Samsung Hit with Restraining Order Over Smart TV Surveillance Tech in Texas (texasattorneygeneral.gov)
- Reference: 0180548817
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/01/08/1729204/samsung-hit-with-restraining-order-over-smart-tv-surveillance-tech-in-texas
- Source link: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-secures-major-win-stopping-samsung-using-its-smart-tvs-illegally-spy
The ACR system captured screenshots of what users were watching every 500 milliseconds, according to the state's lawsuit, and did so without consumer knowledge or consent. The District Court found good cause to believe Samsung's actions violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The TRO prohibits Samsung and any parties working in concert with the company from using, selling, transferring, collecting, or sharing ACR data tied to Texas consumers.
Samsung is one of five major TV manufacturers the Texas Attorney General's office has sued over ACR deployment. Paxton previously secured a similar order against Hisense.
[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-secures-major-win-stopping-samsung-using-its-smart-tvs-illegally-spy
Dumb TVs are impossible to find (Score:4)
Good luck buying a 'dumb' TV to try and avoid all this surveillance and advertising non-sense. I went looking and even TVs meant for digital signage and corporate use is near impossible to buy (they won't sell to individuals), and extremely expensive for mediocre quality (color correctness is crap).
We're stuck with this AI infused, Ad-ridden, surveillance garbage.
Re:Dumb TVs are impossible to find (Score:4, Informative)
What we call "Dumb TVs," the industry calls "monitors." Use that search term and you'll find plenty.
Re: (Score:2)
Yup, plenty out there in all the common sizes, just won't find them nearly as cheap as your average living room TV;
[1]Commercial Displays [bhphotovideo.com]
[1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/digital-signage-monitors/ci/36550
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, the prices are initially surprising. I guess all the spying, ads, and preloaded crapware/shovelware have massively increased the margins on Smart TVs, so that competitive pressures brought the price to way below benevolent TVs. That should give us all an idea how many dollars worth of fuckery a Smart TV inflicts.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair these displays are generally built to higher quality standards as well, they're meant to go into environments to run 16/7 or 24/7 and are warrantied as such so they're just made different and they sell far less of them then the consumer sets.
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... And anyone who doubts this is invited to go into a sports bar and count the TVs where the picture is blue, or full of bright/dark spots, or half of it's dim, or ...
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Yeah this is right in my industry so I have had to make this case to customers dozens if not hundreds of times when they ask "i can get a 55" TV at best buy for like $300"
And yes you can can and that's even a viable plan but your warranty is DOA as soon as you hang it up in a store or restaurant so be prepared to replace when it fails. Sometimes that is the better value still!
The commercial one is $1200 but it has a 3 or 5 or even 7 year warranty that the vendor will send someone to repair on-site. Just d
Re: (Score:2)
Costs are not prices.
The shovelware allows you to discriminate* between your price-sensitive and non-price sensitive customers, essentially giving you two different demand curves and allowing you to clear those markets at separate prices. This does not tell you that the profit per unit is *matched* between the two, just that the total profit is *maximized*.
*: Here discriminate is used in the value neutral "tell the difference".
Re: (Score:3)
[1]Sharp PN-ME552 55" UHD 4K HDR Commercial Monitor [bhphotovideo.com]
[1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1801250-REG/nec_multisync_pn_me552_55_class.html
Re: (Score:2)
This is not a product endorsement; I have no familiarity with the product and all I did was search Amazon and pick the first result (which was also sponsored). That said: [1]Amazon claims to sell this [amazon.com].
(This is not a store endorsement, either, but it looks like Amazon will let you put it in your shopping cart (and presumably buy it) without asking who is going to use it for what. I only mention this because someone else posted that some vendor refuses to sell monitors to individuals.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-QE55T-3840x2160-Commercial-LH55QETELGCXGO/dp/B08DQBJ912
Re: (Score:2)
I'm the one that mentioned they don't sell to individuals, and that was me going to the source. I'm in Canada and Amazon.ca does not seem to carry these, but it's nice to see Amazon.com does. For the specific link you shared, it does seem to be a bit risky, as some reviews say they got broken devices and they had to pay for shipping to return it, etc.
