If they want to collect air quality stats from my location they should pay me for that data.

From their perspective, they probably gave you a discount for your data. See also https://www.businessinsider.com/smart-tv-data-collection-adv...

You can get the version that phones home or you can pay extra for the version that doesn't.

I suppose the problem is that they'd make this transparent and there would likely be a bit of backlash ... thank goodness that regulatory agencies have our best interests at heart /s

I originally bought Kindles without ads, but for my third Kindle I decided to buy it with ads to see how bad they were. You can pay the extra later to get rid of ads, so if it turns out buying the version with ads was a mistake it is easy to fix it.

I don't see the sleep screen except briefly between the time I open the cover and the time the Kindle wakes up. I'm rarely on the home screen. I do almost all book shopping on my computer rather than on my Kindle. Thus I almost never actually see an ad, and when I do it is almost always not interfering with what I'm there to do.

The few ads that I do briefly see in those rare times I'm not in a book or in my library are static images without sound. For the sleep screen it is usually an ad for a book and the image is the book cover, which is often actually nice to look at.

After actually seeing the ads, I now feel like I wasted my money buying the ad-free versions for my first two Kindles.

I've done this with one other Kindle and several other people have done it based on my experience and they've all gotten ads removed for free and some have gotten store credit in various amounts.

I didn't even mention why I wanted the ads gone, I just asked how to remove them and they gave me free books and a typically $20 upgrade for free.

There was a time that the Kindle ads were actually appropriate. I've even purchased the odd sci-fi book that showed up on the wake screen. But that's been a couple of years. Now I get the same bodice-rippers you're seeing. What a waste; Amazon has my book purchase history going back 20 years, and that is what you're showing me? Do your advertising customers know this? Because, shallow guy that I am, I read sci-fi, philosophy, and books on distance running. That's pretty much it. I did read part of a Danielle Steele book (imagine GPT-3 wrote a romance novel...) 35 years ago when I was married to a woman who read those, but I doubt Amazon knows that.

This is a nice trite trope, but getting an affordable TV without these features might be nearly impossible for most people these days.

But he hates it because there's a million buttons and menus to navigate, when all he wants is to type in the channel numbers.

It even needed a firmware update out of the box and he didn't have a clue why a TV would need new software and immediately panicked and refused to use the thing until we drove 150 miles to accept the update for him

We just wanted a TV that receives terrestrial TV and has a couple of HDMI ports for his DVR which he knows how to use without over complex menus, is that so much to ask?

If you don't plug it into the internet it's not going to be a smart tv

Could replace the remote with a Old Person Remote perhaps.

Just looked for a random tv, it has a normal remote to me https://ao.com/product/vel50fo01uk-veltech-tv-black-66496-10... scroll right on the photos

It is not a question about affordable TV. The only ones that does not have smart features (as far as I can identify) are the cheapest LCD ones at the bottom of the price list.

The best alternatives that I can find is projectors or monitors, as those seems to so far not expect an Internet connection.

But you can forget about common TV features like HDR support, DTS/DD audio decoding, usable remotes and other useful features.

Finally, there is a 30 second "sponsorship punishment" if it sees you have brought a product competing with its sponsor.

So say the sponsor is Coke and it sees a 2 liter bottle of pepsi in your home. It displays something literally equivalent to (not in exactly so many words) "we are punishing you for bringing pepsi into our home, because our sponsor is coke." It then counts down a 30 second punishment timer. As a shopper you dont have THAT strong of a preference between coke and pepsi. So the next time you need to watch a movie on the dictator (name of TV set) you buy coke that night instead of pepsi.

Does that cross a line? How would you legislate against it? Devices shall not act as slave owners over humans who have bought them?

Well, um....

On what grounds would a punishment timer be illegal?

There was literally a Black Mirror episode about something very similar.

It is literally possible for a television to include a punishment timer (as in, it is pretty trivial to code up, if the device isn't rooted.) What happens if a company sells one that literally identifies shopping and uses a punishment timer for people who buy a competitor to their sponsor instead of their sponsor? can you make it illegal?

So I am going to say, for the technically inclined its time to chase down your router firewall logs and find where the TV is going to for ads and block the IP or port range. Would be curious what the TV does, properly engineered it should just act as if its not connected at all.

This would not be without precedent. Some Samsung TVs already refuse to exit setup mode if they can't connect to the Internet after initial power-on to geo-lookup their IP to make sure that they're being used in the country they're sold for.

The best solution for streaming is a low-end PC with hardware video decoding and the ability to run Ublock Origin.

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Edit: I see from other comments that Samsung TVs already go into degraded functionality mode if they can't connect to their ad servers, and already serve some ads from endpoints used for necessary functionality.

I still use my Chromecast for Youtube, because the UI in a browser isn't great for couch use. On the CC, multiple people can add videos to the playback queue, I haven't found a good replacement for that yet.

For anything longer than a typical Youtube video, it's not an issue finding a movie and starting it from a wireless keyboard.

Our current TV is a 42" LG that I got for free from work. It's old enough to not have any "smart" features, it has no networking at all. The picture quality is great and no ghosting unlike a lot of older LCDs. I am not looking forward to the day I eventually have to replace it.

I just found out this weekend; with an older, cca 2013-ish samsung tv, connected to a network that has OpenWRT router with Adblock, and forced redirect of all port 53, 853 traffic to the local resolver. It cannot resolve its mothership (the rules were already in the Adblock list, I didn't add anything). The TV shows up a messagebox that it cannot to the Internet and asking the user to check the connection.

The local DLNA sources work.

However recently I wanted to setup my home automation system to automatically turn the TV off when I go to bed or outside, and for that I needed to connect it to the home network.

I solved this by confguring the router firewall to drop any package from the TV to the internet. It works!

Integration brings unneeded obsolescence and reduces choice and control. May be hard to avoid in space constrained phones but should not be needed on tvs.

If it becomes impossible to buy a TV that doesn't just display what I chose by the time this one is due for replacement, I'll take a device sold as a computer monitor instead. Or a projector. Maybe I'll pay extra, but I'll be fine with that.