Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a suit on Monday against Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, and Hisense, claiming in a press release that they "have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (“ACR”) technology.”
Paxton goes on to label ACR as “an uninvited, invisible digital invader,” and in one of the five separately filed suits, he calls Samsung TVs “a mass surveillance system.”
Since this is Texas, I’m predicting the suit will be settled once they secure a contract that ensures they get copies of every collection in Texas, indexed by name, address, and if available, SSN in perpetuity.
I mean, once they’re a state-sanctioned invader, it’s not longer illegal
Those Texas MAGAs are just pissed they didn’t think of it first. Give them a bribe, they’ll go away.
I personally submitted Hisense’s ACR servers to a popular DNS adblock list that’s used by a lot of products.
And just like that, anyone with a VIDAA TV hiding behind a pi-hole went dark.
We should really make sure every TV gets checked.
Anyone remember Weeping Angel?
I’d actually prefer a dumb TV, we only use jellyfin anyway and that could be served by some raspy or similar. But they’re extinct it seems. At least modern ones with 4 or 8k.
I hate this dumbing down of everything.
Sceptre
Yes, I couldn’t find one when my old LG from 2012 died. I did not activate wifi, added TV antenna. I already have Chromecast TV so I’m tracked enough, thanks.
However, it’s also possible that during setup, the TV may have asked if we’d like “an enhanced and personalized viewing experience.” Who wouldn’t say yes to that?
I dunno, anyone who actually reads it? “Enhanced and personalized” always means spyware. Always.
Oh people like you make my head hurt. Not because you’re wrong, because you’re not. You’re entirely right here.
The reason people like you make my head hurt is because you live in this self isolated bubble where you think everyone else is mentally on the same page as you.
You’re baffled that anyone would agree to that checkbox, because anyone who reads it would understand as you understand that it’s not in your best interest.
Whereas I’M baffled that you think hardly anyone reads the EULA of anything.
Google could literally put in their EULA “user agrees to chop off their genitals and walk barefoot on hot coals”. People would still agree and check yes. Why? Because they never read it. They just click the thing that lets them do the thing and use the thing. Thats as far as 99% go with EULAs.
I’ve watched people like you in person complain that everybody doesn’t do things their way. And while that way is, in general, a better way than is currently being handled, it all falls apart on one key aspect to not understanding the world. That important key being that the world does not see things through your eyes. They do not think of things from your perspective. But instead of taking action to create a world with better ideas being practiced, you sit on the sidelines, watching as the world does what the world will do, and thats be influenced by others. That is what humanity has always been. That’s what it will always be. But in the last 200 years, instead of being influenced by the ideas of a community upbringing, and structure, and morals, it is now, and for all of our lives, been influenced by the ultra rich. The 1%.
We’ve fallen into a world where a persons worth is equal to their net worth. A world where celebrities and ultra rich businessmen are celebrated rather than shunned. Entire genres of music where the sole message is “I have money, therefore bitches fuck me”. And the masses flock to it, because they have adopted that message as their own.
Here you sit. Not having fallen for the basic tricks that are played on society. That alone gives you a huge step up, to rise above the glass ceiling, break through, and bring changes needed to this world.
Instead, you ponder why no one else recognizes there is a glass ceiling. You question why others aren’t doing things the way you would, while offering no resistence of substance.
Everyone wants to complain about shrinkflation, but nobody wants to stop buying the product. If they change the formula, or the price, or the portion size, or whatever, and suddenly they have 0 purchases, things go back how they were real fucking quick. It is up to us, as the ones who see what is happening to educate those around us. To filter out the static noise of the internet’s social media. To teach our loved ones that they are being ripped off. Stop buying “smart” tv’s. Teach those around you to only buy dumb tv’s. And if there’s no dumb tv’s on sale, then there’s no tv’s to buy. And if they keep not selling dumb tv’s, you keep not buying. You teach those around you to keep not buying.
This is how you fight the war against the elite. Not with guns, but with wallets that refuse to open. They can’t take our money unless we agree to buy their goods.
But we’ll never get to that point from the sidelines.
This is how you fight the war against the elite. Not with guns, but with wallets that refuse to open. They can’t take our money unless we agree to buy their goods.
No, this cannot work. Their wallets are much, much bigger than almost all of ours combined.
That was a staggeringly large number of words relative to the number of things you actually said.
tl;dr: I think I’m just going to press OK on this
EULAwall of text.Oh ok
Why can’t you guys take a win? Just say it’s good Texas is doing this
It is because of who is running Texas. We don’t believe them. It’s either kabuki, or a means to extract something from the corporations while blowing smoke up our asses.
