Right?

$450 and a toaster to use something like the external batteries I’ve used for a decade.

So you have nothing to hide, eh?

Read more here.

These tvs, like smartphones, track lots of stuff. And the databases they feed make all sorts of inferences.

They even scan what you’re watching from other sources and can determine what show it is, and report that info too.

They know when you’re home and leave, to some extent.

I’ve read of patents for wifi tech in tvs that will connect to other TVs of the same brand for a connection if you don’t set one up.

They definitely use their own DNS, and probably have some hard coded IPs so you can’t block them phoning home via DNS (I’ve tested this myself). I can see this traffic even when I setup DNS blocks - they still hit the vendor’s service IPs (looking at you, Samsung).

These companies are openly antagonistic and adversarial to us, and you “have nothing to hide”?

Another hero we didn’t know we needed.

Have my grateful uovote.

Wow, I never made that connection

Legos

Sorry, it’s Legos

Has been since at least 1972

Except I’ve had experiences that aren’t explainable by alm this:

Discussing a random, never-thought-of-before idea with a friend, in the car. Neither of us had ever thought of this thing before (honestly don’t recall now what it was). Discussed it for 2 minutes, then moved on.

Later we’re both seeing related ads, yet neither of us searched for anything.

And it was something way out of left field for both of us, that neither of us had ever thought of before. The related ads were so jarring that we both told each other about it.

Oh, and my phone was rooted, de-googled (lineage), with heavy restrictions for the apps, no social media (I still don’t have any accounts with any of them, except here), etc. The other phone was an iPhone.

I’ve had a very similar experience.

Once discussed something, out of the blue, something I’ve never been curious about in my life, in the car, with a friend who also has never thought about the same thing.

Hours later we’re both seeing related ads.

Now, I get that the amount of data required for such analysis is supposedly outside the bounds of what phones can do. But I can’t see any other explanation. Neither of us ever searched anything in this subject, we talked about doe a couple minutes and moved on, never doing anything about it. We have very different interests, too.