I think that's great. Unless you have a shitty internet connection with data caps it should not be an issue.
On a more fundamental note, I think it's pretty ridiculous that every apartment in the building I live in runs its own wifi network, screaming at the top of its lungs to be heard in the noise.
Well, having a bathroom in each apartment could also be seen as a total waste of space and water, just as wifi is, but there are good reasons why people prefer having their own reserved resources and privacy - in both cases.
You do realize that wifi uses a shared medium and each network only lets one device send at once? If one device is transmitting then all other devices must cease transmitting or they interfere with the radio signals. Having more 5Ghz short range networks is a good thing.
It's the same thing with 5G. More cells, less range.
"when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB"
Given that it's US-only, where most internet plans have pretty high caps, it's hard for me to get upset about this. I would have expected my Echoes alone to use more than that during normal monthly operation, playing music, fetching news, etc.
I’d expect data caps to be some of the worst in the US. Poorer countries had their internet infrastructure put in much more recently. That said, I also suspect you can’t just look at mean (average) speed to get a feel for that.
My main concern with sharing like this isn't the bandwidth usage, but what happens when someone abuses the connection (downloading/sharing child porn as an example).
I don't want anything to do with it if there's even the slightest chance I'd end up on the hook for someone else's crimes.
My understanding is that you aren’t sharing a general connection to the internet, you’re specifically letting Amazon devices tunnel some data back to Amazon’s parent servers. You’d also likely have a pretty good case against Amazon if using their product as directed caused your trouble with the po po
Ah right, so this is more of service channel that Amazon devices can use to connect Amazon HQ? That's not so bad then, but the headline is pretty click-baity.
> The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.
Seems this is not about guest hotspots or the like, but a separate network for Amazon devices.
Or if you're a TV maker with an agreement with Amazon to use this network, it's enough to send content-based media identification information - which report on what is shown on the screen (whether broadcast, cable, stream or game).
I recently changed from 1 gbps fiber to mobile hotspot due to a remote work setup, and … blew through 30GB on the iOS 14.5 and MacOS patch day.*
After that, the flagship Unlimited 5G Verizon hotspot is limited to 600 kbps up or down. (Granted, 600 kbps would have been amazing in 1997 so it’s a good reminder of the mess we web devs have made of bandwidth.)
Presumably they’re figuring people with limited bandwidth don’t use Echo/Alexa? Because it doesn’t seem like they figure that from the materials.
* For anyone running a formerly wired household off a physical hotspot device, I suggest enabling (a) Mac Mini or Macbook to cache and reshare Apple updates to the household, or Windows Update Delivery Optimization, (b) turning off Windows, MacOS/iOS and Xbox updates and running the initial update downloads through a T-Mobile Magenta Max plan on family phones (each phone gets 50GB or 150GB per phone for $10 more), then use the cache or local Network Transfer to propogate to other devices. This keeps the physical hotspot dedicated to normal traffic, not slammed by unexpected OS, app, or game updates.
Parent comment is not kidding: it may be both the worst and best option.
Based on extended discussions with Verizon and T-Mobile management (office execs, not store reps or call reps), this appears to be the only reliable option available to a non-enterprise customer.
Well known flat rate unlimited rural internet resellers of "red", "pink", and "blue" categorically stop working after "abuse" with a threshold set below normal usage that would keep a family online despite software updates (even w/o streaming!).
As a large enough enterprise, I could buy a "data pool" for the firm to get zero rated no throttle for our device fleet. When you hear raves from colleagues about Verizon hotspots, they may be enjoying this -- I sure do for legit work use. But this isn't technically ethical for individuals, and the companies won't offer it to an LLC or S-Corp with just a few lines.
So, with VZ, for example, by getting 4 hotspots configured the same and putting them on rotation, you end up spending about the same per month ($240/mo) as an enterprise hotspot, to get sufficient capacity for normal household software and game updates.
That would really only happen if you are in an area with lots of devices connecting to your Echo(s) constantly. In reality, you're gonna see that Sidewalk bandwidth taken sporadically. If you're in a rural area, you'll probably never see any traffic from it.
TBH the title is a bit misleading. Amazon plans to use your internet for API calls related to its devices, similar to Apple’s Find My network. I’m more curious about the location sharing bit.
Ah there, another one falling for Apple marketing.
FAAG are all companies that want to make the maximum of money from their current market positioning, assets and brand.
There is no inherent ethics in any of these companies.
The moment Apple doesn't grow on iPhones/apps and see selling customer payment data as a significat add to revenue, they will sell all your data as every other company. Tim is no more ethical than Mark or Larry or Jeff.
The way companies act right now is the way that maximizes their current profit. Rolling out privacy measures on iOS hurts Amazon, Google, Facebook and helps Apples brand, that's the reason Apple does it. And if this changes - e.g. the app store gets decentralized or regulated or people understand they don't need to pay 30% to Apple for a web application - Apple will stop it in a second without any second thought and find new revenue streams, e.g. selling your data.
> There is no inherent ethics in any of these companies.
Didn't say that. Said they had a much better track record.
AirTags launched with clear consideration to privacy issues, like a stalker dropping one in your bag. They appear to have thought this out well. The recent anti-tracking changes to iOS that Facebook is squealing about are another point in their favor for me.
Are they my friend? No. Are their interests currently better aligned with mine? It would seem so.
I'm referring to the more recent iOS 14 changes, especially that it defaults to "no tracking, don't even prompt" - users have to specifically turn on a "let apps ask me" setting to even get a prompt.
As I've said, the track isn't important, the current market positioning is. Apple will not care about what they did in the past if their market position and positioning is changing.
Yes, my point is you can simultaneously be aware that Apple can or will screw you in the future, but also choose to place more trust in Apple compared to Amazon at the present time.
You can't just swap the words without changing the analysis of what the resulting sentence means. Yes, the reaction to this is different if it's an Apple product vs. an Amazon product, because the two companies are different.
Two privacy vulnerabilities are worse than one. If I buy an Echo, I may well be aware what I'm getting into and accept the risk of an always-on voice assistant, but do not want the additional risk of that assistant sharing my Internet connection.
To proxy someone else’s use of your own network, use which you (generic ‘you’) may not know is happening in the first place because not everyone reads Hacker News or the EULA?
> however if someone does something illegal with it that'll still trace back to my IP and police will kick down my door, correct?
This is a big concern with all the major "public WIFI" systems like this one and others such as Comcast's Xfinity WiFi and it's pretty much never actually true.
For actual Wi-Fi provided by an ISP, the public network will usually come out of a completely different IP (your modem will internally have 2 IPs, or tunnel the public network's traffic straight into the ISP's infrastructure and it will only talk to the public internet from there with a different IP).
For this one, I'm not sure if this is even IP-based at all and allows access to the internet. Seems like all it allows is to talk to Amazon (using some proprietary protocol) and offers no access to the outside internet anyway.
on the contrary, if all the devices do that, then you have plausible deniability. they can no longer pin anything on you because it could be a neighbor or even someone out on the street.
the details depend on the country i guess, but at least in some countries there needs to be evidence that it was you before they can do anything.
there was a case where someone was approached for sharing movies. as soon as the authorities found out that this was an airbnb they backed off because they could no longer pin the act on the owner.
Plausible deniability doesn't actually mean anything unless your highly-paid lawyer (you're rich, right?) can convince the judge. The scenario where some random stranger does an illegal thing on your network by hijacking Amazon's network is a bit far-fetched compared to the most common obvious case (you did it), so you'll have to work hard to convince them that's the actual explanation.
Please don’t support Amazon from creating another network-effect product that creates vendor lock-in, and privacy issues. Convenience should not be the end-all goal, as the ad blatantly states, but instead interoperability and open-protocols.
> Convenience is way too alluring for the general public
Despite being technically-savvy, and ready to hack away at systems for max configuration; I too prefer convenience for a lot of things. That’s the magic of modern life, you can save time on so many “complicated” things.
For me at some point it became an insight that I don’t always want “faster” or even “simpler” , most things are simple enough already that I don’t need to trade privacy, security, speed or even a nice discount for that latest and greatest product that’s actually just a new sales channel disguised as a product or app.
I feel like you’re making a tangential observation, rather than a direct response to the concept of “convenience” being useful in modern life.
Anyways, could you provide some concrete examples of products where you were able to obtain such privacy and security guarantees with minimal friction?
I usually research any product where it comes from, who owns it, what is the angle of the company. In a way that is convenience to me nowadays. Recently I bought a 3d app, and I first checked what the company did, how did it treat its customers. What does its actions look like? This is kind of my standard procedure these days.
I'd wager that at face value most of the public wouldn't want their neighbors sharing internet, if only for the liability risk (who wants to find out the hard way their neighbors kid was downloading kiddie porn)
I dont know how i feel about this comment. It's almost as if there's the perception that the general public are a bunch of robots/sheep incapable of making their own decisions. I can sympathize with that perspective but need to draw the line and believe that people have a choice. Perhaps I'm being too naive.
If we look beyond Amazon, Apple has basically built their entire business model under the guise of "convenience." It's so convenient that you never will leave their ecosystem. If/when you attempt to leave, they'll make it so painful that you'll give up in frustration.
I generally agree, but on the other hand, from a consumer perspective IoT devices have and continue to be particularly inconvenient. After 15 or so years of IoT devices, what do we have that resembles interoperability or open protocols? Maybe Zigbee? Instead, it seems that each IoT device is a one-off effort by a very small team, and that networking is the part where you cross your fingers, close your eyes, and hold your nose throughout the processes of connecting and diagnosing connectivity issues.
There are a few companies that have "closed" systems that are nonetheless extremely easy to integrate into something like Home Assistant, or anything else. Lutron, for example, exposes a Telnet port on their (pro) hub that you can connect to and issue plain text commands. Sure, open standards are always better, but I'll take documented local control as a pretty close second.
For who? Even as a tech savvy person, that is ALL I want. I used to tinker around with home projects, nowadays I want things that work with no fuss. I don't want to play IT support desk for my family, I want their stuff to work.
Convenience is exactly what people want who don't understand technology but want to use it for benefit.
You did just say that convenience is ALL you want... and many of the most convenient tech products these days (e.g. Kindles, Ring doorbells, Facebook, internet-connected TVs, smartphone apps, etc) are not so great for people who value privacy.
