"We Could Get Sued for This" - GamersNexus goes deep with the privacy violations and overreach of modern consumer electronics, including Smart TVs, other devices, and how they record your voice.


Esta entrada fue editada (domingo, 6 de septiembre de 2026, 0:41)
in reply to Kairos

Bit convoluted but the gist of it is this:

as exciting as [thing], which is to say

[very]thing = very

As exciting as very

Very exciting

English is kind of scuffed in that the order of words only sounds correct or not based on how often you've heard it said that way before.

Esta entrada fue editada (domingo, 6 de septiembre de 2026, 19:02)
in reply to DeadEndLink

I have a "smart" TV. It wouldn't let me get past setup until I put it on wifi, so I spun up a hotspot, then immediately killed it and just plugged in a micro PC running Linux to the HDMI port.

Occasionally, I'll sit on the remote and a pop up happens saying I'll need to connect to the Internet for to work, but that's about it.

in reply to plateee

If you watch the video, (oh boy was it long but informative) it likely is still spying on you rampantly and using neighbors as hotspot points to send the data.

Unlike smartphones, they are plugged in so they can just run speech to text (and the TVs that the op had could hear 20m away in other rooms with the mic array) forever. If you sell the TV or something and it ever connects to the internet again, it will likely dump all of that plaintext data corresponding to your physical location.

Esta entrada fue editada (martes, 8 de septiembre de 2026, 8:42)
in reply to ProdigalFrog
in reply to SaveTheTuaHawk

Well... No. And opamp output is fully different than an opamp input. They aren't reversible.

The electronics would have to be specially designed to be a transceiver instead of just a speaker output (I mean, they definitely can do it, it just is more work and more cost)

It would be 10x cheaper just to put a microphone in it.

Esta entrada fue editada (lunes, 7 de septiembre de 2026, 13:51)
in reply to ProdigalFrog

A bit click baity. They won't get sued.

I have some very specific examples where I can prove MS teams is scraping conversations and selling data. Twice I've had meeting about very unusual specific chemical compounds where I was then solicited by synthesis companies within 48hrs.

Don't discuss novel IP on Teams.

But the TV market is highly competitive and they are all basically the same thing (sorry nerds). You would think a truly disconnected TV would be a sales feature at this point. Unless the TV business is not actually about selling you a TV.

Esta entrada fue editada (domingo, 6 de septiembre de 2026, 13:59)
in reply to SaveTheTuaHawk

There's a bunch of products that clearly aren't selling to consumers anymore. Cars were the first one I noticed, about 15-20 years ago. When I was growing up, cars came in an absolute rainbow of colors. Ever since the early '00s, all the colors have disappeared, except corpo friendly colors like white, grey, gold, silver, tan, black, and the occasional blue or red. Almost no green, orange, or yellow cars even exist anymore. The car manufacturers don't care about us consumers buying a single car. They'd rather sell a fleet at a loss of profit per unit, but so many units they don't care.

The same thing is happening to electronics, TV's, and to a certain extent, housing. If you want a "dumb TV," search for a "commercial display panel." You'll pay like 3 times more, but those don't have the intrusive data collection crap.

in reply to SaveTheTuaHawk
Don't discuss novel IP on Teams.


Because my company forces us to use it, and because I know they're both watching every conversation and believe it's kept only within the company, I feel no compunction to keep company secrets off of there.

They had Mattermost set up and working well, but somebody in the C-suite got FOMO.

in reply to hirihit640
The full version wasn't available at the time that I posted it, but it is now: youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA