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Re:Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African w... by r00fus on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @04:44PM (#28294765)
Amazon sidewalk [1] has entered the chat. The article focuses on "neighbors" but I'm pretty sure the main use case is to enable smart TVs and other IOT to phone home despite being disallowed.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/amazon-devices-will-...

Re:Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African w... by Sebb767 on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @05:10PM (#28295056)
> I'm pretty sure the main use case is to enable smart TVs and other IOT to phone home despite being disallowed.

I highly doubt that. Rolling out this network is a lot of work and I'm nearly 100% certain this is to reduce claims of non-working devices caused by bad WiFi, plus maybe the option to sell network access on a wide range of devices.

Avoiding blocked network for TVs and other "smart" appliances is surely a nice benefit, but I doubt even 1% of people actually block network access (hell, most probably want it!). There's no way Amazon would pour that amount of effort into extracting that minuscule piece of tracking data.

Re:Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African w... by criddell on Tuesday August 24, 2021 @04:57PM (#28294917)
Thanks for posting that. I was trying to remember what it was called and couldn't.