Question: Which government agency or terrorist agitator do you work for? I ask because most people will never see even a dozen TVs in their lives, much less "dozens", and 99.99% of those people who do don't give a shit, and a portion who do give a shit don't buy smart TVs.

Who are you really?

Indeed, I'm just pointing out that 8.4GB is not a lot of data when talking about continuous transmission over time and not necessarily evidence of anything in particular.

You just in fact postulated a whole 3rd different scenario for what the data contains. Anything is possible.

What OS do you think most of these run?

You misinterpreted what your stats mean. In fact they make my point. The market for amazon/google/whatever HDMI sticks is evidence that consumers are looking for a smart experience. But they exist to support two other market features: a) TVs last a long time. b) media updates don't. Virtually the entire market for those sticks exists to support existing dumb TVs, or smart TVs that were abandoned (e.g. we went out and bought a Google Chromecast when our 10 year old smart TV stopped supporting Netflix, we then proceeded to sell that Chromecast when we bought a new TV because the new TV once again supported Netflix.

There's no evidence that the world is moving away from simplification / unification. The sales figures and market size of smart all-in-one devices and continued sales of new smart TVs is evidence of this. And the app experience while shitty is not at all related to this trend: in fact it once again supports my point that consumers are chasing smart integrated experiences and will go so far as to use shitty apps with horrendous UX to get it.

Go ask any of your friends with a new TV if you can borrow their Roku. I'll bet you a Marsbar they will say one of two things: 1) Sure, we're not using it, 2) Sorry we threw it away.

That's wrong. This guy was born with a silver plate. His entire family is rich, even without his crypto fraud.

Or maybe one person was paying attention and knows this was already tried and failed.

He already tried that. https://finance.yahoo.com/mark... https://www.coindesk.com/polic... and the appealed directly: https://www.bbc.com/news/artic...

*claps*. Hahahaha, I concede that Slashdot would be a better place with more cats.

You may not be the target market, instead normal people who don't have Home Assistant are the target market. You're a nerd (don't worry most of us on Slashdot are, don't be offended), it's worth noting that our needs are not considered a target market by nearly any consumer electronics brand.

While I don't disagree they are likely collecting screenshots, it's worth pointing out that 8.4GB of data over an entire week of 4h daily sessions (or 100800 seconds) is a transfer speed of only 83kB/s. It very much could be just compressed audio, and not even need to be uncompressed.

Didn't your internet starter kit with your AOL account tell you about image hosting sites like imgur?

Does Slashdot have a history of running stories about your cat? Is your cat in the middle of an open source licensing spat? What makes you think your cat is special? At least this story is tech related, or if you want I can mention Trump is a thundercunt if that makes you feel more at home on Slashdot?

No it's not. That's regulating Apple in the UK. The thing everyone seems to forget is that Apple isn't an American company. It's a "multinational" company. And it is very much possible to legally compel a company to not share details internally with other business units. Apple can still talk to congress, but congress isn't automatically privy to the details of a "foreign" company in a "foreign" market.

Sure the CEO probably knows more, but hey, you want to be the head of a multinational, that's why you have lawyers telling you which fine from which country will be preferable.

I think they are responding adequately already. The statement about US laws doesn't even warrant a response since this has nothing at all to do with US laws, congress, or the USA in the slightest. The Constitution of the USA affects the USA only, and even then it seems lately no one gives a shit about it anyway.

Yes but your last sentence hits it in a nutshell. The privacy nightmare not withstanding people actually *want* Smart TVs. Virtually the whole market for those who don't are made up of a few people here on Slashdot. People actively shop for TVs which include Netflix, HBO, Disney+, etc. I'm among them, I bought my last TV precisely because it included support for Steam Link and the ability to cast to it as a UPnP endpoint and support for DLNA. The trend for home simplification is clear among wider consumers, so it's a hard pill to swallow to tell them to buy a commercial sign display, and then bolt another box to it for functionality... and then they need to trust that other box.

Congrats you haven't eliminated the microphone. Modern TVs have microphones used for DSP to make their 5mm thick speakers sound passable. Also who says that the spying disappears when you get a TV without voice control or gesture control? You call these features "unnecessary", but the companies that make money selling your data consider them very necessary.

Also why would you trust the off switch? May as well take LG's word that they aren't spying. In fact if you follow the original story and watch the video you'll note that the LG TV very much does have a switch to switch off the microphone including an OS flag that the microphone is off. But which microphone? The mic in the TV is off, but what about the one in the smart remote? Also even with the TV mic off they were still able to recover speech from the mic. Turns out software muting was insufficient to actually mute the sound to the point where speech couldn't be not just recovered, but also people identified by voice. Thanks modern day low-noise 32bit ADCs.

The only thing you can do as a consumer is choose whom you trust.