> I don't want an ongoing relationship with the device manufacturer.

I think it depends on the device. If I buy an iPhone, I have the expectation of installing apps on it after purchase, and that necessarily involves a relationship with the app store provider (ie. Apple), not the store I bought the phone from.

With a TV, I suppose it depends on whether I want to install media apps like Prime Video or Netflix on it. I understand that there will be people who don't want that, in which case I agree with you. But others want to be able to run this stuff somehow, whether it's directly on the TV or via some HDMI device like a Chromecast or a Fire Stick. At that point, they _do_ want a relationship with some hardware manufacturer so that the third party app can be delivered to run on the hardware.

Then what about all the cloud enabled spyware? How would that work? (/sarcasm)

Truly though, smart-home stuff runs the whole gamut of privacy and device manufacturer relationships. eg: I have used three different smart/room AC units:

- one requires its own cloud-enabled app for any remote connectivity, no HomeKit integration - one integrates with HomeKit but then leaves an upgrade hint that can only be done through an app with a login - one integrates with HomeKit and pretty much just works

HomeKit then allows me to remotely control via HomePod/AppleTV acting as a router ... of course this is just a different cloud connectivity but with on-premises devices controlling other on-premises devices.

For each manufacturer of smart devices, there is potentially a separate cloud where data is being funneled through. Some devices support multiple upstreams.

I get that Matter should be a way to fix it but the reality feels more like https://xkcd.com/927/

Part of me just wants dumb devices back. Get rid of buttons on a microwave (just give me a knob for time and maybe another knob for power setting.) Remove touchscreens from cars (mine glares at me with certain sun-angles.) Bring back the desktop/computer hutch and phones that don't live in your pocket. However, having the ability to start cooling my bedroom 45 minutes before I arrive home is ... pretty compelling too.

By and large, that has been my experience.

No less than Shazam is?

If they aren't suing they are guilty as hell. Even if they were only most guilty they would sue; their legal dept knows they have no legs to stand on.

It is pretty neat and several resources online explaining it but it chunks the recoding and does a hash of the fft of each frame i think which reduces the data a lot. The server has a pre hashed database https://hackernoon.com/how-shazam-works-in-a-nutshell

I know a guy who made a Shazam-like phone app that can listen to a few seconds of noisy audio and make a fingerprint that can be used to quickly ID those specific few seconds out of a pre-fingerprinted archive of an enormous amount of audio (zillions of hours of TV). Making the fingerprint requires a tiny amount of very smart code (in C with no dependencies). But, the fingerprint is not useful for understanding audio that's not in the archive.

TV shows are completed and in the can well before air date. It is entirely plausible that the interested party in having the content identifiable by Shazam like services submit whatever needs to be submitted for new content

Signals analysis is pretty refined and not THAT compute intense.

Nielsen is global Company that is used for pricing ads on TV stations around the world. Their way of doing it from what I know personally is that they sign up people to put this ACR boxes voluntarily and then based on extrapolation of data - they can tell you pretty close what was the viewership across demographics. Similar to how election polls are done - you just need a good sample.

It's been done for at least good 15 years.

nielsen's ACR method is embedded into millions of devices and vendors. No need for a microphone, it's processing the audio signal being sent out. A microphone would be a wasted conversion..

(your car infotainment also likely has nielsen tech in it most likely, as they bought arbitron and gracenote)

LMGTFY was made for people like you.

You know you can look it up if you are skeptical, right?

You simply do not say something like “we don’t record continuously” if the reality is that you only record when voice control or speech to text is active. Given the entire industry’s track record, the only sane thing to do when confronted with weasel wording is to assume the truth is the worst possible interpretation that isn’t a blatant lie, and even then, sometimes it is just a blatant lie.

Here’s some examples:

- We don’t record continuously -> We record nearly all the time, only stopping to upload the recording.

- We do not sell your data -> But we do “share” it.

- All your data is protected from unauthorized LLM scraping -> But we define all the big tech companies as authorized scraping.

You'd think if that was all they recorded for, they would be saying it very loudly to end the speculation that weasel-wording leads to.

None of that requires recording and has been done with embedded hw with local software for years.

Like I do with laptops, just snip wires (or pull out header/connector) to microphone and camera. Problem partly solved.

