Don't give your "smart" TV internet access. It's that simple.
Samsung's chicanery taught me this, but other manufacturers are no better. Those TV apps may seem nice, but they can be run on hardware you have more control over. I'd recommend only buying "dumb" TV's, but they've become increasingly rare and expensive. Less costs more!
Soon we'll have a popup before every individual show on Netflix asking us if we accept the cookies before we watch, all in the name of consumer protection
Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers, most of which you don’t even notice because it’s hard to notice harm that did not happen.
Just shows how much you are worth as a product to them, and how little competition is in the cell market, that all these devices can get lifetime cell connections while we are paying, how much a month? Actually, lawsuits about privacy for devices like this should quote how much the infrastructure costs are to support their tech. The network, services, people, etc are all a good estimate of actual value, in dollars, they are deriving from selling you as a product.
We use a crap ton of calls/sms/data over the same period, expect decent QoS on well performing bands, and have a TON more customer management and onboarding overheard over the same 5-10 year period. Meanwhile devices with embedded telemetry might get a plan as low as 500 MB total over 10 years and have hundreds of thousands in a single sale with no customer support overheard, SIM reactivation on new phones, etc.
Are you getting as good a deal? No, probably not, but trying to compare them to the cellular service you pay for is problematic in many ways. You too can get a $14 10 year prepaid plan from 1NCE for your Pi to send sensor telemetry from on occasion if that's what you want instead of "normal" cell service.
I wouldn't mind companies having to disclose everything and anything about the telemetry they collect though. Just putting the dollar figure on it is unlikely to shock anyone as it is low for you to do the same thing too.
Follow the example of how buying a Linux PC works. Look at popular brands where there are vibrant online communities of people neutralizing the surveillance / control bits - pulling out the 5G modems and whatnot. It's possible manufacturers will eventually arrive at using all-in-one integrated chipset where you can't just disconnect a daughterboard or scratch the appropriate traces to a radio chip, but we're so far from that.
Bad news: we're actually closer than you'd think to that, considering how many cellular modems on their own are full blown SOC stacks and how far we've gotten into the eSIM camp.
Cell modems are their own SOCs, but are their application processors being used to implement the main functionality of the TV?
Maybe they are, with Android UIs and whatnot? I actually don't have any "smart" TVs (main TV is a 43 inch monitor driven directly by Kodi), so I'm still picturing the car model where there is a separate component that does WAN communications, and the software developers made the system tolerant of it being disconnected (for development ease and also resiliency to failures). But maybe my model is horribly wrong for TVs.
> Don't give your "smart" TV internet access. It's that simple.
For the tech users yes, simple. But for the non-technical user it's not.
The ISP given router don't normally provide the options for such. Nor would my mother, father, brother, sister even know about the slightest about networking, isolating networks.
My parents got a Samsung TV. At Christmas, I turned off all the data collection features (and some abysmal AI face filter that was ruining the latest Knives Out film). It very annoyingly started prompting to reenable them regularly.
TV-free here for about 6 years. I'd recommend it. It takes some getting used to, but after acclimating, the presence of TVs has become annoying. I'm not sure why I'd want to lose myself for an hour or two to it when there's more fulfilling things in the world.
I can see where you're coming from with your "more fulfilling things" statement, but I disagree. After all, TV's don't spew noise they spew stories. I'm not gonna argue that all TV is fulfilling, but engaging with stories is one of the the things which separates us from animals and to me is one of the more fulfilling things in life.
This is an area I'm keeping an eye on - currently this 55" Gigabyte one is about as good as it gets, but it feels like it's straddling the line between monitor and TV, as it runs Android and supports CEC and eARC.
Appliance manufacturers are starting to lock features behind an app/connectivity. Bosch and I believe LG are putting certain wash cycles app only. The in app only functionality will just get more intrusive until morale improves.
The grandparent mentioned "world wide mesh network internet". Is Amazon Sidewalk world wide? The link you posted only mentioned it launched in the United States in 2021. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/everything-you-need... shows a coverage map with large areas unserviced.
they can give the tv powers to autoconnect to public/open networks and can partner with companies like Comcast to get more access points. It's best not to buy a smart TV
Everyone says this but is there even a single example of any TV manufacturer including a cellular chip or partnering with an ISP for this kind of access?
Yeah sure eventually the "don't give your TV network access" might stop working but it works today and for the foreseeable future. You're more likely to get a TV that refuses to operate without a network.
American cable operators set up a separately managed and isolated SSID and DOCSIS service flow to provide Hotspot2.0 access for their cellular subscribers (among other things). XfinityMobile/SpectrumMobile SSIDs are everywhere now out of the box being hosted off of ISP-issued hardware.
