alt Hacker Newsin the US. My LG TV has put up a giant TOS agreement thing and I can't use any apps until I agree. So I unplugged the ethernet cable and bought an Apple TV. problem solved?
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For now. I wouldn't surprised that if enough people start doing this, they'll just put a cheap cellular modem in the TV. Or find open access points. Or make a deal with Amazon and others to exfiltrate information via a smart home speaker/assistant.
Technical solutions only go so far, at some point you have to put in place a regulatory framework that requires consent. The divergences between US-EU privacy policies, configuration screens, etc. show that the GDPR is slowly starting to do its work.
What LG (and Samsung and all the other electronics companies) are doing is profiling the user to sell targeted advertising. This is technically not personal information, and that's a grey area for those companies when communicating to the public.
People here generally don't like to hear that, but Apple is doing the very same. There's even a study-paper on how they do this without collecting personal information [0]
So when a company yells out how it's not collecting your "personal information", the statement actually doesn't cover what has been discovered here from all I can decipher from this "research"
[0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/learning-with-pri...
> So I unplugged the ethernet cable and bought an Apple TV.
What makes you think the Apple TV is any better? I'd wager that Apple collects just as much telemetry.