Either way, thanks for the link, it's given me hope of finding something that is a 4K display, 55-65 inches, and has good color accuracy, all without the sp
Re: (Score:2)
The "monitors" are not dumb either.... both my Samsungs M8 are capable of streaming applications such as netflix, prime, hulu, etc... and Office365 all on its own, no need to attach it to a computer. You only need mouse/keyboard.
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So, let me get this straight.. The TVs will monitor you. But the monitors won't monitor you. Brilliant!
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Don't connect it to your wifi.
Re:Dumb TVs are impossible to find (Score:5, Interesting)
> Don't connect it to your wifi.
I have an LG C2 (circa 2019). I disabled everything I could through the menus. I never plugged in ethernet and had wifi disabled. One day my wife turned on the TV and it started doing an update. I flipped out on her for obviously having turned on wifi, how else could it update? Nearly (okay, not quite, but felt like it) got divorced over it, until I realized, no she really hadn't. The damn TV formed a mesh network with my neighbour's TV over bluetooth (I live in an apartment and apparently the concrete floor wasn't enough to block the signal).
These TVs will stop at nothing to phone home and get connectivity. When I phoned LG and freaked out at them, they told me there was some setting about 6 menus deep, totally unrelated to anything mesh or network connectivity that if I disabled would prevent it from connecting to other TVs. It was not obvious, not mentioned anywhere in the documentation, or in the many many pages of EULA that I actually read through when I first turned on my TV after purchase.
I want a TV that takes an HDMI (or DisplayPort) and displays it. No TV Tuner, built-in apps, or internet enabled anything. It aslo needs to support HDCP or else my AppleTV refuses to send video to it. Regular Monitors don't have HDCP support without being a smartTV. It's infuriating.
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> Regular Monitors don't have HDCP support without being a smartTV.
These days I would be surprised if any standard monitor lacks HDCP support over HDMI and DisplayPort. It's in most specs I see and I don't buy smart monitors.
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I have often mused here, when people smugly say "just don't give it your wifi password", about how long it would take the idle processing power of a TV to crack your wifi password. It turns out that even I suffer from insufficient imagination.
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Nothing connected to the internet is safe anymore.
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Just don't connect it to the internet. Problem solved. Don't plug in an ethernet cable and don't allow it to connect to your wifi network. I guess they could still put a cellular modem in the device and have it phone home that way, but that seems like it would be quite expensive over the life of the device. I suppose if you want to consume streaming media, you'll ultimately have to deal with spying via whatever device is delivering that content to the TV.
Best,
Firewalls on modem? (Score:2)
Haven't tried this myself, mind you. Just wondering how well this would work.
Re: (Score:2)
IME, not very well, assuming the objective is to block offensive functionality while still being able to use streaming services and whatnot. I've made a couple halfhearted attempts at this, and run into issues -- the only effective strategy is to block everything and whitelist specific hosts to allow things to work, and then every week some service or another changes something or pushes an update that breaks it. And some TVs, Samsung being notable for this, will keep popping up nags if they have a network
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> I went looking and even TVs meant for digital signage and corporate use is near impossible to buy (they won't sell to individuals)
You didn't look very hard. They sell them on Amazon.
Good start. Now do Flock. (Score:3)
While I don't agree with much that Ken Paxton does, I'll take this small win. It's bad enough when "smart" TVs snoop what's being watched through apps and network connections -- this bullshit, screen-capturing whatever's being fed in via HDMI etc. and doing analysis on it to come up with "insights" to sell, yeah, fuck you very much. I'd never connect a TV to the Internet anyway, but I'm in a small minority in that regard, and regular people have rights too.
