You may be able to turn it off. I just went into my Vizio M’s settings menu for the first time in forever and low and behold a ToS for “Automated Content Recognition” shows up before I can access the settings. They make it sound so cool.

The setting can later be accessed buried away in “Reset and Admin”.

I wonder often if technology needs more legal guardrails for the 90% of people that don’t pay attention to telemetry and will gladly accept. Nutrition/medicine is another iffy one. It’s interesting to me how some countries require warnings on high sodium and high sugar food. Something like that probably wouldn’t fly in the US but I like that it exists.

In other news, water is wet.

Jokes aside, this has been known for a while. I refuse to buy a smart TV.

I made the conscious decision to buy one since it was a good deal. But you bet I’m never hooking this thing up to WiFi.

Some of these TVs automatically connect to your neighbors open WiFi.

I haven’t bought a smart tv yet, either; but, I think this is a perfect usecase for a pihole, isn’t it?

You could just not hook it up to the internet

They're known to connect to unprotected WiFi aitomatically, there's almost no escape