Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than TVs themselves

Re:Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than ... by throwntoday on Sunday November 14, 2021 @03:33PM (#29220392)

I have a 4k Vizio dumb tv. It was the only one I could find that didn't have some laggy android/web OS and it's been solid for 4+ years. Never once connected it to the internet though.

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Re:Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than ... by acjohnson55 on Sunday November 14, 2021 @04:28PM (#29220905)

I bought a 4k Vizio P65 dumb TV 4 years ago, and to my surprise, it was upgraded over the air to a smart TV.

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Re:Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than ... by daxelrod on Sunday November 14, 2021 @05:10PM (#29221203)

Can you please give more detail about what model this was and how the upgrade worked? Did you give it an internet connection? Did it find open wifi on its own? Did it use a cellular antenna?

I'm curious as an owner of a Vizio TV that I think is a dumb TV...

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Re:Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than ... by acjohnson55 on Monday November 15, 2021 @03:18PM (#29232156)

I have the P65-C1. I had it connected to the internet, because of the built-in Chromecast client. So I was imprecise in saying "OTA", because it was just an ordinary update.

Interestingly, the TV came with no remote, because it included a simple Android tablet, instead, which was supposed to be used as a streaming source and to run the remote control app. So in a sense, it was kind of like a smart TV, but with the brains externalized to the tablet. But when they decided to upgrade it to a proper smart TV, they also mailed me a regular remote.

But yeah, I was kind of irritated, given that I specifically bought it to be more of a dumb TV. I also took care to disable the screen scraping data collection.

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