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posted by on Saturday January 28 2017, @01:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the they-know-everything-now dept.

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.]


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by mth on Saturday January 28 2017, @12:50PM

    by mth (2848) on Saturday January 28 2017, @12:50PM (#459868) Homepage

    There are two separate problems here: the first is that the TV spies on the viewer, the second is that it's showing ads. To be clear, I'm not against ads in general, but usually the deal is that ads are bundled with something valuable that you're getting for free. In this case, the ads seem to be there solely for the benefit of the manufacturer, not for the benefit of the viewer.

    "If you're not paying, you're the product", but increasingly you're being treated as a product even when you are paying for a device. Another example are preinstalled apps on phones and tablets that cannot be uninstalled (through ordinary means): I assume the manufacturer got paid for that, but they're eating up my storage space even if I never use them, so to me they have a negative value.

    I think the underlying problem is the mindset of "we must maximize profits", rather than "we provide useful goods and services and are rewarded for that". The latter being what corporations were originally meant to do, the former being just plain greed.

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