Caveat emptor:
Opinion: From buried settings to geopolitical risk, the business model is surveillance
www.theregister.com
"At the end of last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton
sued five of the largest TV companies, accusing them of excessive and deceptive surveillance of their customers.
Paxton reserved special venom for the two China-based members of the quintet. His argument is that unlike Sony, Samsung, and LG, if Hisense and TCL have conducted surveillance in the way the lawsuits accuse them of, they'd potentially be required to share all data with the Chinese Communist Party.
It is a rare pleasure to state that legal action against tech companies is cogent, timely, focused, and – if the allegations are true – deserves to succeed. It is less pleasant to predict that even if one, several, or all of these manufacturers did what they're accused of, and were sanctioned for it, it would not put the safeguards in place to stop such practices from recurring.
At the heart of the cases is the fact that most smart TVs use Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) to send rapid-fire screenshots back to company servers, where they are analyzed to finely detail your TV usage. This sometimes covers not just streaming video, but whatever apps or external devices are displaying, and the allegations are that every other bit of personal data the set can scry is also pulled in. Installed apps can have trackers, data from other devices can be swept up."
Wadda ya know? The state of Texas did something I fully support.
