If you have bought a "smart" TV in the past few years you will find that it is reporting back to the mothership on the programmes you watch, the content you stream and will use this information to "bring you relevant targeted adverts". Automatic Content Recognition [ACR] Viewing Information Services" [VIS] and voice recognition are enabled by default on Samsung TVs and you'll have to dig into the settings to disable these "features".

There is also an issue known as "false off" where your TV continues to listen to you when it's on standby.

If you have a "smart" remote then this has a microphone which will also be listening unless turned off.

For some TVs [in our case a Samsung], it's almost as bad as Windows.

I spent the first hour or so with our new TV going throught the manual and turning off as many of the smart features that I could.

We do use the TV to stream Netflix and Amazon Prime but that's it.

Anyone who thinks that a/ this is for your / our benefit, and, b/ that this is secure is deluded.

Quite. We just had delivered an 'upgrade' to our Magenta basic real-time TV box (pictures delivered over internet) and it took a good half hour to turn off all the 'features'. A microphone in the remote? WTF?

Still looking for a new TV, but finding one that simply displays the image thrown at it is getting harder. Getting an answer to the question 'what does this TV do in the absence of a network connection' seems almost impossible. Yes, I can block at the firewall, but I shouldn't have to. Nor should I have to provide a network connection to be able to accept a terms and conditions agreement. Finding one without dubious 'AI' changing the settings depending what I'm watching is also hard - that's the job of the material producer, to get it right before transmission.

O brave new world, that has such wonders in it.

" Still looking for a new TV, but finding one that simply displays the image thrown at it is getting harder. "

I have a Samsung TV from 2013 with none of this Smart bollocks on it. The day is breaks I will be heart broken because I have absolutely no idea what I could put in it's place that doesn't have the smart shite enabled.

Even worse I decided to have two young kids, so every day is a cliffhanger as to whether or not it'll survive play time.

> finding [a TV] that simply displays the image thrown at it is getting harder.

Isn't that precisely what a computer monitor does?

The "smart TV" in my office play room has never screened a TV programme or stream. It acts purely as a large monitor for my main computer. Since I don't care about screen response times, it fits the bill perfectly for throwing up many VMs at the same time.

Showing you ads is just enshitification. The real problem is the data itself. Anybody who thinks that the collected data will not be used against you is deluded. Anybody who does not think that three-and-four letter agencies have access to all that collected data is equally deluded.

How did that saying go,... those who don't learn from history...etc.

If you have bought a "smart" TV in the past few years you will find that it is reporting back to the mothership on the programmes you watch, the content you stream and will use this information to "bring you relevant targeted adverts". Automatic Content Recognition [ACR] Viewing Information Services" [VIS] and voice recognition are enabled by default on Samsung TVs and you'll have to dig into the settings to disable these "features".

This is why my TV has never been plugged into my network.

Same here. I've indulged in a streaming box but the TV itself has never been connected to a network. The streaming box is cheap to replace or upgrade; the TV isn't.

“turning things off”

Oh how, sweet.

> the future viability of many European TV broadcasters at stake

This sounds all very noble and "think of the consumer". However, we must remember that TV broadcasters do exactly what is being complained about. They choose what content to broadcast, what to leave in and what to leave out. And just as their TV audiences can flip channels to find something more agreeable, so can consumers on the end of a smart TV's streaming function or Alexa.

As time goes by I'm more and more fed up with "smart" everything, especially TVs. Can't we just have "dumb" TV that shows antenna signal and picture from connected devices? and that wouldn't be slow AS and break down once the maker gets bored with maintenance?

we have one Samsung TV and it has the annoying "feature" of starting Netflix if you dint do anything for a short while after powering it... ffs

It might be worthwhile spending the extra money on a plain monitor and a Pi running OSMC, TVHeadEnd, MythTV or the like.

Just don't plug it into the internet! It can monitor all you want, but it won't be able to talk to anyone

Or PiHole for the win!

I helped a friend set up a new TV she recently bought.

You could NOT use it without connecting it to the Internet. It would not let you skip or finish the setup process without an unrestricted 'net connection.

The setup process itself - including agreeing to T&Cs - could not be skipped.

If you disconnected it from the Internet, or hooked it to a PiHole , a large "Your Internet connection is not working properly"-type banner was displayed in rhe middle of rhe screen, and you could not use the TV remote control to make it display a connected video source (DVD player, digitial terrestrial broadcast, etc.).

If my "smart" TVs (We have five scattered around the house) are a representative sample, Big Brother appears to be a mite retarded. Their recommendations appear to have a large degree of randomness changing unpredictably with every user action. And every now and then they alter settings like closed captioning in a random fashion. And one of them simply does something randomly weird like changing channels on its own every hour or three. Another synchs perfectly during boot, runs for maybe 30 seconds, then looses synch andreboots. After which it runs OK. All of them are prone to occasionally posting network related error messages randomly during bootup although none of the other household computing devices -- PCs, tablets, a Chromebook -- seem to have any problems. Could be real network issues, but it sure looks more like race conditions in the code.

Rarely, they appear to become totally confused. Usually, cycling power, restores them to their normal kinda usable state.

All in all, I think I preferred the dumb TVs of the 1980s, True, one had to wait for the CRT to warm up. But that took less time than smart TV boot. There were fewer channels back then. But channel selection was straightforward. Now it involves finding ones way through frequently morphing gaudy, but far from clear, cascading visual menus.

Color me unimpressed.

Smart TV seem to be pretty much obsolete out the box. Venders being rather unwilling to maintain these shiny screens for any length of time. In fact was LG not fined for selling brand new TVs which were already unsupported?

We use an add on streaming devices and run the TVs as a dumb tv. They're not network connected to anything. The streaming box is better maintained and the TV doesn't listen.

The real issue here is by incorporating everything into "the cloud" these service providers get to break things - and the associated costly hardware - with nary a pretence of accountability.

Something Google Home users know only too well.