If we lived in an world where the most convenient products also protected users' privacy then maybe we wouldn't be having this quibble.
Convenience isn't a goal, per se. It's a by-product of sorts. When things work and are intuitive, they're very convenient. Economically, it can be useful to design many things this way.
A good doorknob is ready-at-hand: it's just about invisible to me until it breaks and, suddenly, it's present and bright in my mind. I've been in the woods and become unsafe: everything around becomes suddenly, viscerally present. That's not a feeling I want often. But individual things I attend to (like watching what I eat or trying to ID a bird by its song) make the world much more colorful, and make me feel more a part of it. Plus, as the comments here suggest, immediate convenience can lead to downstream perils (e.g. in terms of data collection).
I love how insidious Amazon are with their products, get the hardware into their homes then just change what it does to what you want. What you didn't read the EULA in the last update?
The latest Firestick software update is a great example of this. The new UI/UX aggressively de-prioritizes apps from content producers in favor of a "feed" that lets them push their own content and intermediate content producers from their customers. They even go as far as to deliberately hide your saved items/watch next items three levels deep in a menu.
They are not alone in this. Google has switched their UI/UX in the same manner. I haven't used Apple TV in a few years but when I last did they were headed in the same direction. Roku is likely not far behind in doing the same.
Apple has made some moves in that direction, but they have a dedicated button on the remote that takes you directly to your queue (for streaming apps that support Apple's unified queue, which is all the major streamers with the notable exception of Netflix).
That said, their UI for recommendations has gotten worse. You'd get some ML-driven suggestions pulled only from services you've marked as connected and don't need to pay extra to access, but they've pushed that set of recommendations further down the interface over time, offering up a combination of paid content, first-party content, and curated content in the mix as well, with no heed paid to what you already subscribe to.
Honestly, one of the side effects of this sort of thing, and the splintering of streaming services into on-line cable bills, is that what used to be hard to find movies and tv episodes are no longer hard to find to add to my home collection. So that's a positive, I guess.
This is one of the reasons why I've always been fascinated by people who claim Amazon has a customer focus. It is impossible to get what you awant from Amazon. If you go to Amazon they are going to make sure you get what they want to give you. You're going to watch the content they make, buy the white label goods they produce and click the adverts they put in front of you. It is the most customer hostile company I've ever seen.
"Customer-focus" means focusing on customer satisfaction.
There are many ways to make a person happy at the point of purchase: price, delivery speed, meeting expectations, etc.
In this manner a casino is also customer-focused.
The sense of "hostile" you're using supposes that customers are satisfied in cases where their long-term interests are being harmed.. and, indeed. This is where governments tend to step in.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the benefits of running software you create on your own (for example a forth kernel is conceptually easy to write and build from there) because of how it contrasts your own wishes for what you want your devices to do vs the company or person whose software you merely use, especially when automatic updates are involved. (Also applies to javascript on web pages vs. plain data/documents which you can view with your own software or at least software that works the way you want it to.)
Absolutely I always seen open source projects as a nice advantage but now I am starting to realise open source is a necessity. If I have access to the code and I hate an update I can roll back or change it. The past 10 years its felt like any new tech you have to just accept as your new over lord or exclude yourself from our technological society, theres no middle ground.
Amazon's just keeping up with the Jones. I.e. when I updated Win10 recently it very un-helpfully installed some new videoconferencing app that can't easily be removed. The only helpful advice from MS is how to hide the app from the taskbar so you no longer notice its there. Such BS!!
This is a blatant attempt at using their market power to gain a dominant position in IoT connectivity by creating a parallel Network where Net Neutrality does not apply. If this succeeds, only Amazon approved devices will be allowed on this global Network connecting only to aws provided services thereby establishing a monopoly on non-cellular IoT connectivity.
After Apples recent move in the same direction with their „find my“ mesh network of apple devices being used to introduce a whole new mode of operation to support their Air Tags the Question of Net Neutrality has to be extended from just ISPs to Dominant Platforms that have the ability to create derivative Mesh-Networks.
I can't help but feel that this is only a net neutrality issue because we've already given up on letting people freely choose what kind of mesh-networks (if any) their devices get to participate in.
The customer isn't the last say in what is good for a society or economy, if Amazon puts a moat around IoT that's thousands of companies, products, employees, and unknown innovation all either gone completely or sucked up into Amazon.
How does this put a moat around IoT? This is creating a network that didn't previously exist. How does that hurt innovation? If you don't want to be a part of this network you can just... continue what you were doing before. Now at least there is an option.
It's really not that hard. The user loses freedoms because of technology monocultures and Amazons move will further facilitate a whole television market that semi-covertly spies on the user.
It really is that hard. Technology monoculture? This is built on the back of existing networks, which will continue to exist when this new network is online.
Your Smart TV already spies on you. Not sure how this helps.
I’m not sure a parallel can be drawn to the Find My network. That one is purely designed for location tracking in an anonymous way, and does not have the ability to transfer data between devices or any other type of tracking.
AirTags come with UWB as well as Bluetooth. There's no real reason why they couldn't pass messages along. Firstly, AirTags that come within reach of one another. An Apple version of Nest could do the same, and would supercharge the FindMy network.
Once these systems are accepted they often get upgraded without significant reconsideration.
You're right but it is pushing their advantage from the phone sector onto another and forcing out their competition in Tile. That sounds to me like monopolistic activity.
In fact literally anyone and anything can use the Find My network if they want. Apple can’t stop “rogue” devices from connecting to it without bricking AirTags.
Unless Find My supports Tile hardware being able to simultaneously connect to both Find My and Tile's own network by default, this access is a Sophie's choice for Tile:
- If their hardware only connects to Find My, then the Tile network (and Android phones specifically) will have fewer connection points available, making the devices less attractive to Android users who will not have access to Find My.
- If their hardware only connects to the Tile network, then their tracker hardware is less attractive to iOS users, who have the larger Find My network available.
If Tile is able to ship hardware (or adapt their existing hardware) to connect to both networks by default, this sidesteps the issue entirely, since it'll work both with cross-platform hardware and take advantage of the first-party tracking network. And the ability to do so by default is hugely important here: putting something behind a toggle will effectively kill its adoption, and will have knock-on network effects.
As far as I’m aware nothing stops them from doing just that. You’ve got the dynamics right, but the hardware is not the problem, it’s the app.
They want iOS users to download the Tile app instead of using the native Find My. If they don’t, coverage will be severely degraded for Android users as you mention.
The hardware is just a dumb emitter. Fixing this would require either:
1. The Find My api to be available on Android, so phones can track and locate tags
2. Find My on iOS uploads tag data to a third party service of the users’ choice
The latter is absolutely unlikely as it exposes user data defeating all of the privacy guarantees Apple developed. #1 is more likely but still a long shot.
At what point is a business making decisions for its own interest not a problem?
We always criticism big companies for their market position. Where is the line drawn between big enough to be successful but not big enough to be unfair player using existing business to leapfrog into other areas?
It seems we are quick to point a finger but its never qualified. We just think "x is big, x is doing y, x is being unfair."
These are private LANs. They don't own a public network. It will piggyback on your home ISP. I'm pretty sure this is just to simplify IoT network discovery
There won't be a monopoly on non-cellular IoT connectivity though. There are a ridiculous number of IoT networks out there whether it's Sigfox or some other LoRaWAN solution and more are being built by the day.
I would be curious to know what kind of consumer response Amazon anticipates from this. Are consumer privacy, security and freedom factors that were considered in Amazon's decision making process when developing this product?
I know it's not in the spirit of discussion on Hacker News, however I feel I must just add the rhetorical remark: "Is everyone else concerned yet?"
It's a real shame that human selfishness means everyone has to have their own mini WiFi point rather than all sharing.
I wish the 2.4Ghz band had some kind of "at least half the bandwidth of any network connection over 2.4Ghz must be available for use by any member of the public, for free".
That would effectively be the licensing cost for your use of the WiFi band - you use up bandwidth in 2.4Ghz, but provide for free bandwidth to the internet for other people to use.
Only "not true" if there is some evidence it is not true. I looked at the sibling link and found this:
>> Will opening my network make me liable for others' illegal actions? +
>> This one is a bit more complicated, but the short answer is, "We don't think so." Click here to find out more.
"dont think so" is not convincing. Also not convincing is the broken link on the "Click here to find out more."
I dont think this should be treated lightly -- there is no reason to assume that openly sharing an internet connection is safe given the consequences of illegal use.
That problem is of our own making by giving the government the power to assume IP Location == Probable cause.
That problem is easily solved (in the US at least) by enacting more stringent 4th amendment protections for people and more properly limiting the governments police powers. This should be done anyway regardless of the proposed suggestions about public wifi
Well if the law required each AP provide half the bandwidth for public use, you can bet every AP would have firewalling built in and a public/private split.
Just like the LTE network typically has firewalling between users, and stories of peoples phones being hacked via LTE are very rare.
I'm using my neighbor's wifi (with his consent). It feels silly that every apartment in a building has its own wifi, I can receive at least 8 wifi networks from my laptop
There are very legitimate reasons for not sharing networks, eg: security, not having latency/throughput issues when others are using the network.
And personally I would need a wired connection anyway, so having a wifi network built in to the network switch isn't really a big deal, since the fiber is to the apartment.
There are also very legit reasons for sharing networks - the cost of sharing a connection is much less than everyone having their own connection.
Two community-owned wifi connections are more reliable than one individually-owned cabled connection.
ISPs have lobbied for everyone to stop sharing their own connections by over-stating the risks (rather than mitigating them), enabling password protection by default, and allowing risk to the owner to be encoded in law.
And yet, ISPs are now taking some part of each connection for themselves. That's a problem.
We could instead share our connections in a community-owned way.
Yes I know, my father is a doctor, and he's required to own his own and private internet access. But in general, vast majority of cases we don't have those requirements, nor need exceptional speed
i feel the same and would like to see buildings get connected as a whole paid by part of the utility billing or similar. something akin to how central heating is paid for.
So, if I buy a so called Smart-TV (not because I like it but because traditional ones are getting harder to find) but don't set up it on my home network so it can't phone home, it could scan around anyway and find other open devices more than willing to participate in my personal data exfiltration?
