When we bought a new TV a couple of years ago, I was really to use all the Smart features from our SmartTV. But after a while the discomfort has outweighed the features. Recently we had the opportunity to “test” a newer SmartTV in a hotel and I must admit – it hasn’t gotten better! But I was surprised that the rabbit hole was even deeper and darker than I would have expected …
Our old SmartTV
But first things first. We do own a “Smart”TV, but don’t use the features anymore. The reason is simply usability and Ad-pressure:
- As if we do would not see enough ads already on free tv, a couple of channels showed Ad-banners on the left and lower part of the screen when switching channels. And as this wasn’t annoying enough, sometimes the TV restarted when an Ad was loading on certain channels …
- The update time: Every couple of days when we opened the “SmartHub” (The interface with all the smart features & apps), it required updating. Such an update takes a couple of minutes where you can’t use the TV. It could update any time of the day (& night), or when I turn on the TV but don’t yet use the SmartHub. But no – it updates when you start the SmartHub. So, every couple of days when we wanted to use Netflix … we watched a progress bar for couple of minutes instead …
- The update fails: what really broke the SmartTV’s neck was when a SmartHub-Update required us to re-login into Netflix. At an interface where you couldn’t use an external keyboard. Imagine the “convenience” of entering a safe password only by the arrow buttons. – But okay, this can happen. The next day, another SmartHub-update caused the same issue again. And the day after … again, a third time. – This third time, we didn’t log in again but bought a FireTV stick, did reset the SmartHub and disconnected it from the internet. – GameOver SmartTV
New SmartTVs
Recently we were on vacation and had the opportunity to use a newer SmartTV in our room. We just wanted to surf through the channels … But we both were negatively surprised:
- Additional advertising banners on the left and lower part of the screen an almost all channels
- When the banners went away, the next popup appeared reminding us of the special features of this channel by pressing the red or blue button on the remote.
If you just want to surf through the channels, that was SO much unnecessary overhead! We quickly decided that we’d better stay with our FireTV stick and keep our TV disconnected from the web. – Even if we ever would buy a new TV.
Tracking (FireTV)
Since quite a while I am running a PiHole Server in my network to reduce tracking on DNS-level for all the devices on the network. What I quickly saw was that the top blocked device on the network was … the FireTV Stick. Well okay, I can understand -to a certain degree – that as an App- and Device-Developer you want some kind of analytics to know how the device is used. But I was … surprised by the number of requests that were blocked: Just in the last 24h PiHole recorded ~1300 of ~4000 blocked requests from the FireTV Stick. And we’ve been using the stick only in the late evening …
Just today I checked that you can disable quite some tracking and the personalised advertising (!) in the settings of the FireTV stick – which I just did today. Let’s see how much / if the blocked requests go down now.
How to turn off data collection for every TV brand | Tom’s Guide (tomsguide.com) might be a nice visit if you seek the disable & OptOut options on other devices as well.
Tracking / Surveillance
But still I felt like I’m a bit in control about what’s going on, until I read this article yesterday: Überwachung durch Smart-TVs und Streaming-Player: Neuer Bericht macht aufmerksam (stadt-bremerhaven.de).
The article is a summary of the report “Streaming Television Industry Conducting Vast Surveillance of Viewers, Targeting Them with Manipulative AI-driven Ad Tactics, Says New Report | Center For Digital Democracy (democraticmedia.org)“. Well the title says gives already a good hint, right? An important part there is Automatic content recognition (ACR):
Surveillance has been built directly into television sets, with major manufacturers’ “smart TVs” deploying automatic content recognition (ACR) and other monitoring software to capture “an extensive, highly granular, and intimate amount of information that, when combined with contemporary identity technologies, enables tracking and ad targeting at the individual viewer level,” the report explains.
CDD Report
I mean … WTF?! How is this in any ways compliant with the GDPR? What especially annoys me is that I am obviously not the client of the companies producing TVs anymore. The advertising companies are – even though I am paying to buy the device.
Solutions?
I can just recommend reading the article How to turn off data collection for every TV brand | Tom’s Guide (tomsguide.com). It gives some guidance how to minimize the tracking.
But still, I wonder how this behaviour is GDPR compliant at all.