If you don't trust the TV manufacturer to include spying devices in their product, there is no reason to believe the "dumb" TV you brought from them is any less capable.

And how exactly is a dumb TV with no WiFi radio, ethernet port, or any other forms of outgoing communication going to phone home? Please enlighten me.

How can you prove that your TV doesn't have a WiFi antenna inside? There's plenty of space to hide something like that in.

... and what network will it be connecting to? Sure maybe a free hotspot here or there, but many of these TVs will not have access to even those.

And hell yeah you can prove it's not in there, either with a quick wireless scan or even a simple physical tear down of the housing which can then be put back together.

Show me a dumb TV that has been wired up to spy on people that has been in the wild before.

You can do those things, but you're not going to.

> You can do those things, but you're not going to.

This is a 100% trash point. I have yet to see an unknown device on my network from a dumb screen, let alone any additional microphones or cameras on said dumb screen. I have also not seen or heard of any reports of it becoming a spying type device. You mean to tell me the dumb panel I bought, which is from a major manufacture with known tear downs and a ton of buyers, managed to sneak this hardware in (even something like a cellular radio) and nobody noticed?

I'll repeat this for you so you perhaps it will impact you this time: Show me a dumb TV that has been wired up to spy on people that has been in the wild before.

Please come equipped with citations, references, and examples before commenting.

No, because you're not worth spying on. Show me a unicorn. Please come equipped with a living sample and a detached horn before replying.

> Please come equipped with a living sample and a detached horn before replying.

You cannot show up to a thread, a demand that a negative be proven. That's not how that works, and the burden of proof is on you.

> Show me a unicorn.

If you're not going to be constructive here, just stop commenting.

I did not demand a negative be proven. The only one here who cares about proving anything is you. I was only using a rhetorical device to illustrate the absurdity of what you said. Sorry if that wasn't clear, I realize English is probably not your native language.

I don't trust the TV manufacturer to secure their initial release of their "smart" os, and I surely don't expect them to keep it patched. Anybody who breaks into your video-enabled tv can see everything you're doing...

Not if it isn't connected to your network.

> Not if it isn't connected to your network.

Not if it isn't connected to a network. But its hardly as if devices with manufacturer-paid cellular connectivity built in and preconfigured don't exist, so there's no reason that it has to be your network.

To the extent that manufacturers are either monetizing networked services or deriving useful data from them, making them independent of end-user networking choices has a pretty clear benefit, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it become a common thing in Smart TVs.

Valid point. But then you're left with a bunch of crap in the UI that is unnecessary and annoying at best.

Really? I'm not. My smart TV defaults to just displaying whatever the incoming signal tells it to.

And if some manufacturer decides to clutter things, I just won't buy it. Problem solved.

It's not too much of a stretch for smart TVs to start including cellular connectivity (and advertising it as "zero-setup").

And who will pay for that cellular connectivity?

This is getting well into ad absurdum (a common problem on HN). Smart TVs are perfectly fine for the person who doesn't want a smart TV. Just don't use any of the smart TV features and don't connect it to the network. Problem solved.

Nobody thought Amazon would put a cell phone antenna into an eBook reader, but look what happened! :)

That's exactly the example I was thinking of as precedent.