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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 mcgrew on Saturday January 28 2017, @02:41PM
Agreed. It's hard to buy a dumb TV any more. I just bought a "smart" TV, but there's no way I'm giving it my wi-fi password or plugging it into my router.
It is pretty cool that the TV has a USB port. I can copy movies or music (sadly, ogg not supported in my TV) to a thumb drive and play them on the TV.
If I can find a Linux distro that will work on an old 32 bit Gateway laptop that's now running XP, I can plug its composite video to the VCR and watch movies from the network that way. Actually, the USB gives me far better resolution than composite video; that HGMI cable REALLY improved the DVD's picture. So even if I can make the Gatway safe for the network I may still be using USB.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org