Because the likely outcome will be a shady backroom business deal where they take a cut or just a payoff and you’ll never hear about it again. It’s Texas.
No. The likely outcome is this. I’m going to use fake numbers for the sake of demonstrating a concept.
Samsung spies on you. From the data, they can harvest $500 million dollars throughout Texas tv watchers sending info back to South Korea.
Texas says “Hey! Whoa! You can’t do that! You better stop or we’ll fine you $20,000 dollars!”
Samsung says “Ok”, and keeps doing it. Pays the fine, and takes it to court. They lose the case, but cost Texas $15,000 of court costs just to win. Then they keep doing it.
Now Texas thinks twice about charging the fee, because last time they only got $5,000 after defending themselves in court.
Meanwhile Samsung just views it as the cost of doing business. And carries on.
Angry upvote. This is the case when they are serious about it. See my other comment for how I feel Texas approaches it.
This is the way.
… in almost everything.
5 quick bribes later:
Ken Paxton and Governor Greg Abbott announce new initiative to forcibly ensure working ACR in all Texans’ TVs and reporting where they’ve directed, “to protect children from harmful content”
Bruh every single aspect of modern life is invasive deceptive and basically unlawful. I don’t want to be a part of it anymore. And from the looks of it the plan is to make this surveillance and ai lifestyle the base foundation of all that is digital, including money once it goes digital with a government run crypto. This is already dystopian. And it’s like there’s a civil war revolution that will inevitably happen. They already do the dirt… So we are passed that… They are already done testing technologies, and are implementing them in the process of moving from fed funded public companies to government.
The decision has been made already, everything else is theater of false choice and false democracy.
Isn’t that project 2025 in a nutshell. It’s happening right now. And people just stay distracted by marketed BS made to keep them distracted.
It feels evil and rapey. The government and all that I was taught was “good” feels evil and rapey.
Another angry upvote for you.
guess samsung didn’t pay their bribe on time.
It’s projection. Paxton doesn’t like who’s benefiting.
Or extortion. He makes a stink, they make some campaign donations, and he backs off or gives them a slap on the wrist.
He’s following his fellow criminal and messiah Trump who has been exporting companies left and right.
Yup. He just sued the EPIC medical record company this past week or so claiming they are a monopoly. Took me 5 minutes to figure out he’s just mad Epic allows their hospital clients to restrict parents from accessing some of their kids medical information once they’re past the age of 12. I don’t think I have to spell out what he doesn’t want kids to be able to hide from their parents. It’s disgusting. There’s always an ulterior motive with this fuck
Source? I’m interested as I work closely with Epic. They have a monopoly but whether they are being anti-competitive is the question.
Here you go. Beckers newsletter is great to follow if you work in the healthcare space
It is, but it goes straight to my Graymail folder. Probably because ,y employer is concerned for what I might read in it. Thanks!
Edit: well it seems Epic is another “woke” company. I hate this timeline.
Mass surveillance system? Yes, of course. That’s the whole point. Tracking and profiling you to charge more for ads.
Lmao these smart TVs are basically the screens in the book 1984, in every house.
Rare Ken Paxton win.
Something something about a broken clock being right twice a day.
Ken Paxton saying or doing something reasonable and/or beneficial is more like finding a random page torn out from a page-a-day calendar and having it be the right day and date but from a different year
If it’s illegal why isn’t the state executive branch making arrests? Why isn’t the state legislative banning the sale of these devices?
If I was selling an illegal product, they wouldn’t be dragging my happy ass through court to get relief from my actions.
Because corporations are only people when it comes to good things. If it’s a bad thing, corporate veil protects the people doing the crimes because they have (what no one who puts any thought to it would believe is) plausible deniability because they never told people to do illegal things, they just said they wanted something done and let their underlings figure it out.
yeah, but you wouldn’t be able to settle for a lucrative deal that the Texan elite can personally benefit from. that’s the difference.
Do YouTube next. Do websites next.
Websites have already been „done“ by the GDPR and the companies just implemented the measures with a clear malicious intent, bullying their users into compliance and blaming the horrible cookie banners they implemented on the EU.
Yeah, I was responsible for a moderately high-volume site, and getting it GDPR compliant wasn’t all that much effort. That’s because we’re not scumbags abusing our users’ personal information.
And yeah, the cookie-banners bullshit isn’t required, it was just passive aggression by sites butthurt that they couldn’t intrusively track their users so easily anymore.
Well I mean, it was implemented about as well as California Prop 65, which had the effect of printing “This product contains chemicals known in the state of California to cause cancer” on literally everything ever made.