If the Amazon project succeeds, I would expect in a few months most home devices manufacturers, to partner to implement it so they have a way to circumvent users choices.
That move is just one step further in removing control. They now have sealed devices that can have who knows what functions but are confined to the network. Next step is to have a concealed upstream. After that they will somehow get a legal mandate to force such devices on you (like the EU did with cars). Maybe they will use smoke detectors or "emergency" services. In the end, this is exactly like in 1984.
Less 1984 and more Fahrenheit 451. There is no central authority imposing this to exert control on the masses: consumers are imposing it on themselves willingly and industry is just giving them what they want. Juvenal redux.
TVs without smart features used to be priced like TVs still are now; the one I'm still using cost me something like $300 several years ago.
Those commercial displays are priced for businesses to afford. It's not something the average consumer is going to reasonably buy - especially not lower-income people.
(As an aside, it's fucked that the cheaper devices that low-income people can afford are always the ones with the most surveillance.)
This is similar to saying, if you don't want to be filmed in the street move to a private island. Doesnt solve the problem for most people. Brands don't care about the few exceptions that know their dark side. What they care about is that tens of millions don't.
The existence of "reasonable alternatives" is largely irrelevant. Firefox is a reasonable alternative to Chrome, and yet very few of the people I tell about Chrome's tracking switch - they just don't care. Same for Protonmail/Gmail, iOS/Android, Linux/Windows (yeah, yeah, not everything runs on Windows - nobody I know will even attempt to dual-boot and do what they can on Linux), dumb/smart TVs (yes, reasonable dumb TVs exist - the Spectres, most notably). This is a willingness issue, not a lack of reasonable alternatives, in the majority (not all) of markets.
I don’t remember much backstory in 1984 for how the surveillance state came to be, but I think it’s totally plausible that a government could co-opt this self-imposed setup and use it for 1984-style control.
So armed Amazon goons kicking down your door and bringing you to the dungeons of the Ministry of Customer Obsession to be tortured with fake cattle prod knockoffs?
You are legally obliged to install a smart meter, smart smoke detector and smart heating control in your home. If you rent, your landlord will install these things. If you own the authorities will inspect the presence and operation of these devices and fine you if you don't comply.
All these devices will be offered by companies like amazon. Coincidentally, amazon lobbyists shape the laws that make these things mandatory.
I don't think they have to make it mandatory, all they have to do is remove all the other choices. Simple to do if you have amazon or google amounts of money. Politicians are surprisingly cheap but they aren't as reliable as narrowing customer choice behind a mask of competition. Once the barrier to entry is lifted sufficiently high the job is done.
Mandatory installation comes 3-5 years after insurance discounts for smart smoke detectors or whatever, to prod the last few hold-outs into "compliance".
"We find that tracking the smoke levels inside a house using the smart fire detectors gives firefighters an early warning system. For the safety of your pets and your children, who may not know how to use 911 or may not have a phone they can reach, and since you don't have a landline they can use, we are requiring all houses to be equipped with a FireProtection 2.0 capable smoke alarm."
I would get worried when the FAANG companies start buying insurance businesses. Since a lot of have "smart speakers" and mobile phones listening to us and whatnot lying about our houses we installed voluntarily, lobbying for something like this seems completely unnecessary.
I really think the fears of government over-reach are something that has receded into the past. We didn't need to be forced into a surveillance society, we willingly paid for and installed it ourselves in exchange for "likes" and "upvotes" and being able to discuss big budget TV shows in real time with our fake internet friends.
Big brother turned out to be our dopamine circuits.
> You are legally obliged to install a smart meter, smart smoke detector and smart heating control in your home
If that's all they do, what's the problem here? All three have big and direct positives for everyone ( you, your home, your community) - a smart heating control saves energy ( climate catastrophe incoming, so could be useful), a smart smoke detector can alert the fire department if smoke is ongoing for more than X time, and a smart meter can be used to accurately predict, distribute, reduce and bill energy consumption. And if they all stay in their lane, there aren't many privacy downsides.
Edit: I'd appreciate a response to go with the downvotes and tell me what i'm missing
Which is why i explicitly qualified that the smart stuff in question should only be smart to do its job ( e.g. a smoke detector to alarm you and the fire department, not to have a microphone and camera to spy on you), like the French smart electric meters, which only report consumption to the utility ans nothing else.
Except even if they can only do that, it's still possible to spy on the consumer's habits through their electricity consumption. What time do they sleep, are they really sick at home or did they they leave town, are they on holiday,...
And since they are connected to the internet, they're vulnerable to hacks, so this information could not only get into the hands of governments and energy companies, but all kinds of random people.
Btw in reality it's much worse than that. Many of the smart smoke detectors have microphones in them, which is a really smart idea. Sometimes companies even "forget" to tell the victims, er... I mean users about it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/googles-nest-securit...
What you are missing is the motivation of the seller. The company is not interested in making your house a safer place and helping you living your life. Instead they want your data. And they want your data to essentially extract more money from you. This setup sees you as an obstacle that needs to be overcome and it is just a short step to sell that data to a third party. And no one, repeat: absolutely fucking no one, that collects your data clandestinely is doing this because they think you would agree with their motives. In the end, they always want to get an advantage over you.
And nobody is talking about a company, the whole premise was that there's a mandate to have a smart meter/smoke detector/etc.; if that were to happen, it isn't a company selling you something for their interest, it's a government telling you to get something for everyone's interest.
E.g. in France the smart electric meters are mandatory ( they don't belong to you but the utility in the first place), and are of a specific type that does nothing but collect electric consumption. I'm sure that if it were left to a private company there'd be a microphone or two just in case, but that really isn't the scenario we're talking about.
Do the amazon knock off cattle prods hurt more or less than genuine ones? Like, do they just not work? Are they just bricks in boxes? Or do they instantly cause death? I’m joking, but I go through this logic each time I regrettably make an amazon purchase: what’s the knock-off failure mode. Vitamins? Heavy metal poisoning. No go. Pens? They don’t write well. Acceptable for amazon purchase.
You jest, but all I'm thinking about is just how unpolluted the 2.4GHz spectrum would be if everybody's house had a built-in Faraday cage, and how nice that would be...
And as long as the faraday cage wasn't in interior walls, wifi would work really well on 2.4 inside your house, with such a nice low noise floor. You'd need it though, since cell service would be rather poor.
Coming soon, YouTube video guides on how to locate the rf ICs on the motherboard of your smart tv, and take a Dremel cutting disk to the section of the PCB that has the copper traces for the antenna.
There is nothing stopping TV manufacturers from putting a 3/4G modem in their products. The billing is likely insignificant compared to the value of the data they can exfiltrate.
I figure that this scenario is all but inevitable at this point. Most people just don't care -- and those that do can go live in Faraday cages like weirdos.
Our only recourse at this point are very strict laws that require all devices that do this to periodically and very explicitly state they are doing so, also providing the option to turn the 'feature' off.
The important part then is that failure to comply needs to result in personal liability for retailers, distributors and manufacturers.
That second part is the one that will probably never come true but it is the only thing that would bring any sort of meaningful change.
I disagree... can you honestly tell me that you absolutely require to have an Amazon device? Or a smart TV?
I can understand if they were putting microphones into the electrical sockets when your house was being built... you need to have electricity.
The solution is don't fucking buy the items... when they see a drop in sales, even a few percent, they'll take notice. Or, god forbid, get your old TV repaired!
Mandating that the government steps in is crazy... we're talking about governments that are paid, openly, by lobbyists from these organisations.
Repair is not always possible.. Consider a TV with a shattered panel. You'll have to depend on the manufacturer to make this party available, which usually they won't because they'd much rather sell you a new one.
I don't think there's anything wrong with government regulations. Yes they listen to lobbies too much but it's a different issue that should also be addressed.
Amazon Sidewalk has a huge radius, so many people's neighbors likely have these devices. So if _any_ of your devices talk to them, you have no control even if you don't have an amazon device.
I own amazon devices (none that have sidewalk) but if my neighbors came to me and told me to remove them for their privacy. I'd probably laugh them to the door. I live in a building with 500 units, and its almost 100% chance that i'm within sidewalk range (I also live near to the alexa office in seattle so there's that too).
Point is: You can't control your neighbors.
Not everyone can afford to or wants to move to the middle of no where such that their neighbors are out of radio distance.
Your comment is less facetious when you realize how many people (including tech-savvy ones like Zuckerberg) put a piece of tape over their laptop cameras. Yet, the industry doesn't care.
I mean, sure, but my TomTom 5000 which I bought like 8 years ago for £200 has a sim card that works worldwide, I've used it all over Europe, briefly in North America and in Martinique, it just has seamless GSM connection wherever you go. If a small satnav manufacter can produce such a device for £200 and clearly afford to pay the subscription fees for nearly a decade(I don't pay anything for having this) then I think it's literally a matter of time until we start seeing this in TVs.
There's a lot of carriers around the world, yes, but they're often "subcontractors" to some of the bigger ones like T-Mobile and Vodafone, which often operate a network covering a whole country. Those are more than happy to offer a long term data contract for purposes like this.
I tried that on my LG tv. The result was a 60 second timeout before I could use the tv when turning it on.
I ended up figuring out how to factory reset it and then never set up the wifi. No firmware update, but I don’t care since I only want a dumb monitor.
fwiw you can often update the firmware via USB anyway—not sure about LG specifically but Samsung TVs support this. It's often worth updating the firmware as, like a lot of software these days, it sometimes ships half-broken.
My advice: connect it to a restricted network, where it can successfully ping home and assert internet connectivity, but everything else (except maybe updates or whatever you want to allow) just fails.
A better, more useful approach is to have a DNS server on the home network (something like a pi hole), where all analytics go nowhere, Youtube isn't capable of downloading ads, etc., but you can still use the smart TV features you want. IIRC some TVs have internal DNS servers and only use those, so an ARP spoofing may be also needed.
“Smart devices” have been trying to phone home for awhile now. I don’t have any stats or research to cite, but my own evidence from reverse-engineering TVs and other IOT devices.
I suspect the business motivation by Amazon is to become the “middleman” between these devices and the manufacture.