That’s where we have to circle back to the parent comment - a smart TV operator could 100% go buddy-buddy up with Xfinity/Spectrum/Cox/et al. and get Hotspot2.0 certs at the factory level to go hop onto whatever cable operators they want to target.
Xfinity cable modem / router combos will create public Xfinity networks by default for many years now. Absolutely is something Xfinity could be selling access to for other corporations.
My suspicion is that Ken Paxton thought Samsung was Chinese, and soon after the court action was submitted found out they were actually South Korean (or at least 'not Chinese').
It's the routine fascist shakedown playbook at this point:
1. Make some big noise and token action about an issue that has been festering for decades, while their own party has been the primary opposition to any kind of substantive lasting reform (eg US GDPR)
2. Rally the useful idiots to rally around the cause of widely-desired reform, backfitting all the ideals behind the issue as if fascists have any appreciation for lofty ideals
3. Let the target company marinate and roast under the pressure until they capitulate and send a bribe and/or other tribute
4. Drop the token action after the attention spans of their useful idiots have expired and they've moved on to the next spectacle
5. If the issue comes to a head again, the useful idiots blame the "libuhruls" rather than having an ounce of self-awareness to realize their own leaders sandbagged and sold them out
Fairly typical in state courts, where trial-level judges are generally left to do what they please and often give little if any rationale. In federal courts, judges generally explain themselves (sometimes they are required to) en route to doing what they please.
There is no written decision on the vacating other than what you already linked.
Reading the TRO, a lot jumps out at me. To pick a single thing:
"The Court HOLDS that because the State seeks injunctive relief pursuant to an
authorized statute, which supersedes the common law, it need not prove immediate and irreparable injury, nor does the Court have to balance the equities when the State litigates in the public interest."
A quick search doesn't show me that texas courts have interpreted it to do so anyway, but maybe they have - i'm not familiar enough with texas law to say for sure.
It's likely that they set some conditions and said "if you meet these conditions, we'll vacate the order" - probably some sort of compliance with Texas regulations governing what can and can't and should and shouldn't be tracked, and Samsung technically complied?
Seems like that temporary order was set to expire Jan 19th anyways, and there is a hearing for Samsung scheduled tomorrow. So there's still some hope..
Republicans have quite a few of these sorts of folks. See Rick Scott rewarded with multiple elections to office after leading the largest medicare fraud settlement in our nations history. Republicans are convinced government doesn't work and try their best to put the people in office to prove it.
Don't give your "smart" TV internet access. It's that simple.
Samsung's chicanery taught me this, but other manufacturers are no better. Those TV apps may seem nice, but they can be run on hardware you have more control over. I'd recommend only buying "dumb" TV's, but they've become increasingly rare and expensive. Less costs more!
> Don't give your "smart" TV internet access. It's that simple.
No it's not.
Am I supposed to counter every action taken by a conglomerate against me every time?
Do all the consumers have to align to this as well?
a TV must be a TV, in the same sense that orange juice must be made from oranges.
Looking forward to EU reining in on them.
It's goddamn hilarious when during setup a device/software asks me if I live in the EU.
Makes me want to Spotify Beethoven.
Yes all hail the EU.
Soon we'll have a popup before every individual show on Netflix asking us if we accept the cookies before we watch, all in the name of consumer protection
Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers, most of which you don’t even notice because it’s hard to notice harm that did not happen.
That's fair. I live in the EU and I love it here, and I'm glad for those protections every day. Except the damn cookie popup.
I don't agree they're malicious compliance though. I think it's just regular compliance.
Regular compliance would be be to stop tracking users.
A ton of websites don’t even track users but have the cookie popup because they think that’s what you’re supposed to do.
I worry about things like "improved" 5G technologies that let devices create their own connections. search for 5g miot or 5g redcap
more devices over time are getting plain cellular connections, let alone these newer cheaper versions.
Just shows how much you are worth as a product to them, and how little competition is in the cell market, that all these devices can get lifetime cell connections while we are paying, how much a month? Actually, lawsuits about privacy for devices like this should quote how much the infrastructure costs are to support their tech. The network, services, people, etc are all a good estimate of actual value, in dollars, they are deriving from selling you as a product.
We use a crap ton of calls/sms/data over the same period, expect decent QoS on well performing bands, and have a TON more customer management and onboarding overheard over the same 5-10 year period. Meanwhile devices with embedded telemetry might get a plan as low as 500 MB total over 10 years and have hundreds of thousands in a single sale with no customer support overheard, SIM reactivation on new phones, etc.
