The thing is, the smart thing you hook up to it is under your control. It could be a laptop or Raspberry Pi.

Is a Windows PC really under your control nowadays? And if you connect your phone to the TV, you don't really even own those, even if you paid $1000 for your "phone". The manufacturers are the true owners unless you root them which is not always easy.

No, but you can detach the Windows PC. With a smart TV, you're stuck with whatever is in that firmware, without which the TV may not even turn on.

I guess you could detach the smart TV and replace it with another... but I get your point.

But you could plug in a Roku or a Fire TV, right? The TV can't proxy through those. It's maybe cringeworthy to say, but I probably trust those companies more than I do Samsung.

>but I probably trust those companies more than I do Samsung.

Care to explain why? It looks like both roku and firetv spies on what you watch.

https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...

You do not need to "trust," just read their respective Privacy Statements and you'll see for yourself.

This is not an argument, like not at all, it's just a distraction from the issue: Trampling all over user-rights because somewhere in hundreds of pages of ToS/EULA legal-speak there's a clause hidden supposedly justifying it all.

Here's some reality: "You’d Need 76 Work Days to Read All Your Privacy Policies Each Year" [0] and that was back in 2012. Since then ToS, EULA, Privacy Statement and whatnot have only expanded in scope, people use even more services these days and thus accept even more terms.

You'd need a dedicated law team doing all the reading and interpreting for you if you want to realistically stay informed about all that consent you've given, without having to give up large parts of your productivity just checking and tracing what weird things you supposedly agreed to [1].

There need to be some well-established limits that won't just rely on users supposedly hand-waving all their privacy away, that way the USG might actually even go back to honoring the Fourth Amendment [2].

[0] http://techland.time.com/2012/03/06/youd-need-76-work-days-t...

[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-ridiculous-eula-clauses-agr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Netflix is watching you. Youtube, on the other hand, in a private window over a VPN is as far as you can go privacy-wise.

"The content I consume". When the fuck did people start actually talking about themselves like this, it sounds like it's straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel from the 80s.

I hear you. Nobody could say this in reference to reading books. That tells you something.

I've seen "gobble up" and "devour" used in reference to books before.