Amazon is known to sell the ring data, i suspect this could give amazon more data that they can sell and make more money. It is almost like a mesh tracking in a neighborhood if this is enabled.
I think amazon might be more focused on owning the middleware for smart home devices to improve the features available (compared to say zigbee) and improve the experience... and sell chips to device makers for $$
My answer is a home projector. It’s not 4K but it’s cheap and puts out a great display. It’s also just a projector without any applications or network access.
This is the route i went (though admittedly mostly by accident), unfortunately do have a "smart AV receiver/amp" but the functionality there's too convenient for me to kill all networking.
If i had to buy a TV now I'd avoid a smart one like the plague.
Yeah but the instant you plug in a chromecast to watch netflix or disney+ they got you. Blu rays are drying up at an alarming rate, at least it feels that way.
That tracking is limited by account and/or access device. It is not bound to the display. I use a Roku and who knows what data they share with the channel providers, but at this time I doubt they are giving unfettered network access, outside of content request/response, to the channel providers.
I think I can accept the tracking Chromecast does when I stream Netflix through it. I have it behind a remote switch so that Chromecast only gets electricity while I'm watching something, then it just gets switched off again.
Or am I underestimating the tracking Chromecast is doing?
100%. We just got a sceptre from walmart. Stupid big for the price, great picture, and did I mention the low price. Oh, and not one smart feature; just television with various inputs.
I haven't TV shopped in literal decades. It astounded me that there was (a) a market for more advertising on your television via smart features, and (b) seemingly low-end models are the only ones that are available as 'dumb'. Other manufacturers have regular tv's, but they are never available, and cost as much as the smart versions. The whole thing is weird.
Low end TVs also skimp on HDMI ports. I didn't think of this, purchased a cheap LG (with only 2) and then had to buy an HDMI hub. Obviously still cheaper than paying $2-400 more on the TV itself, but next I'm I'll count the ports.
Compared to any OLED, they're just as good. A bit bright, but everything else is solid. The speakers are what are often complained about, in that they're small and not that loud. Ours is loud enough that we keep it on 7 (out of like 50? I've never gone above 10) for a room that is 14'x28'.
A faraday cage around a TV kind of defeats the point. Although it would improve some films a great deal :-)
I think this has to get sorted out in the wash with regulation. If you collect data about someone, it needs to be treated at HIPPAA levels of paranoia. That just makes so much of this rubbish go away.
It might increase the costs of TVs. Certainly there are many areas of global markets that have incredible deep tech that just are not seeing expected market pricing.
(Off topic but eye-tests. In the UK there are branches dedicated to performing a medical test by post-graduate trained operators, for token cost, just so they can upsell me on expensive frames. I mean I would rather pay for the eye test and buy online.)
Edit: I was wrong. Please disregard this comment. Someone links the comment below. And the sub thread that I remember being removed appears to still be present.
——
I commented the other week about enjoying my LG oled smart tv. Someone mentioned what about the evesdropping. (Which I’m aware of) and it started a small thread of people discussing that. These replies were removed about 24-48 hours later. I found it odd the comments about smart TVs evesdropping were removed. So I’m commenting to bookmark this, and see if this discussion is also removed.
Removed from HN? I have some doubts. It’s not impossible but I don’t think HN’s reputation would survive if they’re removing comments in service to … anyone else.
Edit: this[1] looks like what you’re talking about. Has anything been removed (by HN) from this conversation?
That’s a great move and I applaud you and also I wonder whether LG would start disabling TVs unable to get their requests through if they noticed a critical mass of them doing that.
As well as this, there are simple ways around things like pihole. Such as DNS over HTTP or even just hardcoding IPs as a fallback. I expect these to become more common as usage of pihole and similar methods increase.
They probably wouldn't be allowed to disable the basic functionality of the TV, at least not without marketing it as "online only TV", which wouldn't look good (your internet may fail, or you may want it in a place without internet). LG will disable your "smart features" if you refuse the EULA. But that's actually the optimistic and desired outcome.
The undesirable outcome is that they just hardcode some IPs or DNS in which case PiHole would be of no use. At best you could create a NAT port forward to redirect DNS requests to the PiHole, assuming it's not DoH.
And the worst case scenario is if they build in 5G connection and take the whole connectivity aspect out of your control.
> they just hardcode some IPs or DNS in which case PiHole would be of no use. At best you could create a NAT port forward to redirect DNS requests to the PiHole, assuming it's not DoH.
The idea is that you'll need more than just a PiHole for all of this which further reduces the pool of people who can pull it off. You have to redirect DNS requests to your own DNS server, and/or block 443/DoH completely, neither of which the PiHole or a regular ISP router can do on their own. At this point if you can you're probably better off blocking all outside connectivity from you TV anyway.
I strongly recommend everyone to just reject any and all EULA screens ever presented. At this point at least legally the manufacturer can no longer legally do much which is why they'll disable almost every smart feature, which is essentially "dumbifying" the TV.
It's much more likely it was removed for some unrelated reason (flamewar, spam, or just a mistake - btw you can email the mods if you think it was a mistake, it seems they're very responsive)
HN is full of discussions on these matters and I've never seen them get removed.
And you can always use Archive.org's Wayback Machine to periodically save the page.
- Smart tvs but with user replaceable firmware. Think OpenWRT for TVs. Maybe the same guy who does the dumb panels could sell those but with a raspberry pi in place of the logic board.
Of course a monitor solves these issues but these are normally smaller and more expensive.
"Dumb TVs" would cost more. It's hard to market something that costs more and has what most people would perceive to be fewer features.
They would cost more because post-sale content sales and advertising generate revenue for TV manufacturers, which they use to subsidise the device sale price, because it's such a competitive, low-margin, market.
This is why I saw "what most people consider". It's easy to market this to HN but most people don't know or care about this sort of control over their devices.
> It's hard to market something that costs more and has what most people would perceive to be fewer features.
I'd pay for privacy and control.
The other option like I've said is to recycle and mod smart tvs and rewrite their logic so that the user can do wathever he wants. Maybe marketing the modding kits. That would be more akin to those people who install custom open source bios on IBM Thinkpads.
Monitors are designed to be used closer to your eyes. Probably have more pixel density.
So I believe there would be a huge price gap between a huge 50"+ monitor and a TV that is more expensive because some extra work on software had to be made.
If you're using a dumb TV (monitor), and a device feeding it (Apple TV, Roku, Firestick, Chromecast), they typically come with a remote which will handle those needs.
I will admit, OTA TV (that is, via an antenna) will be... harder.
When was the last time regulation protects anything?
The Security Act of 1934 created the SEC and look at the past 20 or so years and see how many scandals has happened under their watch. All big players. Look at Madoff. Whisper blower after whisper blower to the SEC and what did SEC do? They looked the other way.
I disagree that it's hard to market. There are plenty of privacy conscious people that would pay extra. I see billboards every day for duckduckgo that advertise their privacy features. I think a privacy focused TV or IOT device would do well.
Privacy is only one angle, a lot of it is about selling you content like TV/Films that can be promoted via the TV. Often goes hand-in-hand with advertising that has privacy issues, but much of the money comes from the consumer not advertisers. That's a more subtle one to market: buy this device that has fewer choices about buying content.
I may be living in my own small little bubble but I don't know anybody shopping for anything because their smart TV showed an ad. Everything ads seem to do is just piss some people off.
Then again I remember that if commercials weren't successful, TV as we know it would not exist. People gobbling up ads and buying stuff because of that is why ads are still being used after all.
There's also the factor that whoever owns the platform showing the ads doesn't care whether the ads are effective. So long as your eyeballs are tracking it, they'll get paid anyway.
Only in the sense that restaurateurs don't care if the food is good. If it's selling... sure, they'll keep selling something that sucks. But generally, advertisers aren't quite the fools everyone thinks they are. There are always fools around, but prices tend to be rational enough long term. If ads aren't effective, revenue will dry up eventually.
All that effort to track people for ads... these are all attempts at improving effectiveness.
I don't entirely agree. A better analogy might be that a restaurant's landlord doesn't care if the food is good. I've run into the problem that sellers of adspace will often prefer to work more with customers who have lower conversion rates. Makes perfect sense when you think about it, people with the crappiest products need advertising the most, while the best products can lean on word-of-mouth.
Edit: Come to think of it, the fact a product is advertising at all might come to be seen as a negative signal of value by the public at large.
There are 20 equally good product brands for 99% of things you buy and use everyday. But you have a clear favorite amongst those 20 that you have already chosen to buy and use consistently. And you don't change your preference unless you are repeatedly reminded of those alternatives. This is advertising 101. Then there are products that you don't yet use because you don't yet think you need or want them. And you don't feel you need/want them until you are repeatedly and subtly/overtly "sold" this product.
Please don't take it personally. I obviously don't know _you_ and the "you" in my sentences isn't referring to you specifically. With that "you", I was referring to the typical user in general.
Fair enough. I intentionally cultivate a preference for novelty which is at odds with that description. Between that and the presumption a lot of the hype around advertising has, I can get defensive around the subject.
- There are things you buy infrequently or on a whim where the options are equally good, and the advertisers just want their product to be the last of the competitions' logos to be associated with a positive feeling. For example, I rarely drink soda, but when I do I'm choosing between Coke and Pepsi with no real brand connection (other than both companies feeding feelings into my brain on occasion). How can I know whether the advertising is some part of what influences me to pick one?
- Products whose function is partially social signalling, where the advertising can serve to establish the signal/brand connection. I care virtually not at all about pickup trucks, but I have a mental connection between Ford and Denis Leary's voice talking about "toughness". Ford pays for all that because you're much more likely to buy an oversized truck for your grocery runs if your community's overriding association with the F150 is "tough" than "small hands".
That is only true while people don't know your product exists. Once they know it exists they try to get an unbiased review; advertising can't provide that.
This isn't how regular people think though. When presented with X products, with different features but generally good quality, people choose with their gut. You are an extreme minority if you deviate from this pattern.
Not to mention, most products can't carry themselves by word of mouth. Only a select few. Advertising prevents concentration of mindshare.
>> Everything ads seem to do is just piss some people off.