Are you getting as good a deal? No, probably not, but trying to compare them to the cellular service you pay for is problematic in many ways. You too can get a $14 10 year prepaid plan from 1NCE for your Pi to send sensor telemetry from on occasion if that's what you want instead of "normal" cell service.
I wouldn't mind companies having to disclose everything and anything about the telemetry they collect though. Just putting the dollar figure on it is unlikely to shock anyone as it is low for you to do the same thing too.
Follow the example of how buying a Linux PC works. Look at popular brands where there are vibrant online communities of people neutralizing the surveillance / control bits - pulling out the 5G modems and whatnot. It's possible manufacturers will eventually arrive at using all-in-one integrated chipset where you can't just disconnect a daughterboard or scratch the appropriate traces to a radio chip, but we're so far from that.
Bad news: we're actually closer than you'd think to that, considering how many cellular modems on their own are full blown SOC stacks and how far we've gotten into the eSIM camp.
Cell modems are their own SOCs, but are their application processors being used to implement the main functionality of the TV?
Maybe they are, with Android UIs and whatnot? I actually don't have any "smart" TVs (main TV is a 43 inch monitor driven directly by Kodi), so I'm still picturing the car model where there is a separate component that does WAN communications, and the software developers made the system tolerant of it being disconnected (for development ease and also resiliency to failures). But maybe my model is horribly wrong for TVs.
Yes or Amazon sidewalk. Also "great" as an unauthorized side channel exfiltration path.
> Don't give your "smart" TV internet access. It's that simple.
For the tech users yes, simple. But for the non-technical user it's not.
The ISP given router don't normally provide the options for such. Nor would my mother, father, brother, sister even know about the slightest about networking, isolating networks.
The very simple solution that would work in practice is: don't give your TV your WiFi password.
Like everything in tech, they can be persistently annoying in asking. You may not do it, but can you be sure nobody in the house will?
My parents got a Samsung TV. At Christmas, I turned off all the data collection features (and some abysmal AI face filter that was ruining the latest Knives Out film). It very annoyingly started prompting to reenable them regularly.
Even simpler would be not to own a TV.
Sky TV the typical UK household satellite service now comes via your ISP as IPTV rather than dish. WiFi unfortunately then becomes the requirement.
Have not had a TV in over 20 years. Fantastic quality of life upgrade.
They’re colloquially called “idiot box” in Australia for a reason.
TV-free here for about 6 years. I'd recommend it. It takes some getting used to, but after acclimating, the presence of TVs has become annoying. I'm not sure why I'd want to lose myself for an hour or two to it when there's more fulfilling things in the world.
I can see where you're coming from with your "more fulfilling things" statement, but I disagree. After all, TV's don't spew noise they spew stories. I'm not gonna argue that all TV is fulfilling, but engaging with stories is one of the the things which separates us from animals and to me is one of the more fulfilling things in life.
> After all, TV's don't spew noise they spew stories.
Not really, TV in my experience it's all propaganda/stuff to keep you engaged and mad plus ads mixed in with some small content.
You're better off without broadcast TV... reading books, watching movies, socializing etc.
Hooking up a streaming box is incredibly easy.
So exactly where do I get a 60 inch monitor?
This is an area I'm keeping an eye on - currently this 55" Gigabyte one is about as good as it gets, but it feels like it's straddling the line between monitor and TV, as it runs Android and supports CEC and eARC.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Monitor/S55U
Once a company like Iiyama, Dell or Philips releases a 65-75" model with Display Port, I'm just going to buy it. Fingers crossed they do.
Appliance manufacturers are starting to lock features behind an app/connectivity. Bosch and I believe LG are putting certain wash cycles app only. The in app only functionality will just get more intrusive until morale improves.
I had this idea for a novel where we get a world wide mesh network internet via tvs trying to make their own internet to phone home.
Already exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Sidewalk
The grandparent mentioned "world wide mesh network internet". Is Amazon Sidewalk world wide? The link you posted only mentioned it launched in the United States in 2021. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/everything-you-need... shows a coverage map with large areas unserviced.
Roku, when built-in to a TV, refuses to work as a dumb tv until you give it Internet access and sign in
I have a Roku tv. I never plugged it in or gave it internet access. It works fine.
It wasn't the case until iirc a few years ago. My guess is that you're on an old version of the software that didn't yet do this.
they can give the tv powers to autoconnect to public/open networks and can partner with companies like Comcast to get more access points. It's best not to buy a smart TV
Everyone says this but is there even a single example of any TV manufacturer including a cellular chip or partnering with an ISP for this kind of access?
Yeah sure eventually the "don't give your TV network access" might stop working but it works today and for the foreseeable future. You're more likely to get a TV that refuses to operate without a network.