Now that we're working on getting invasive surveillance technology out of the lives of everyday Americans minding their own business, perhaps, Mr. Paxton, you'd like to have a word with Flock? *crickets*
Re:If this was coming from California (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone here is praising this. They're just also using the opportunity to trash on Praxton, which is perfectly justified.
Re: (Score:2)
No the slashdot logic would say Samsung should stop selling them in Texas. Or is that only when the EU does consumer protection laws?
Re: If this was coming from California (Score:2)
Dumb as they are, sometimes they do something right.
Now, let's see them so the same to an American company that does the same thing...
They don't have a chance with me (Score:2)
I'm a high tech career engineer, but it doesn't mean all the "smart" stuffs are must have. For the TVs, nowadays I don't have a choice but to buy a smart TV. But there's no way in hell I'd allow it to access my local network. It can cry all it wants, no internet allowed. It doesn't matter if it takes screenshot, there's no way for it to send it home.
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Not until they put a cellular modem in 'em, which now that I think of it, would be dirt cheap for them to do.
"Daddy, why is the TV covered in foil? Can we at least remove it from the screen side?"
Ken Paxton (Score:3, Insightful)
Ken Paxton is running for US Senate in 2026.
He desperately wants Texans to forget that he was impeached by his own party members on 20 counts of public corruption, bribery, abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and abuse of the public trust.
Everything he is doing is to grab headlines and distract voters.
My Samsung TVs storage is full (Score:2)
I have not used my Samsung TV remote in years, I control everything from my AppleTV. The TV has not been connected to the internet since I got it 4 years ago and installed updates back then.
A few weeks ago I had to change a setting and had to dig out my remote. it had lost pairing for the remote, but what was really strange was that I got an error that the TVs storage was full and it said i had to do a factory reset or contact support.
So what filled the internal storage in the years where it have not been c
Re: My Samsung TVs storage is full (Score:2)
I don't want my TV spying on me.
Google and Apple can, though.
Lol.
Paxton doesn't care (Score:2)
Paxton's raft of laws depriving Texans of choices, of rights, indicate he's not doing this to protect the people. This is driven by his xenophobia and racism.
Every 500 milliseconds (Score:2)
Or twice a second, which is far more intuitive.
Re:That's rich coming from Paxton (Score:4, Informative)
That's rich coming from Paxton
Why are you supporting Samsung by smearing the character of the one prosecuting them in the middle of a discussion about this case, and the article has nothing to do with an attorney's personal life history? The state attorney to a case represent the people, not themself. Do you work for Samsung? Did they pay you, or what?
Opposing counsel members' alleged but unproven adultery or unproven historic crimes, and other complaints don't have anything to do with the case or discussion of an article about Samsung getting ordered by the court. They don't make it a wrong decision or action for the AG to pursue, or bad in any way.
Re:That's rich coming from Paxton (Score:4, Insightful)
> That's rich coming from Paxton
> Why are you supporting Samsung by smearing the character of the one prosecuting them in the middle of a discussion about this case, and the article has nothing to do with an attorney's personal life history? The state attorney to a case represent the people, not themself. Do you work for Samsung? Did they pay you, or what?
> Opposing counsel members' alleged but unproven adultery or unproven historic crimes, and other complaints don't have anything to do with the case or discussion of an article about Samsung getting ordered by the court. They don't make it a wrong decision or action for the AG to pursue, or bad in any way.
You can see Samsung as a shit company and also see Paxton as the tremendous piece of garbage that he is. I have zero problem saying, "I'm glad someone is going after someone for this type of practice, but I wish it was someone with a better framework of morality. Cheering for Paxton doing anything feels a bit like cheering on Lucifer."
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Paxton is corrupt as f*&k and just generally an all-around bastard. He's pretty in-your face about it, as well. Which makes him a perfect fit for his current position.
This is literally the first thing I've heard about him that I approve of.