This is an eternal sentiment. For the more analytical, there are many examples of advertising millions demonstrably doing nothing. Ha, BMW turned off their ads for a year and nothing happened. So and so blew squillions on ill conceived ad campaigns, etc. It's very easy to cherry-pick advertising stories. To bastardize the adage, "half of the advertising tree is always cherries."
And yet, advertising is one of the biggest economic forces of our time... as you say. It literally rivals oil, shipping and other traditional giants. FB & Alphabet are, as businesses, $trn advertising businesses. That's the market proof that advertising does affect your choices.
The simple proof is easily visible to anyone on the advertiser side of the advertiser-consumer relationship. You open an online business. No one shows up. You advertise. People show up. It may or may not be profitable, but the causality is plain. Even without tracking/analytics/snooping... it's a plain fact that many or most customers for many businesses or even whole sectors are attributable to ads.
Consumers only notice that ads piss them off. Advertisers only notice that ads make consumers do stuff. Both are extremely dismissive of the others' intelligence.
To be honest, if it was just "hey, here's this show on Netflix!" or "Try this new streaming platform!" type ads, I could deal. I've never had too much trouble disabling this sort of thing on my Sony TV.
The thing that always worries me is that it's essentially a low end smartphone with a really sweet screen. I still don't know what will happen if the OS/firmware ever gets borked. Will it just fail over to the last input I used, essentially rendering it a monitor? (not the worst thing that could happen)
Or will it just boot up to some error screen and become useless because the "smarts" broke and now I can't use a perfectly good display anymore?
I know a lot of people prefer the ease and convenience, and that's why they sell so well. But I'd always prefer to have the display be the display, and then use whatever box or dongle or PC I choose to provide the content. Those can be swapped and upgraded. The 2014-era smartphone SoC built into the TV can't.
Ads are not primarily about making the user consciously _like_ a product. They are about making the user _know_ a product or brand. Once they are in the mood or need of buying something, product X "feels" vaguely familiar. This is supposed to give them more confidence in the potential purchase.
> I may be living in my own small little bubble but I don't know anybody shopping for anything because their smart TV showed an ad. Everything ads seem to do is just piss some people off.
I don't think you're living in a bubble, but I do think that advertisers will pay for completely ineffective ads. Therefore, Samsung and LG have to compete to make the worse product so they can win the free money these naive advertisers are handing out.
I assume that investors simply won't accept one-time sales as a business model anymore. They want continuous growth with no employees on payroll to grow things. Ads are that. (You can see this everywhere. Apple wants 30% of Spotify subscriptions just for making the iPhone. Games are designed for esports and the associated sponsorships. Amazon wants $99 a year for shipping, rather than $10 on top of each order. Easy money, and people say "yes!!!!" to it all.)
Well, they might cost more, but TV/monitor prices have dropped so much over the past couple of decades that it can't be that much of a deciding factor.
I suppose that the smart part's hardware is below $10, it's not much more advanced than a RPi. OK, $20 if it includes a decent camera for video calls.
But its presence can be sold for a hundred more, because the consumers apparently... want these features? Things like YouTube, Netflix, video calls, etc. And, of course, voice control.
> I suppose that the smart part's hardware is below $10, it's not much more advanced than a RPi. OK, $20 if it includes a decent camera for video calls.
Citation? Because I find that assumption outlandish.
I've watched them replace the control board in my 7 year old Vizio TV, the hardware is significantly better than anything but the highest end current RPi. Dual core cpu, quad core gpu, AC wifi, 8gb of memory, and the ability to push 4k HDR video at 120hz.
You keep saying they're all selling personal data for hundreds of dollars, citation?
My idea is that chips themselves, sold in bulk, are but a fraction of the cost of the complete control board. Assembly and testing easily double the cost. For a consumer device like RPi, also shipping, packaging, and markup add, say, 50% on top.
For a TV manufacturer, most of these costs don't appear because they just need to add a few components to an existing PCB, and add more tests for them.
The other part of costs is licensing and/or development of software, its ongoing maintenance, extended tech support (online, phone), maybe sometimes content deals (a free month of Netflix, or something).
"So look, it’s not just about data collection. It’s about post-purchase monetization of the TV.
This is a cutthroat industry. It’s a 6-percent margin industry, right? I mean, you know it’s pretty ruthless. You could say it’s self-inflicted, or you could say there’s a greater strategy going on here, and there is. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost."
Let's imagine the bill of material is about $30, and that's cheap knowing they have mid to high end embedded SoCs or DSPs being able to move 4K video.
To that price, you also need to add a continuous software development for the OS and some apps (even if they are Open Source, because they need to do at least some modifications). Minor bugs will happen and you would need to solve them.
Also, more complex hardware and software usually equals more complex testing and debugging, and with this more person-hours and a bigger cost. At the end, it might not be $100, but it will be near enough to round it for $100.
To be clear, this is said without having ever worked in a TV manufacturing company, but knowing how this kind of things are made, I think I'm not too far from reality.
No, it's common industry practice that "Smart TVs" (i.e. ones with built in ad tracking) are sold at-or-below cost and companies make up the difference by showing ads.
There is a huge market for 'dumb panels', under the moniker of 'digital signage'. Nearly every major TV vendor has 'dumb' displays SKUs on offer in many different configs. The only problem is that they aren't always easy to get one's hand on, as they usually are sold through b2b channels instead of consumer-facing retail outlets.
To offer a non-walmart option, I've been using the Rtings table tool to find consumer TVs are potentially more respectful of privacy. Although I get the impression a number of sets aren't captured here (maybe walmart has some listed that Rtings doesn't), they are fairly thorough.
You could say "I'm not installing software updates" and be safe from ads as long as you don't need any bugfixes, but then you're also missing out on security updates. If you keep it off the internet maybe you're ok, but your TV might start connecting to a neighbor's wifi to give you more advertising.
No, your average home tv is not designed to run 24/7. These Digital Signage Monitors are supposed to do this. Try running your average costumer tv 24/7 for half a year and see how the color & sharpness is. Also they are repairable (normally).
I worked at a company that was attempting to sell software to consumer electronics manufacturers as per the divx model - some of us remember when you couldn't buy a dvd player without that logo. But when streaming began to replace physical media, I was told that services such as Amazon and Netflix began paying to have their software in the devices. I'm curious whether that's still a revenue source for manufacturers.
This might be out of date now, but 10 years ago I purchased a couple of monitors for a digital display. IIRC the monitors were more expensive because the screen wouldn't "burn" in images if left on the same image for a long period of time.
This is significant. Current OLEDs at full luminance burn in within 100 hours. The problem is mitigated somewhat by the variety of details displayed during typical TV programming, but if you use an OLED TV as a daily driver computer monitor or with a gaming system to play the same games for hours you will notice burn-in quickly.
I have an OLED TV and after thousands of hours of use, sometimes hundreds on a single game, there is no burn-in. However, I do not set the TV to full brightness.
Edit: I suspect an OLED digital sign WOULD burn in though as I imagine that content is much more static and displayed many more hours per day. I just wanted to make the point that I do not fear OLED for common consumer use cases.
Its even getting hard to find digital signage that isn't connected at this point. IIRC all the samsung stuff moved to having little fleet management computers some time ago.
I replaced my TV with an LG 43” 4K monitor which cost AUD$700 (similar price to a TV of the same brand/size here). It’s not quite the 50” my TV was but it’s big enough for my purposes.
It has 4 HDMI inputs and zero smart features. Turns on in under a second, etc. Before that I had a TV that required almost a full minute to start up before I could change AV input or change channel or do anything because it had to load it’s bloated smart crap.
I've been buying "Sceptre" -brand LCD TVs for use around the house the past several years. They're "dumb" with just a basic remote and basic settings firmware like TVs from a decade or two ago, and they tend to be reasonably priced, and of reasonable quality. Plug a streaming stick or your RPi in the back for your choice of $Streaming_TV service. They now also make units with Android TV built in, but so far they're still making non-smart models as well!
I don't know about OLED and other fancy panels (like Micro LED, QLED, etc.), but for common LCD panels there are plenty of controller available to use them, even with 4K resolution [1]. And panels aren't difficult to find because they are used to repair other television. The problem here is to protect it about dust and dirt, also not having a convenient and easy to use user interface.
IMO the best middle point is buying a LG Smart TV. They have Amazon Prime, Amazon Alexa, Netflix, and other platform installed, but IIRC you can uninstall this apps and you can't use them until you accept the terms and conditions. If you don't accept them you shouldn't worry about them.
I haven't used Wireshark to know if that apps use the network even without using them, but at least isn't the same to some Samsung TV that insert ads in the menus when your TV is connected to the Internet.
In addition to the privacy benefits, you could potentially build a controller that actually turns on Really Fast. Modern smart TVs just feel slow in every way.
"Smart tvs but with user replaceable firmware" THIS, I've never thought about it before, but I'd definitely pay extra for a TV that has a open firmware for users to replace.
I had assumed with was happening with Comcast's wifi option already.
Manufacturers just have to have credentials and someone nearby to have a comcast network device.
This is totally plausible and I imagine some manufacturers will try it. Alternatively they can simply make the TV not work unless it has been connected to WiFi...I believe there may already be some sets that do this.
Have a look at big "business monitors" like NEC E657Q [1]. I was able to find some 55, 65, 75" 4K monitors without smart functions. It is probably not THAT bad after all...
Honestly, the end user should be subsidised for hosting this feature. The fact that Amazon are able to spin this as "we're giving this to you for free" shows how far the tech industry has gone in tricking it's consumers into thinking that they're getting something for nothing.
> helps devices like Amazon Echo devices, Ring Security Cams, outdoor lights, motion sensors, and Tile trackers work better at home and beyond the front door.
I hope they inform their customers that filming and recording public spots or other people's houses in Europe requires advertising the presence of CCTV and adhering to data protection laws.
I have a feeling that in the coming years the number of neighbours suing each other for this kind of thing will become more prevalent.
>I hope they inform their customers that filming and recording public spots or other people's houses in Europe requires advertising the presence of CCTV and adhering to data protection laws.
I live in the EU and have a camera on the front of my garage, pointing at the street and partially covering my opposite neighbour's house. I'd like to understand more about which rules I need to adhere to, I was unaware of this. Can you point me towards some resources on the subject?