Absolutely no router has shipped in the last decade that I’m aware of that is open by default. ISP modems definitely don’t.
American cable operators set up a separately managed and isolated SSID and DOCSIS service flow to provide Hotspot2.0 access for their cellular subscribers (among other things). XfinityMobile/SpectrumMobile SSIDs are everywhere now out of the box being hosted off of ISP-issued hardware.
And it requires a log in.
That’s where we have to circle back to the parent comment - a smart TV operator could 100% go buddy-buddy up with Xfinity/Spectrum/Cox/et al. and get Hotspot2.0 certs at the factory level to go hop onto whatever cable operators they want to target.
Xfinity cable modem / router combos will create public Xfinity networks by default for many years now. Absolutely is something Xfinity could be selling access to for other corporations.
Yes and it even it requires you to log in first.
You might want to find out why the order was immediately vacated, but you, or at least I, will not do so by reading the article:
> One day after granting the TRO, the same judge ruled that it should not remain in effect and vacated the order.
> “The Court finds, sua sponte, that the [TRO obtained by the State of Texas against Samsung] should be set aside,” the judge wrote in the order.
"ruled that it should not remain in effect" links to https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26462588-20260106-or..., but my desire to understand what's going on does not yet extend to reading the order.
"sua sponte" means "of the court's own volition", there is no reason given in the order to vacate.
The obvious reason is that Samsung's check finally cleared.
My suspicion is that Ken Paxton thought Samsung was Chinese, and soon after the court action was submitted found out they were actually South Korean (or at least 'not Chinese').
It's the routine fascist shakedown playbook at this point:
1. Make some big noise and token action about an issue that has been festering for decades, while their own party has been the primary opposition to any kind of substantive lasting reform (eg US GDPR)
2. Rally the useful idiots to rally around the cause of widely-desired reform, backfitting all the ideals behind the issue as if fascists have any appreciation for lofty ideals
3. Let the target company marinate and roast under the pressure until they capitulate and send a bribe and/or other tribute
4. Drop the token action after the attention spans of their useful idiots have expired and they've moved on to the next spectacle
5. If the issue comes to a head again, the useful idiots blame the "libuhruls" rather than having an ounce of self-awareness to realize their own leaders sandbagged and sold them out
In such cases, is it normal for there to be no reason or elaboration on why the order was vacated?
Fairly typical in state courts, where trial-level judges are generally left to do what they please and often give little if any rationale. In federal courts, judges generally explain themselves (sometimes they are required to) en route to doing what they please.
This is the TRO order:
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
There is no written decision on the vacating other than what you already linked.
Reading the TRO, a lot jumps out at me. To pick a single thing:
"The Court HOLDS that because the State seeks injunctive relief pursuant to an authorized statute, which supersedes the common law, it need not prove immediate and irreparable injury, nor does the Court have to balance the equities when the State litigates in the public interest."
Certainly the DTPA (https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/?tab=1&code=BC&chapter=BC...) authorizes temporary restraining orders, but if you read it carefully, there is nothing in it that explicitly overrides or replaces the typical TRO standards.
A quick search doesn't show me that texas courts have interpreted it to do so anyway, but maybe they have - i'm not familiar enough with texas law to say for sure.
There are other issues with the TRO
It's likely that they set some conditions and said "if you meet these conditions, we'll vacate the order" - probably some sort of compliance with Texas regulations governing what can and can't and should and shouldn't be tracked, and Samsung technically complied?
Hard to find the details.
One should never use the vendor software shipped on a device, always replace it with a FOSS distro that respects your privacy.
Hopefully the Vizio lawsuit that is going to trial soon will help make that more possible.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
Two recent LWN articles about that:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1052842/52c45fb8bcc3fade/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1052734/5903e175673caeef/
The tentative ruling in that case isn't overly hopeful, with issues 2 & 3 probably going to be dismissed.
SFC say that was a ruling on something they didn't even ask for:
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2025/dec/24/vizio-msa-irrelev... https://sfconservancy.org/news/2025/dec/04/tentative-vizio-r...
Seems like that temporary order was set to expire Jan 19th anyways, and there is a hearing for Samsung scheduled tomorrow. So there's still some hope..
This looks like it was just political theater.
Par for the course for Ken Paxton, one of the most blatantly corrupt politicians in the US.
It truly is unbelievable how out in the open corrupt he is, and last time I checked, he is the front runner for the US Senate in Texas.
Republicans have quite a few of these sorts of folks. See Rick Scott rewarded with multiple elections to office after leading the largest medicare fraud settlement in our nations history. Republicans are convinced government doesn't work and try their best to put the people in office to prove it.