If you don’t want apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, then you want to rape festival-goers. Those are the only two choices!

That was a satisfying read. I’m glad rule of law still exists to some extent and it’s not just team sports.

Right, these seem like reasonable hypotheses. I see a LOT of “innovation” happening in this space, though. In the future, or maybe even the present, I think it would be trivial to use speech to text and store conversations as small text files. Let’s say anytime it hears a specific brand name, “Cheerios” or “Toyota”, it records the conversation in a text file and sends it to marketers for research. It’s really not unthinkable.

The recent Mozilla report confirms that cars are using your microphone to determine what song or podcast you’re listening to, and listening to your conversations, so it’s not as if this is paranoid conjecture. If there’s money in it, and no rules to stop them, I think it’s almost inevitable.

I think automatic content recognition works by capturing still frames at strategic moments, so it may not take as much data as we think. For example, studios apparently hide watermarks that identify shows and movies. Then you would just need to make the tv detect the watermarks, not store and send screenshots of the screen. Then it can send a tiny CVS file of when and for how long you watched the show. It wouldn’t even need to know the name of the show. The watermark could be an alphanumeric code, and so even new shows would be detectable.

Great detailed comment. My concern is that I’m not clear on whether the TV tries to collect data even without an internet connection, and sends the collected data if you ever connect it in the future (e.g. for a firmware update). It’s such a poorly regulated industry, I have no trust in the companies imposing any reasonable limits on their own behavior.

I thought PC monitors would be higher priced than commercial displays, but I haven’t really looked into it. It sounds like I should get a pihole either way.

I’m aware of and OK with the idea that Netflix (or whatever) knows what I’m watching on their service when I’m logged in. I’m not OK with the TV itself collecting extra data, especially automated content recognition or my private conversations with their microphone. It’s nuts that that’s allowed.