It's plain illegal in Switzerland regardless of CCTV signs. Even dashcams are in a gray area where it should technically be illegal but it has never been enforced before a court as far as I know (dashcam are extremely rare here anyway). I wonder how it works for Tesla cars that record their surrounding when parked, maybe they don't have that feature here.
Surveillance of public areas is only permited with very good reasons (e.g protecting outdoor ATMs) and must be restricted at the minimum required to serve its purpose.
Good god this title editorializing is atrocious. For those who don't read the articles and only go for the comments... Amazon plans to use Echo devices as some sort of local, extremely low-bandwidth (80 Kbps) gateway for IoT communication. Not some sort of "internet sharing" in a "this is a wifi hotspot" way.
Are the ISPs actually okay with this? Ideally Amazon would check who your ISP is and then check if the ISP will allow this type of usage, before just enabling it.
If properly protected I don't see the issue, but it really needs to be opt in. The main issue from my point of view is that companies like Amazon automatically assume that a customer is okay with this, without knowing anything about pricing, security requirement and stability of the customers internet connection.
BT, the UK’s largest ISP, has this feature (Wi-fi sharing on a separate network) built into the routers or “hubs” it supplies, and on by default.
The benefit for people is that they can get Wi-fi in many places — free for BT customers, and a small fee for others. Note that anonymous access isn’t allowed.
For other ISPs who don’t offer something like this, I don’t think they can stop their customers, the main question around customers offering free Wi-fi to others would focus around liability, I think. Who’s responsible if people do naughty things using your Wi-fi? And will Amazon’s solution help identify a potential bad actor?
>The benefit for people is that they can get Wi-fi in many places — free for BT customers, and a small fee for others.
I subscribed to a BT Openreach broadband product, a few years ago, in personal capacity. The service you are describing is called BT WiFi, after being rebranded. For residential customers, it is enabled by default i.e. an opt-out feature, as you have noted. Once you manage to find a way to disable it, you lose the 'benefits'. I found the feature to be extremely disconcerting, especially relating to a pattern of random parked vehicles and people loitering around residential premises at various times of the day, essentially to leech bandwidth off my connection.
It would seem that the ISP supplied router (HH6) was designed to create a splintered guest/public WiFi over a VPN. Although the matter of anonymity and liability was of great concern. However, I did not pursue it any further, due to numerous red flags, relating to degradation in QoS and security; latency, contention, poor signal, connection logs with dubious entries etc. It felt prudent to cut loose, rather than justify any perceived benefits.
To stay on the point, I am not sure if the Sidewalk branding will travel well long-term, might as well drop the facade and call it: Amazon Shodan.
On the other hand, putting more a ton of pressure on the ancient broadband infrastructure is great. It's one of the few forcing functions we have to push ISPs into actually improving their service.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadOn a more fundamental note, I think it's pretty ridiculous that every apartment in the building I live in runs its own wifi network, screaming at the top of its lungs to be heard in the noise.
It's the same thing with 5G. More cells, less range.
Given that it's US-only, where most internet plans have pretty high caps, it's hard for me to get upset about this. I would have expected my Echoes alone to use more than that during normal monthly operation, playing music, fetching news, etc.
I don't want anything to do with it if there's even the slightest chance I'd end up on the hook for someone else's crimes.
Seems this is not about guest hotspots or the like, but a separate network for Amazon devices.
So, 13% of my upload bandwidth would be consumed.
This is a bit disingenuous on their part, equivocating uploading with downloading.
Does each Echo device consume 80kbps, or is that total?
If I had 10 Echo devices, would my internet connection no longer function and become saturated?
After that, the flagship Unlimited 5G Verizon hotspot is limited to 600 kbps up or down. (Granted, 600 kbps would have been amazing in 1997 so it’s a good reminder of the mess we web devs have made of bandwidth.)
Presumably they’re figuring people with limited bandwidth don’t use Echo/Alexa? Because it doesn’t seem like they figure that from the materials.
* For anyone running a formerly wired household off a physical hotspot device, I suggest enabling (a) Mac Mini or Macbook to cache and reshare Apple updates to the household, or Windows Update Delivery Optimization, (b) turning off Windows, MacOS/iOS and Xbox updates and running the initial update downloads through a T-Mobile Magenta Max plan on family phones (each phone gets 50GB or 150GB per phone for $10 more), then use the cache or local Network Transfer to propogate to other devices. This keeps the physical hotspot dedicated to normal traffic, not slammed by unexpected OS, app, or game updates.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac...
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-content-cach...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-d...
Worst one, buying 4 hotspots and setting them all to the same ssid and pw, and each week, you only use one of the 4, power off the other 3.
4x transfer increase!
Based on extended discussions with Verizon and T-Mobile management (office execs, not store reps or call reps), this appears to be the only reliable option available to a non-enterprise customer.
Well known flat rate unlimited rural internet resellers of "red", "pink", and "blue" categorically stop working after "abuse" with a threshold set below normal usage that would keep a family online despite software updates (even w/o streaming!).
As a large enough enterprise, I could buy a "data pool" for the firm to get zero rated no throttle for our device fleet. When you hear raves from colleagues about Verizon hotspots, they may be enjoying this -- I sure do for legit work use. But this isn't technically ethical for individuals, and the companies won't offer it to an LLC or S-Corp with just a few lines.
So, with VZ, for example, by getting 4 hotspots configured the same and putting them on rotation, you end up spending about the same per month ($240/mo) as an enterprise hotspot, to get sufficient capacity for normal household software and game updates.
I also have a decently trafficked street in front of my home with paved sidewalks on both sides.
The two companies have a different track record on privacy.
FAAG are all companies that want to make the maximum of money from their current market positioning, assets and brand.
There is no inherent ethics in any of these companies.
The moment Apple doesn't grow on iPhones/apps and see selling customer payment data as a significat add to revenue, they will sell all your data as every other company. Tim is no more ethical than Mark or Larry or Jeff.
The way companies act right now is the way that maximizes their current profit. Rolling out privacy measures on iOS hurts Amazon, Google, Facebook and helps Apples brand, that's the reason Apple does it. And if this changes - e.g. the app store gets decentralized or regulated or people understand they don't need to pay 30% to Apple for a web application - Apple will stop it in a second without any second thought and find new revenue streams, e.g. selling your data.
Their historic behaviour is not relevant.
Didn't say that. Said they had a much better track record.
AirTags launched with clear consideration to privacy issues, like a stalker dropping one in your bag. They appear to have thought this out well. The recent anti-tracking changes to iOS that Facebook is squealing about are another point in their favor for me.
Are they my friend? No. Are their interests currently better aligned with mine? It would seem so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27075180
As I've said, the track isn't important, the current market positioning is. Apple will not care about what they did in the past if their market position and positioning is changing.
If this changes they will sell all your data without a second thought.
Interesting read though, thanks for the link!
I can't believe you'd compare a corporation to your mum either.
Putting that in the HN FAQ would prevent new users losing karma points.
Also, the original iPod had less space than a Nomad. Lame.
>Device manufacturers interested in creating devices that work with Amazon Sidewalk can view more information on the Sidewalk Developer Console.
...however if someone does something illegal with it that'll still trace back to my IP and police will kick down my door, correct?
This is a big concern with all the major "public WIFI" systems like this one and others such as Comcast's Xfinity WiFi and it's pretty much never actually true.
For actual Wi-Fi provided by an ISP, the public network will usually come out of a completely different IP (your modem will internally have 2 IPs, or tunnel the public network's traffic straight into the ISP's infrastructure and it will only talk to the public internet from there with a different IP).
For this one, I'm not sure if this is even IP-based at all and allows access to the internet. Seems like all it allows is to talk to Amazon (using some proprietary protocol) and offers no access to the outside internet anyway.
That seems mostly OK then...
the details depend on the country i guess, but at least in some countries there needs to be evidence that it was you before they can do anything.
there was a case where someone was approached for sharing movies. as soon as the authorities found out that this was an airbnb they backed off because they could no longer pin the act on the owner.
Despite being technically-savvy, and ready to hack away at systems for max configuration; I too prefer convenience for a lot of things. That’s the magic of modern life, you can save time on so many “complicated” things.
Disclaimer: I don’t use Amazon Echo specifically.
Anyways, could you provide some concrete examples of products where you were able to obtain such privacy and security guarantees with minimal friction?
If we look beyond Amazon, Apple has basically built their entire business model under the guise of "convenience." It's so convenient that you never will leave their ecosystem. If/when you attempt to leave, they'll make it so painful that you'll give up in frustration.
Thread is what you are talking about. It's awesome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)
For who? Even as a tech savvy person, that is ALL I want. I used to tinker around with home projects, nowadays I want things that work with no fuss. I don't want to play IT support desk for my family, I want their stuff to work.
Convenience is exactly what people want who don't understand technology but want to use it for benefit.
If we lived in an world where the most convenient products also protected users' privacy then maybe we wouldn't be having this quibble.
A good doorknob is ready-at-hand: it's just about invisible to me until it breaks and, suddenly, it's present and bright in my mind. I've been in the woods and become unsafe: everything around becomes suddenly, viscerally present. That's not a feeling I want often. But individual things I attend to (like watching what I eat or trying to ID a bird by its song) make the world much more colorful, and make me feel more a part of it. Plus, as the comments here suggest, immediate convenience can lead to downstream perils (e.g. in terms of data collection).
That said, their UI for recommendations has gotten worse. You'd get some ML-driven suggestions pulled only from services you've marked as connected and don't need to pay extra to access, but they've pushed that set of recommendations further down the interface over time, offering up a combination of paid content, first-party content, and curated content in the mix as well, with no heed paid to what you already subscribe to.
I had other things come up and did not unbox it yet.
After the first week, I have begun to receive emails from Amazon urging me to setup the Firestick, at least once per week.
This is the opposite of motivating, Amazon.
There are many ways to make a person happy at the point of purchase: price, delivery speed, meeting expectations, etc.
In this manner a casino is also customer-focused.
The sense of "hostile" you're using supposes that customers are satisfied in cases where their long-term interests are being harmed.. and, indeed. This is where governments tend to step in.
Your Smart TV already spies on you. Not sure how this helps.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet...
Anything of that sort would be a completely new, unrelated system.
Once these systems are accepted they often get upgraded without significant reconsideration.
