Cotton balls would have been cheaper... :)
Easy enough fix: Don’t buy a smart TV...
Do what I did. Pay to have your old flat screen repaired. Often times it just requires replacement of the power converter.
Cover the camera with opaque material. Is that doable?
I suppose you could unplug it when not in use.
It's not like Obama is on 24/7.
It just seems that way sometimes.
So why get it? There are plenty of “dumb TV” options available.
If we required private companies to pay us for the information that would stop one set of abuses.
Then all we need is a fourth amendment of the Constitution to take care of the rest of the abuses.
Oh, yeah, we already have that. What we need is courts that enforce it.
In Soviet Russia, television watches you.
Sooooo... don’t connect it to your wireless or wired network. Good luck getting info out of it remotely then.
BookMark
1. Why did you buy it? And
2. Why are you connecting it to the internet?
There’s no way in hell I would put one of these things in my house.
Uh...or so I've been told.
Only thing that scares me about my smartTV is how much it talks to my bluray. It’ll turn the bluray on when I navigate to the correct input, it pauses the bluray if I navigate away, and unpauses when I go back. Kind of creepy. His complaints are silly how does he expect the high tech features to work without the “bad”? You can’t really do gesture control without a camera and some level of personal recognition. You can’t create a list of favorite apps and websites without storing the info. You can’t store logins without cookies in some form. Wanting those features without the “tracking” is like demanding locks without keys, just not gonna happen.
That’s the beauty of being a FReeper.
You know you’re at the top of the regime’s list so you never have to worry about stuff like this.
1984 - Orwell; “The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
We bought a Visio smart tv from Sam’s Club, brought it home, set it up, turned it on...and it lasted about 10 minutes before locking up. The remote did nothing, neither did the minimal manual controls on the set itself. The only way to turn it off was to unplug it.
Took it back and swapped out for a new one. Same thing happened except didn’t even get 10 minutes.
Took it back, got another one. The exasperated salesman said I probably needed to set something differently in our house router (file sharing something or other. I did that. Lasted for about a half hour this time. Locked up again.
Took the Visio Smart TV back, swapped out for a Samsung Stupid TV...works just fine.