Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a suit on Monday against Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, and Hisense, claiming in a press release that they "have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (“ACR”) technology.”
Paxton goes on to label ACR as “an uninvited, invisible digital invader,” and in one of the five separately filed suits, he calls Samsung TVs “a mass surveillance system.”
Since this is Texas, I’m predicting the suit will be settled once they secure a contract that ensures they get copies of every collection in Texas, indexed by name, address, and if available, SSN in perpetuity.
And if they watch liberal or spanish-language programming.
So basically everyone far enough South? Narrows down pretty easily once you can determine where Tejano radio stations are broadcast, no awkwardly invasive tech required at all, just good old classic detective work that only requires a modicum of critical thought!
I mean, once they’re a state-sanctioned invader, it’s not longer illegal
They need to identify threats to Texas democracy: specifically anyone who turns off their TV during an episode of Walker: Texas Ranger.
It still upsets me that Chucky turned out to be such a horrible shit strain of a human…
palintir sure wants this data.
Looks like the telly industry missed a payment this month
However, it’s also possible that during setup, the TV may have asked if we’d like “an enhanced and personalized viewing experience.” Who wouldn’t say yes to that?
I dunno, anyone who actually reads it? “Enhanced and personalized” always means spyware. Always.
Oh people like you make my head hurt. Not because you’re wrong, because you’re not. You’re entirely right here.
The reason people like you make my head hurt is because you live in this self isolated bubble where you think everyone else is mentally on the same page as you.
You’re baffled that anyone would agree to that checkbox, because anyone who reads it would understand as you understand that it’s not in your best interest.
Whereas I’M baffled that you think hardly anyone reads the EULA of anything.
Google could literally put in their EULA “user agrees to chop off their genitals and walk barefoot on hot coals”. People would still agree and check yes. Why? Because they never read it. They just click the thing that lets them do the thing and use the thing. Thats as far as 99% go with EULAs.
I’ve watched people like you in person complain that everybody doesn’t do things their way. And while that way is, in general, a better way than is currently being handled, it all falls apart on one key aspect to not understanding the world. That important key being that the world does not see things through your eyes. They do not think of things from your perspective. But instead of taking action to create a world with better ideas being practiced, you sit on the sidelines, watching as the world does what the world will do, and thats be influenced by others. That is what humanity has always been. That’s what it will always be. But in the last 200 years, instead of being influenced by the ideas of a community upbringing, and structure, and morals, it is now, and for all of our lives, been influenced by the ultra rich. The 1%.
We’ve fallen into a world where a persons worth is equal to their net worth. A world where celebrities and ultra rich businessmen are celebrated rather than shunned. Entire genres of music where the sole message is “I have money, therefore bitches fuck me”. And the masses flock to it, because they have adopted that message as their own.
Here you sit. Not having fallen for the basic tricks that are played on society. That alone gives you a huge step up, to rise above the glass ceiling, break through, and bring changes needed to this world.
Instead, you ponder why no one else recognizes there is a glass ceiling. You question why others aren’t doing things the way you would, while offering no resistence of substance.
Everyone wants to complain about shrinkflation, but nobody wants to stop buying the product. If they change the formula, or the price, or the portion size, or whatever, and suddenly they have 0 purchases, things go back how they were real fucking quick. It is up to us, as the ones who see what is happening to educate those around us. To filter out the static noise of the internet’s social media. To teach our loved ones that they are being ripped off. Stop buying “smart” tv’s. Teach those around you to only buy dumb tv’s. And if there’s no dumb tv’s on sale, then there’s no tv’s to buy. And if they keep not selling dumb tv’s, you keep not buying. You teach those around you to keep not buying.
This is how you fight the war against the elite. Not with guns, but with wallets that refuse to open. They can’t take our money unless we agree to buy their goods.
But we’ll never get to that point from the sidelines.
That was a staggeringly large number of words relative to the number of things you actually said.
tl;dr: I think I’m just going to press OK on this
EULAwall of text.This is how you fight the war against the elite. Not with guns, but with wallets that refuse to open. They can’t take our money unless we agree to buy their goods.
No, this cannot work. Their wallets are much, much bigger than almost all of ours combined.
Oh ok
We’ve fallen into a world where a persons worth is equal to their net worth. A world where celebrities and ultra rich businessmen are celebrated rather than shunned. Entire genres of music where the sole message is “I have money, therefore bitches fuck me”. And the masses flock to it, because they have adopted that message as their own.
Is this AI? Because it looks like AI… or are people writing like AI now?
Yeah. A moderator of fuck_ai is using ai.
Techgoblin doublespeak should be illegal
What the user sees:
Do you want to use this thing you paid for?
[I agree] [Go into a complicated menu that doesn’t matter]
Yeah, 100% decline anything that asks for personalized anything.
If the question is vague bullshit like this, the answer is “no”.
You should try asking people about the last EULA they read the next time you’re at a party. You’re gonna be blown away.
I personally submitted Hisense’s ACR servers to a popular DNS adblock list that’s used by a lot of products.
And just like that, anyone with a VIDAA TV hiding behind a pi-hole went dark.
We should really make sure every TV gets checked.
I wonder how long it will take until they all start using DoH and conveniently make the TV fail if it’s blocked…
You’d have to block whatever DoH server it’s using. They usually fall back to regular DNS. I’ve found that a Chromecast will use Google DNS, but will fall back to LAN DNS when blocked.
Why can’t you guys take a win? Just say it’s good Texas is doing this
Because the likely outcome will be a shady backroom business deal where they take a cut or just a payoff and you’ll never hear about it again. It’s Texas.
No. The likely outcome is this. I’m going to use fake numbers for the sake of demonstrating a concept.
Samsung spies on you. From the data, they can harvest $500 million dollars throughout Texas tv watchers sending info back to South Korea.
Texas says “Hey! Whoa! You can’t do that! You better stop or we’ll fine you $20,000 dollars!”
Samsung says “Ok”, and keeps doing it. Pays the fine, and takes it to court. They lose the case, but cost Texas $15,000 of court costs just to win. Then they keep doing it.
Now Texas thinks twice about charging the fee, because last time they only got $5,000 after defending themselves in court.
Meanwhile Samsung just views it as the cost of doing business. And carries on.
Angry upvote. This is the case when they are serious about it. See my other comment for how I feel Texas approaches it.
This is the way.
… in almost everything.
It is because of who is running Texas. We don’t believe them. It’s either kabuki, or a means to extract something from the corporations while blowing smoke up our asses.
Because the people making these claims have an extremely consistent record of siding with rich donors instead of their citizens. They lie have a consistent track record of being caught lying. Trust is earned, and Ken Paxton has consistently done the opposite of that.
Because at the same time they’re trying to implement age verification for app stores while also very vaguely defining what an app store is.
The Act defines an “App Store” as “a publicly available Internet website, software application, or other electronic service that distributes software applications from the owner or developer of a software application to the user of a mobile device.”
So… what constitutes a mobile device? Who is an owner/developer? Does github have to implement age verification for mobile devices?
Those Texas MAGAs are just pissed they didn’t think of it first. Give them a bribe, they’ll go away.
guess samsung didn’t pay their bribe on time.
I’m surprised Texas is doing the right thing here
Manipulating stocks and extorting companies?
This is a shakedown nothing more. Same as the Tylenol causes autism things last month.
How is this equivalent? Unless ACR is not actually violating anything and truly harmless, I don’t think this is equivalent at all.
Because this is a shakedown, its has NOTHING to do with actually stopping the ACR privacy invasion. At no point will Texas actually do anything to stop the issue. They simple telling those companies to pay them off.
I’d actually prefer a dumb TV, we only use jellyfin anyway and that could be served by some raspy or similar. But they’re extinct it seems. At least modern ones with 4 or 8k.
I hate this dumbing down of everything.
Yes, I couldn’t find one when my old LG from 2012 died. I did not activate wifi, added TV antenna. I already have Chromecast TV so I’m tracked enough, thanks.
Really sad. We could even save a good portion of bucks due to all the shit noone needs. I can only imagine the crap pre-installed on Samsung TVs or other of those horrible bloat-brands.
Sceptre
Best Buy Insignia series are dumb. At least the three 40 inch ones I have.
Non USA here, so no best buy. Got a google-tv now with basically nothing on it, heavy firewalling that device off and using only jellyfin. I hate it but…
Thats good to know… before finding out about that just now, I thought Scepter was the only brand left that made dumb TVs.
Smart TV is such bs.
At home we have a computer monitor connected to raspberry pi which can do literally every type of content including games while running pi-hole and device backups in the background, VPN included. Ain’t nobody tracking my family…
Ain’t nobody tracking my family…
Wrongthink detected, employing field-agents.
^/s
Rare Ken Paxton win.
Something something about a broken clock being right twice a day.
Ken Paxton saying or doing something reasonable and/or beneficial is more like finding a random page torn out from a page-a-day calendar and having it be the right day and date but from a different year
Literally 1984
Mass surveillance system? Yes, of course. That’s the whole point. Tracking and profiling you to charge more for ads.
Lmao these smart TVs are basically the screens in the book 1984, in every house.
Does this dude just eat lead paint everyday
Yes, but he’s very much correct here. Paint-eating clock syndrome.
He probably just realised his TV now knows about all the feral porn he’s been watching and is in damage control.
Do YouTube next. Do websites next.
Websites have already been „done“ by the GDPR and the companies just implemented the measures with a clear malicious intent, bullying their users into compliance and blaming the horrible cookie banners they implemented on the EU.
Well I mean, it was implemented about as well as California Prop 65, which had the effect of printing “This product contains chemicals known in the state of California to cause cancer” on literally everything ever made.
Yeah, I was responsible for a moderately high-volume site, and getting it GDPR compliant wasn’t all that much effort. That’s because we’re not scumbags abusing our users’ personal information.
And yeah, the cookie-banners bullshit isn’t required, it was just passive aggression by sites butthurt that they couldn’t intrusively track their users so easily anymore.
