and take the compensation for themselves.

Or, never.

If enough people vote enough or revolt enough, they cannot be stopped. But the incentives for too few people rising up are too costly. They work hard to keep the equilibrium in that balance.

It's even worse if some staff wrote paranoid in your file, 'cause they'll argue it's good for "exposure".

But I would absolutely not install an app for that.

Most apartment buildings in the US already use face-tracking cameras to get this log

In Poland/EU we have an (ever growing) list of forbidden clauses that even when written and signed by consumer are null and void. And I think these can be enacted retroactively - when corporations invent new shady clauses, government steps in and tells them these are invalid.

This helps to even out the consumer-corporation field.

I'd love to have a similar standard applied in the US but I'm not holding my breath.

For another perspective, check out the comment you're replying to.

So just treat it as a best case scenario, knowing that it can get even worse.

1080p, but the picture far outstrips most other TVs I've owned to this day.

I have zero plans to change it, and it's usefulness has outlasted the Chromecast that's connected to it.

Yes, I put the first ads on Smart TVs. Apologies.

The problem is we've not enforced any strong regulation against ads, downgrade rights or hack ability.

I don't need "better performance" from the system built into my TV I just need it to run Kodi.

They can just start a capture, record to RAM / storage, and retrieve it later when it is reconnected to the network.

Otherwise if it's disconnected, it is still hard to exfiltrate the data somewhere. Maybe they could get creative via Bluetooth, but then you would need a cooperating device in proximity of the device.

I've just used an old Intel NUC with Debian stable, a remote mini-keyboard and an automounted Samba share on the network forever. It's no more hacked together than any other computer. I do make the mouse pointer and the fonts real big. No apps required. Don't really need the keyboard except for mplayer hotkey presses - just the touchpad on it; if I need to do something that involves typing other than typing a password, I usually ssh in.

I think people are lowkey addicted to having shit sliding in and out and constantly being advertised to. How do you know what to watch unless somebody is constantly bombarding you with options? If it doesn't look like a star trek control panel, is it really TV?

If you like that, you can install Kodi. I haven't tried it since it was XBMC because I found the interfaces annoying and it had trouble dealing with networks, but I'm sure it's better.

> I've yet to hear of a reasonable recipe to isolate and secure such connected TVs

I don't even try. I overpay for dumb tvs in the present, or underpay for 10 year old tvs pre-Applefication. I've never owned a network capable television, or one with apps. I wouldn't.

edit: if your NAS is a separate box that can sit in proximity to your television, you could probably just run all of this stuff directly from the NAS. They spend most of their time doing nothing at all.

But I guess like an xkcd comic, someone is obligated to raise the issue every time TVs come up.

Samsung were openly bragging about this on their website some years ago (for the benefit of their advertising partners) but have recently muddied the waters when I check their site again, couching it in language mentioning privacy and other evasive language:

https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS10010616/

As far as I know, they don't literally scan your media libraries; they screenshot whatever you're watching through HDMI (most often cable / satellite boxes), as those devices don't provide the telemetry that normal apps do. This info is used for audience measurement (thing Nielsen ratings), as well as showing you ads that are actually likely to match your interests.

"Starting in 2014, Vizio made TVs that automatically tracked what consumers were watching and transmitted that data back to its servers. Vizio even retrofitted older models by installing its tracking software remotely. All of this, the FTC and AG allege, was done without clearly telling consumers or getting their consent.

...

"Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06203 shows LG and Samsung doing something similar

I'm hopeful that there will be sufficient distrust that "jailbreaking" or "rooting" TV controller boards will be turnkey enough to move to something like OpenWrt or GrapheneOS but for TVs.

Not GP, but I do so to make sure my TV doesn't try to connect to a different network. I provide specific IP addresses to the ethernet-connected interface and then block those IP addresses.

I suppose I could also move the TV to an isolated VLAN, but I spent months (the device was purchased nearly, or perhaps even more than, a decade ago) monitoring network traffic to determine to where (via DNS queries and packet captures) my TV was trying to phone home and blocked all egress for the TV and ingress from the sites/IP addresses to which the TV tried to connect.

I suppose that newer TVs might be sneakier (with the kind of WiFi surfing mentioned in TFA and/or installing cellular modems) in their attempts to bypass user control and when I need a new TV, I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

But for now, my TV can't phone home. Or I'd have thrown it away years ago.

Idk why this is so often citied in Smart TV boogeyman arguments.