You can get a sense of the protocol here.
https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack
- If their hardware only connects to Find My, then the Tile network (and Android phones specifically) will have fewer connection points available, making the devices less attractive to Android users who will not have access to Find My.
- If their hardware only connects to the Tile network, then their tracker hardware is less attractive to iOS users, who have the larger Find My network available.
If Tile is able to ship hardware (or adapt their existing hardware) to connect to both networks by default, this sidesteps the issue entirely, since it'll work both with cross-platform hardware and take advantage of the first-party tracking network. And the ability to do so by default is hugely important here: putting something behind a toggle will effectively kill its adoption, and will have knock-on network effects.
They want iOS users to download the Tile app instead of using the native Find My. If they don’t, coverage will be severely degraded for Android users as you mention.
The hardware is just a dumb emitter. Fixing this would require either:
1. The Find My api to be available on Android, so phones can track and locate tags
2. Find My on iOS uploads tag data to a third party service of the users’ choice
The latter is absolutely unlikely as it exposes user data defeating all of the privacy guarantees Apple developed. #1 is more likely but still a long shot.
We always criticism big companies for their market position. Where is the line drawn between big enough to be successful but not big enough to be unfair player using existing business to leapfrog into other areas?
It seems we are quick to point a finger but its never qualified. We just think "x is big, x is doing y, x is being unfair."
I know it's not in the spirit of discussion on Hacker News, however I feel I must just add the rhetorical remark: "Is everyone else concerned yet?"
I wish the 2.4Ghz band had some kind of "at least half the bandwidth of any network connection over 2.4Ghz must be available for use by any member of the public, for free".
That would effectively be the licensing cost for your use of the WiFi band - you use up bandwidth in 2.4Ghz, but provide for free bandwidth to the internet for other people to use.
Only "not true" if there is some evidence it is not true. I looked at the sibling link and found this:
>> Will opening my network make me liable for others' illegal actions? +
>> This one is a bit more complicated, but the short answer is, "We don't think so." Click here to find out more.
"dont think so" is not convincing. Also not convincing is the broken link on the "Click here to find out more."
I dont think this should be treated lightly -- there is no reason to assume that openly sharing an internet connection is safe given the consequences of illegal use.
That problem is easily solved (in the US at least) by enacting more stringent 4th amendment protections for people and more properly limiting the governments police powers. This should be done anyway regardless of the proposed suggestions about public wifi
Obviously there are solutions to that but a layperson won't manage it
Just like the LTE network typically has firewalling between users, and stories of peoples phones being hacked via LTE are very rare.
And personally I would need a wired connection anyway, so having a wifi network built in to the network switch isn't really a big deal, since the fiber is to the apartment.
Police/Authority: You used the internet to access XXX site You: No, it was the other guy using the wireless...
Two community-owned wifi connections are more reliable than one individually-owned cabled connection.
ISPs have lobbied for everyone to stop sharing their own connections by over-stating the risks (rather than mitigating them), enabling password protection by default, and allowing risk to the owner to be encoded in law.
And yet, ISPs are now taking some part of each connection for themselves. That's a problem.
We could instead share our connections in a community-owned way.
That move is just one step further in removing control. They now have sealed devices that can have who knows what functions but are confined to the network. Next step is to have a concealed upstream. After that they will somehow get a legal mandate to force such devices on you (like the EU did with cars). Maybe they will use smoke detectors or "emergency" services. In the end, this is exactly like in 1984.
Without reasonable alternative and without consent is like a LEO version of 'willing'.
Those commercial displays are priced for businesses to afford. It's not something the average consumer is going to reasonably buy - especially not lower-income people.
(As an aside, it's fucked that the cheaper devices that low-income people can afford are always the ones with the most surveillance.)
You are legally obliged to install a smart meter, smart smoke detector and smart heating control in your home. If you rent, your landlord will install these things. If you own the authorities will inspect the presence and operation of these devices and fine you if you don't comply.
All these devices will be offered by companies like amazon. Coincidentally, amazon lobbyists shape the laws that make these things mandatory.
I really think the fears of government over-reach are something that has receded into the past. We didn't need to be forced into a surveillance society, we willingly paid for and installed it ourselves in exchange for "likes" and "upvotes" and being able to discuss big budget TV shows in real time with our fake internet friends.
Big brother turned out to be our dopamine circuits.
If that's all they do, what's the problem here? All three have big and direct positives for everyone ( you, your home, your community) - a smart heating control saves energy ( climate catastrophe incoming, so could be useful), a smart smoke detector can alert the fire department if smoke is ongoing for more than X time, and a smart meter can be used to accurately predict, distribute, reduce and bill energy consumption. And if they all stay in their lane, there aren't many privacy downsides.
Edit: I'd appreciate a response to go with the downvotes and tell me what i'm missing
Being forced into something "for your own good" is still being forced, and is anathema to some.
And since they are connected to the internet, they're vulnerable to hacks, so this information could not only get into the hands of governments and energy companies, but all kinds of random people.
Btw in reality it's much worse than that. Many of the smart smoke detectors have microphones in them, which is a really smart idea. Sometimes companies even "forget" to tell the victims, er... I mean users about it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/googles-nest-securit...
E.g. in France the smart electric meters are mandatory ( they don't belong to you but the utility in the first place), and are of a specific type that does nothing but collect electric consumption. I'm sure that if it were left to a private company there'd be a microphone or two just in case, but that really isn't the scenario we're talking about.
Makes me want to sniff the traffic and see what kind of replies it's getting. Maybe just spoof it.
The important part then is that failure to comply needs to result in personal liability for retailers, distributors and manufacturers.
That second part is the one that will probably never come true but it is the only thing that would bring any sort of meaningful change.
I can understand if they were putting microphones into the electrical sockets when your house was being built... you need to have electricity.
The solution is don't fucking buy the items... when they see a drop in sales, even a few percent, they'll take notice. Or, god forbid, get your old TV repaired!
Mandating that the government steps in is crazy... we're talking about governments that are paid, openly, by lobbyists from these organisations.
I don't think there's anything wrong with government regulations. Yes they listen to lobbies too much but it's a different issue that should also be addressed.
I own amazon devices (none that have sidewalk) but if my neighbors came to me and told me to remove them for their privacy. I'd probably laugh them to the door. I live in a building with 500 units, and its almost 100% chance that i'm within sidewalk range (I also live near to the alexa office in seattle so there's that too).
Point is: You can't control your neighbors.
Not everyone can afford to or wants to move to the middle of no where such that their neighbors are out of radio distance.
A better, more useful approach is to have a DNS server on the home network (something like a pi hole), where all analytics go nowhere, Youtube isn't capable of downloading ads, etc., but you can still use the smart TV features you want. IIRC some TVs have internal DNS servers and only use those, so an ARP spoofing may be also needed.
I suspect the business motivation by Amazon is to become the “middleman” between these devices and the manufacture.
If i had to buy a TV now I'd avoid a smart one like the plague.
Or am I underestimating the tracking Chromecast is doing?
It’s pretty great that such a desirable feature is at the bottom of the barrel
I haven't TV shopped in literal decades. It astounded me that there was (a) a market for more advertising on your television via smart features, and (b) seemingly low-end models are the only ones that are available as 'dumb'. Other manufacturers have regular tv's, but they are never available, and cost as much as the smart versions. The whole thing is weird.
I'm sold on them for future purchases.
Or maybe even around the house. This might be possible in apartments.
I think this has to get sorted out in the wash with regulation. If you collect data about someone, it needs to be treated at HIPPAA levels of paranoia. That just makes so much of this rubbish go away.
It might increase the costs of TVs. Certainly there are many areas of global markets that have incredible deep tech that just are not seeing expected market pricing.
(Off topic but eye-tests. In the UK there are branches dedicated to performing a medical test by post-graduate trained operators, for token cost, just so they can upsell me on expensive frames. I mean I would rather pay for the eye test and buy online.)
——
I commented the other week about enjoying my LG oled smart tv. Someone mentioned what about the evesdropping. (Which I’m aware of) and it started a small thread of people discussing that. These replies were removed about 24-48 hours later. I found it odd the comments about smart TVs evesdropping were removed. So I’m commenting to bookmark this, and see if this discussion is also removed.
Edit: this[1] looks like what you’re talking about. Has anything been removed (by HN) from this conversation?
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26996739
“We noticed you’re using an ad-blocker” ...
The undesirable outcome is that they just hardcode some IPs or DNS in which case PiHole would be of no use. At best you could create a NAT port forward to redirect DNS requests to the PiHole, assuming it's not DoH.
And the worst case scenario is if they build in 5G connection and take the whole connectivity aspect out of your control.
I just blocked all DNS traffic outside of directed to a dnsmasq container allowing only whitelisted hosts (I just allow netflix on smart tv)
Next step is to block all traffic to IP Addresses that have not been resolved by that. That would fix DoH but it seems overkill for now.
> they just hardcode some IPs or DNS in which case PiHole would be of no use. At best you could create a NAT port forward to redirect DNS requests to the PiHole, assuming it's not DoH.
The idea is that you'll need more than just a PiHole for all of this which further reduces the pool of people who can pull it off. You have to redirect DNS requests to your own DNS server, and/or block 443/DoH completely, neither of which the PiHole or a regular ISP router can do on their own. At this point if you can you're probably better off blocking all outside connectivity from you TV anyway.
I strongly recommend everyone to just reject any and all EULA screens ever presented. At this point at least legally the manufacturer can no longer legally do much which is why they'll disable almost every smart feature, which is essentially "dumbifying" the TV.
HN is full of discussions on these matters and I've never seen them get removed.
And you can always use Archive.org's Wayback Machine to periodically save the page.
- Dumb panels (not monitors). Perhaps stripped down recycled smart tvs.
- Smart tvs but with user replaceable firmware. Think OpenWRT for TVs. Maybe the same guy who does the dumb panels could sell those but with a raspberry pi in place of the logic board.
Of course a monitor solves these issues but these are normally smaller and more expensive.
They would cost more because post-sale content sales and advertising generate revenue for TV manufacturers, which they use to subsidise the device sale price, because it's such a competitive, low-margin, market.
I'd pay for privacy and control.
