alt Hacker NewsThe Koreans are taking a huge risk destroying the trust they've built over the last 30 years with this incessant spying and adware. Both LG and Samsung are engaged in this and it could open the door to Chinese rivals like TCL and HiVision. Not because they're much better but because discoveries like these will leave a bad taste in people's mouth whenever they want to buy a new TV.
They need to put a stop to this or they'll start losing market share fast.
Can this spying and tracking be so lucrative that they'll risk alienating their customers over it?
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Not because they're much better but because discoveries like these will leave a bad taste in people's mouth whenever they want to buy a new TV.
It ain't just TVs. Now that I've found out that my Hyundai is not only spying on me, but snitching to the insurance company, I might just take South Korea companies off my list for anything.
This spying is even more prevelant in Korean cars, too. Really sad, because they can be a decent enough product (no worse than any other cheap car) but they are very anti consumer and burning their reputation.
If all this is true, I'd also like to see some serious jail time for those guys that thought this was a good idea. Losing market share should be least of their worries.
99.99999999% of consumers will not notice any difference
> Not because they're much better
they actually are much better if you have a limited budget
How is this not a gigantic fine from the EU for some kind of GDPR reason
You mean THIS TCL? https://ads.tcl.com/
Or THIS Hisense? https://nexxen.com/acr-data/
They all use Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) and collect profiling data to feed into an Ad service offering.
Samsung started this and is now a leading supplier for targeted advertising on TVs (because old serialized TV doesn't have such an option), this is forcing all the brands to follow and do the same, because:
#A: it creates a revenue stream based on active devices (like Apple/Google has), not just at the time of sales, and
#B: their business partners now demand it (big electronics chains won't sell a TV which will affect their targeted ad promotions)
It would be much more valuable to have proper journalists (sorry) to write an investigative report on this whole Ad-targeting industry, to create pressure not just on some TV-vendors but on all home appliances (including cable-company set-top-boxes, which do exactly the same btw).
The only way out of this is to increase public pressure to the point that a regulation (a LAW!) is drafted and enforced.