Fully solve it by disconnecting network cable/Wi-Fi so there's no internet.

For me a TV set only receives FTA signals and has connectors for local media/AV input. It ceases to be a TV set when it starts doing what my PCs and laptops do.

(Anonymity is the reason why FTA broadcasting is still so very important, by design it's only one-way — broadcaster to listener/viewer. Unfortunately smart TVs and the internet subvert anonymity by design.)

There's no practical reason for most people. Spying is the primary function. Edge cases like accessibility or conferencing can be easily enabled with an add on USB mic. You'd need a USB webcam with mic for conferencing anyway.

Are there any useful resources for finding devices that don't have surveillance apparatus built in?

I'm still not purchasing a television. The last thing I need is more screen time in my life.

> Microphones in tvs are a useful accessibility feature

Made nearly moot by the presence of microphones in most (all?) modern remotes.

I say nearly moot because its worth noting the ability to operate a physical remote may itself be prohibitive to some.

So in effect, there are a multitude microphones in a modern LG environment.

Since you're using it for Netflix, etc I assume it has unrestricted Internet access. With that and microphone access, you're giving tacit permission to capture and upload basically whatever it wants, to whoever it wants.

That seems unwise, no matter how helpful the features are.

Many common SOC's MediaTek, Realtek, and Broadcom SOC's quite often used modern audio capable devices analog pins can be software defined either input or output.

IIRC I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room. Audio quality wasn't perfect, but it making sense what was spoken was good enough.

Even the screen itself can be used as a microphone, and a pretty good one, too.

Orwell's 80 years ahead of his time. The great unwashed who watch Netflix etc. either don't know or don't care that they're mirroring the closing moments of the book.

The warning has been there for 80 years and still most are unaware. When Vespasian built the Colosseum it was to help rule over the unruly. Netflix and ilk are its modern incarnation.

If the checkbox is already ticked it is called opt-out. You have to toggle the checkbox to not be activated. The other way around is opt-in. The checkbox is empty and if you want to enable it you have to take action.

Opt-in: take action to have the feature.

Opt-out: take action to not have the feature.

I would argue there is a very clear unambiguously correct choice of wording for that case. The setting was opt out. It's a binary concept and which case it's in is determined by the default given no user action. If it is opt in, then it is off by default and you have to make the choice to turn it on. If it is opt out, it is on by default and you have to make the choice to turn it off. If it was enabled automatically it is opt out. There's no need to complicate the meaning of terminology with a straightforward definition. Given you don't take active action, that you accept all defaults and take the path of least resistance, is it enabled or disabled by default? That's all that matters.

It was enabled when you accepted the terms and conditions when you first turned it on, or did a firmware update. LGs statment says this:

> ACR is an optional feature that is turned off by default. To enable ACR, a user must accept LG’s Viewing Information Agreement, which describes how ACR works.

Which I take to mean that when you agree to the terms, it enables the feature.

Yesterday I saw a comment that say that some info collecting was "opt-in by default" and I imagined it was an evil conspiracy f corporations to dilute the name. I just looked for the comment, but it was just another case of error while writing the comment.

Anyway, last year my phone died and I bought a new one made by Samsung. I had to opt out of collection like 4 or 5 times with confusing buttons, and there is a lot of crapware installed by default, and then the phone offered to install two additional apps. I almost sure I said no, but one of them got installed anyway.

Human wake word recognition isn't infallible, either. How often in your life did you respond because you thought somebody called your name and it wasn't actually the case?

I wrote that in to deter kinda-bad-faith responses, where someone tries to play at being an evil-genie, inserting unreasonable flaws into the gaps, like: "But what if it triggered all the time? On purpose!?"

The point is that ethical implementations do exist, and them working does not rely on anything close to perfection--so nitpicking that word isn't helpful.

I endorse the cynicism, but I feel that's moving the goalposts a tad, from "good is impossible" to "good is improbable".

Or, in a heavily-paraphrased nutshell:

    Politician: "Watch-words are ALWAYS evil-mode. They have to be lying."
    Terr:       "No. Here's a watch-word which would be good-mode."
    Politician: "Well, it'll still *become* evil-mode, eventually."