The other option like I've said is to recycle and mod smart tvs and rewrite their logic so that the user can do wathever he wants. Maybe marketing the modding kits. That would be more akin to those people who install custom open source bios on IBM Thinkpads.
Then buy a monitor. They have HDMI ports so they can get whatever video feed you need. Some even have speakers.
So I believe there would be a huge price gap between a huge 50"+ monitor and a TV that is more expensive because some extra work on software had to be made.
HDMI-CDC (Consumer Device Control)
I will admit, OTA TV (that is, via an antenna) will be... harder.
The Security Act of 1934 created the SEC and look at the past 20 or so years and see how many scandals has happened under their watch. All big players. Look at Madoff. Whisper blower after whisper blower to the SEC and what did SEC do? They looked the other way.
Then again I remember that if commercials weren't successful, TV as we know it would not exist. People gobbling up ads and buying stuff because of that is why ads are still being used after all.
After all... https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
All that effort to track people for ads... these are all attempts at improving effectiveness.
Edit: Come to think of it, the fact a product is advertising at all might come to be seen as a negative signal of value by the public at large.
- There are things you buy infrequently or on a whim where the options are equally good, and the advertisers just want their product to be the last of the competitions' logos to be associated with a positive feeling. For example, I rarely drink soda, but when I do I'm choosing between Coke and Pepsi with no real brand connection (other than both companies feeding feelings into my brain on occasion). How can I know whether the advertising is some part of what influences me to pick one?
- Products whose function is partially social signalling, where the advertising can serve to establish the signal/brand connection. I care virtually not at all about pickup trucks, but I have a mental connection between Ford and Denis Leary's voice talking about "toughness". Ford pays for all that because you're much more likely to buy an oversized truck for your grocery runs if your community's overriding association with the F150 is "tough" than "small hands".
Not to mention, most products can't carry themselves by word of mouth. Only a select few. Advertising prevents concentration of mindshare.
economies of scale and all that
This is an eternal sentiment. For the more analytical, there are many examples of advertising millions demonstrably doing nothing. Ha, BMW turned off their ads for a year and nothing happened. So and so blew squillions on ill conceived ad campaigns, etc. It's very easy to cherry-pick advertising stories. To bastardize the adage, "half of the advertising tree is always cherries."
And yet, advertising is one of the biggest economic forces of our time... as you say. It literally rivals oil, shipping and other traditional giants. FB & Alphabet are, as businesses, $trn advertising businesses. That's the market proof that advertising does affect your choices.
The simple proof is easily visible to anyone on the advertiser side of the advertiser-consumer relationship. You open an online business. No one shows up. You advertise. People show up. It may or may not be profitable, but the causality is plain. Even without tracking/analytics/snooping... it's a plain fact that many or most customers for many businesses or even whole sectors are attributable to ads.
Consumers only notice that ads piss them off. Advertisers only notice that ads make consumers do stuff. Both are extremely dismissive of the others' intelligence.
The thing that always worries me is that it's essentially a low end smartphone with a really sweet screen. I still don't know what will happen if the OS/firmware ever gets borked. Will it just fail over to the last input I used, essentially rendering it a monitor? (not the worst thing that could happen)
Or will it just boot up to some error screen and become useless because the "smarts" broke and now I can't use a perfectly good display anymore?
I know a lot of people prefer the ease and convenience, and that's why they sell so well. But I'd always prefer to have the display be the display, and then use whatever box or dongle or PC I choose to provide the content. Those can be swapped and upgraded. The 2014-era smartphone SoC built into the TV can't.
I don't think you're living in a bubble, but I do think that advertisers will pay for completely ineffective ads. Therefore, Samsung and LG have to compete to make the worse product so they can win the free money these naive advertisers are handing out.
I assume that investors simply won't accept one-time sales as a business model anymore. They want continuous growth with no employees on payroll to grow things. Ads are that. (You can see this everywhere. Apple wants 30% of Spotify subscriptions just for making the iPhone. Games are designed for esports and the associated sponsorships. Amazon wants $99 a year for shipping, rather than $10 on top of each order. Easy money, and people say "yes!!!!" to it all.)
https://www.cdw.com/product/Samsung-40-Full-HD-Non-Smart-Hos...
https://www.cdw.com/product/samsung-hg40nf690gf-nf690-series...
But its presence can be sold for a hundred more, because the consumers apparently... want these features? Things like YouTube, Netflix, video calls, etc. And, of course, voice control.
Citation? Because I find that assumption outlandish.
I've watched them replace the control board in my 7 year old Vizio TV, the hardware is significantly better than anything but the highest end current RPi. Dual core cpu, quad core gpu, AC wifi, 8gb of memory, and the ability to push 4k HDR video at 120hz.
You keep saying they're all selling personal data for hundreds of dollars, citation?
For a TV manufacturer, most of these costs don't appear because they just need to add a few components to an existing PCB, and add more tests for them.
The other part of costs is licensing and/or development of software, its ongoing maintenance, extended tech support (online, phone), maybe sometimes content deals (a free month of Netflix, or something).
Since you are talking about a Vizio tv, here's some straight from their CTO's mouth:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/7/18172397/airplay-2-homekit...
"So look, it’s not just about data collection. It’s about post-purchase monetization of the TV.
This is a cutthroat industry. It’s a 6-percent margin industry, right? I mean, you know it’s pretty ruthless. You could say it’s self-inflicted, or you could say there’s a greater strategy going on here, and there is. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost."
To that price, you also need to add a continuous software development for the OS and some apps (even if they are Open Source, because they need to do at least some modifications). Minor bugs will happen and you would need to solve them.
Also, more complex hardware and software usually equals more complex testing and debugging, and with this more person-hours and a bigger cost. At the end, it might not be $100, but it will be near enough to round it for $100.
To be clear, this is said without having ever worked in a TV manufacturing company, but knowing how this kind of things are made, I think I'm not too far from reality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18905408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781481
Walmart's site lets you filter for "Smart = N". Sceptre and RCA are the main brands.
For example https://www.walmart.com/ip/RCA-65-Class-4K-Ultra-HD-2160P-LE...
https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/table/53948
You could say "I'm not installing software updates" and be safe from ads as long as you don't need any bugfixes, but then you're also missing out on security updates. If you keep it off the internet maybe you're ok, but your TV might start connecting to a neighbor's wifi to give you more advertising.
And with a smart TV, in addition to ads you may also want to be on the lookout for Automatic Content Recognition: https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...
I'd be much happier just not having a wifi antenna in my television.
Edit: I suspect an OLED digital sign WOULD burn in though as I imagine that content is much more static and displayed many more hours per day. I just wanted to make the point that I do not fear OLED for common consumer use cases.
It has 4 HDMI inputs and zero smart features. Turns on in under a second, etc. Before that I had a TV that required almost a full minute to start up before I could change AV input or change channel or do anything because it had to load it’s bloated smart crap.
https://www.samygo.tv/
Since most TVs probably run Linux it probably isn't hard, but will have the usual problems of non-mainline drivers, blobs etc.
IMO the best middle point is buying a LG Smart TV. They have Amazon Prime, Amazon Alexa, Netflix, and other platform installed, but IIRC you can uninstall this apps and you can't use them until you accept the terms and conditions. If you don't accept them you shouldn't worry about them.
I haven't used Wireshark to know if that apps use the network even without using them, but at least isn't the same to some Samsung TV that insert ads in the menus when your TV is connected to the Internet.
[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33001887592.html
It said the first thing they do is find a way of phoning home.
I assume the next versions of the tvs internet connection may be mandatory for it to work.
This isn’t tech problem. This is legal and regulatory issue.
[1] https://www.nec-display.com/ap/en_display/e657q/index.html
Not to the end customer anyway. To organizations and developers building on top of the APIs...
Completely against this idea though its a shame its not... "Get paid for hosting a network using the devices you purchase from us"*
Lastly, it is a cost albeit negligible to the end user who installs the device (power, bandwidth, etc).
*I know it wouldn't amount to anything but its a interesting way to think about it.
I hope they inform their customers that filming and recording public spots or other people's houses in Europe requires advertising the presence of CCTV and adhering to data protection laws.
I have a feeling that in the coming years the number of neighbours suing each other for this kind of thing will become more prevalent.
I live in the EU and have a camera on the front of my garage, pointing at the street and partially covering my opposite neighbour's house. I'd like to understand more about which rules I need to adhere to, I was unaware of this. Can you point me towards some resources on the subject?
https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/domestic-cctv-systems-g...
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e5486933-1806...
https://www.netatmo.com/en-gb/guides/security/burglary/regul...
I love that this is the opening line in two back to back FAQ entries. I'm going to make Alexa read it to me for full effect.
If properly protected I don't see the issue, but it really needs to be opt in. The main issue from my point of view is that companies like Amazon automatically assume that a customer is okay with this, without knowing anything about pricing, security requirement and stability of the customers internet connection.
The benefit for people is that they can get Wi-fi in many places — free for BT customers, and a small fee for others. Note that anonymous access isn’t allowed.
Look for “hub hotspots” here: https://www.btwifi.com/find/
For other ISPs who don’t offer something like this, I don’t think they can stop their customers, the main question around customers offering free Wi-fi to others would focus around liability, I think. Who’s responsible if people do naughty things using your Wi-fi? And will Amazon’s solution help identify a potential bad actor?
I subscribed to a BT Openreach broadband product, a few years ago, in personal capacity. The service you are describing is called BT WiFi, after being rebranded. For residential customers, it is enabled by default i.e. an opt-out feature, as you have noted. Once you manage to find a way to disable it, you lose the 'benefits'. I found the feature to be extremely disconcerting, especially relating to a pattern of random parked vehicles and people loitering around residential premises at various times of the day, essentially to leech bandwidth off my connection.
It would seem that the ISP supplied router (HH6) was designed to create a splintered guest/public WiFi over a VPN. Although the matter of anonymity and liability was of great concern. However, I did not pursue it any further, due to numerous red flags, relating to degradation in QoS and security; latency, contention, poor signal, connection logs with dubious entries etc. It felt prudent to cut loose, rather than justify any perceived benefits.
To stay on the point, I am not sure if the Sidewalk branding will travel well long-term, might as well drop the facade and call it: Amazon Shodan.
https://fon.com/bt-wifi-with-fon-rebranding/