Apologies up front; this is playing out in Dutch media and there do not seem to be English sources available. Nevertheless, I thought the following would be of interest to SN:
Philips TVs are manufactured by TP Vision. Recently, TP Vision announced that it would include more ads on its (Philips-branded) smart-tvs. Comment by Paulo Lopez of TP Vision to the media:
"We know very much about viewing behaviour. Which channels are being watched, which apps are being used. Based on that, we can make ads more relevant in the future." (translation mine).
Well that did cause a few ripples, amongst others with the data protection agency in the Netherlands. They already slapped TP Vision on the wrist back in 2013 for doing basically this. Now the data protection agency is starting another investigation. Moreover, tech-heads also noticed and kicked up a bit of a sh*tstorm at popular Dutch tech site Tweakers.net: more ads, warning, with 555 and 133 comments respectively (on a site where 100+ comments is a lot).
Do you know of any other brands that engage in such sleazy behaviour? And: would it be possible to block the ads while retaining the smart functionality (assuming a user who wants that), when the TV would try to detect/prevent that?
[Ed. Note: All I found in English is a press release from Improve Digital, the advertising company. Typical PR language there.]
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Saturday January 28 2017, @03:23AM
External boxes have to compete on features, speed, usability. They're always going to be better than the media server in a TV - especially 3 or 4 years down the road. I can replace the box for $50, but replacing the TV is $1000.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 28 2017, @03:01PM
That right there is why I never bought a smart TV. I didn't even bother considering the privacy and security implications as it didn't come to that. Having that "smartness" built into the box just adds to the cost of buying the TV, increases the number of components that can fail and you'll likely still need a set top box at some point when a service I wanted to watch either doesn't support that TV or drops support for it.
Smart TVs are really only smart for the people selling them. The fact that they're capable of so much spying is just that much worse. At some point, businesses need to be held accountable for failing to adequately deal with the consequences of their actions. Back before the government stopped enforcing antitrust regulations, you at least had many choices to go with. Now, it's a handful of companies and they mostly do the same anti-consumer things.