i know very few people who wereor are concerned about being spied on regardless of how much they should be.

I get called a downer for mentioning how this all works. You shouldn’t connect your smart tv to the network, you shouldn’t use Alexa, anything you do online is public, and it always gets recorded poorly.

Maybe my partner is the only person who listens, and she has all her stuff disabled, there are no network attached smart things in it house, but she still uses windows and she’s not yet receptive to moving to Linux (which is a hard sell).

Smart TVs just find those “open” hotspots that cable providers leave on everyone’s modem now; you don’t even need to agree to TOS before it starts locating and spying.

Every device is a wiretap. Every device is a wiretap. We live in a panopticon. The purpose of AI is to price us out of the component market. You can’t escape if you can’t afford your own hardware.

I haven’t seen any proof of this, so I’m still skeptical.

I didn’t approve any TOS setting up my tv, so this would be legally a nightmare for them.

I suppose it should be pretty easily verifiable. Just set up a new SSID without protection and see what connects.

Might as well try it with my own TV. IIRC I never accepted any TOS either.

Gamers Nexus recently released a 2-hour video on LG smart TVs and how they spy on you. I haven’t watched the entire video yet, but it seems that the damn things start recording data as soon as they receive power.

so this would be legally a nightmare for them

To many corporations such as LG, laws are just the cost of doing business. Assuming they even receive a fine it will be so small that it won’t matter.

I just mean there’s enough tech illiterate people out there that they don’t need that liability.

95% of people will just turn on the tracking and not know or think about it. Connecting to nearby wifi is more of a risk.

Oh, true. I don’t think I’ve seen even a single person in real life deny cookies on a website. That does make it weird that they start tracking even before interacting with the TOS.

a lot of thise things are great though. everyone draws the line differently. im well aware of the surveillance. to live significantly under the radar you’d need to cut out tso much more to make it meaningful. do you really just watch antenna tv and dvds? no ordering online? always use fake membership cards at the grocery? pay cash? i mean fuck. i get ya though. im just playing devils advocate for the people that may not know and are calling you a downer. EDIT: there are so many nice linux dustros now and windows is so bad, that should be one of the easiest sells imo.

No I bought an AppkeTV, which while it isn’t perfect is not doing what smart tvs do.

I’m not living as a hermit or completely off grid. I just stick to stuff that tracks me as little as reasonably possible and am mindful of what information could leak.

Like, I still have to go to hotels when travelling and they have zero data security with your ID photo and cards. I can’t fix that or avoid it. That’s life. But disabling the always on microphones in my home I can manage.

What is a smart tv doing with an AppleTV isn’t?

Automatic content recognition and selling it like LG and Samsung, inserting ads like Roku, installing residential proxies like 80% of smart tv apps.

If I’m running Netflix and they’re selling the analytics data, it doesn’t matter what platform I use. But everything around that can be avoided.

I would like to use a Linux box but haven’t found a good HDMICEC plus low power plus good app support combination (happy to take suggestions though)

At least your partner is the one you most need to have and benefit from listening. Your privacy can easily be compromised by close associates. Best of luck to you; you’re not doing anything wrong. Its not you that’s the downer, it’s the circumstances you’re describing.

Worse, if you tell them how big of a problem it is, they’ll assume you have something to hide

Up until the 80s, there was still some debate over whether wiretaps should be legal. It’s sad that we have come to accept them as normal.

It was less worrisome back then. The cost to have someone listen to and transcribe your conversations was quite high. They’d really have to want to go after someone to do it.

Now, turning voice conversations into searchable text is nearly free.

Not only that - wiretaps have Judicial Oversight in that they require a Court Order (well, in most of the World, not sure if that’s the case in present day America) which a Judge supposedly only issues if there’s reason to suspect the person whose lines are tapped of committing or preparing to commit a crime, whilst Antrophic’s surveillance of people’s conversations with their chatbot has no Judicial Oversight at all and has no minimum legal threshold that must be reached before it is allowed to happen.

I think this is one of the greatest dangers AI presents. Sure it makes some of us stupider, sure it drinks our water and eats our GPUs and raises power prices… but once upon a time, it took actual human effort to run a dragnet, even with judicial approval.

Now, you plug in an LLM to the giant pile of corporate surveillance data and ask it to find troublemakers. Anonymity is dead and its death made retroactive and since there’s no government oversight, the government can just lease access to the tools they used to need approval to use.

Back in the day the 31337 found a way around the bots.

Too bad they weren’t more elite, or they could have prevented the modern internet from becoming what it is

Sometimes counter culture isn’t about protecting others as much as carving out a space for yourself. What you’re asking for are heroes and martyrs.

Where does this apply?

To the English-speaking world and probably beyond.

People will fight you tooth and nail to prevent something they view as immediately threatening to them. On the other hand, they’ll pay you to implement something they view as immediately useful to them. In either case, they don’t care at all about any non-immediate repercussions for anything.

I’m building a fully private assistant with local Home Assistant, local model, and a local Wikipedia database for lookups. Will probably make a post/release of it soon once I finish replacing all my Google Nest displays.

I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I want to do this, but only got as far as setting up a minimal Home Assistant. Only put a few hours into it, though, then got sidetracked by trying to turn an esp32 into a speaker/microphone puck.

Well, if you’d rather a ready made solution or two

www.projectnomad.us

futureproofhomes.net

clawbox.com

Like the poster above you, I’m rolling my own. More work…but a lot cheaper

PS: you know about this one, right?

shop.m5stack.com/…/m5stack-core2-esp32-iot-develo…

Hah, you can watch my site: nowsci.com as I put everything there.

I’m very nearly at daily usable by everyone, including my partner who has a very different accent to mine. A lot of it was tuning sentences/words to catch poor STT to skip going to an LLM to speed things up and make it reliable. Here’s the current hardware in action:

@SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone yes, Ive tried a lot of LLMs and have settled on Gemma 4 2b with a very specific prompt and local MCP tools for unit conversions, weather, lookups, etc.

For Q&A, my current build uses an MCP container I made to do a SearXNG search and top result retrieval for context (I use a trick to weight Wikipedia results). The final step I haven’t completed is for this to be a backup to Kiwix, for which I also haven’t found a great search tool/index/MCP, so if you want to collab on that I’d be interested. One less thing for me to build myself ;)

I’m nearing completion here: I’ll write it up and post it when I get home and then it’s yours to pull apart use :)

PS: I personally use MCPProxy as a single endpoint for all MCPs; dunno if that helps you with orchestration at all?

Sounds great! I use MCP proxy, too, but have run into some services it just wasn’t happy with.

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