Post-purchase monetization (viewing and traffic analysis that your “smart tv” phones home about, and that the company who makes your tv sells to advertisers for analytical and targeting purposes).
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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Mine has never been connected to the internet.
That’s great but if you have a lower end one (and maybe higher end - not sure what they’re doing recently tbh), it may try to sniff out unsecured or public access SSIDs to connect without your knowledge or consent and transmit metrics and metadata anyways.
We use a Linux media computer for all our watching, the TV is used as nothing more than a simple monitor. So if our TV does that, jokes on them, because all the metrics they can get is when we turn it on and off and that we watch through HDMI at the TV max resolution. 🤣🤣🤣
I stopped watching traditional TV 25 years ago, 2nd best decision I ever made, after marrying my wife. 😀
Same here, friend! Same here!
We use a Linux minicomputer as the driver.
On not watching TV: I stopped around 22 years ago. It feels so good.
There would be nothing for one to connect to out here. There's no WiFi except mine and no cell service unless you go outside.
I would probably desolder the antenna if I was in the city though.
If this is a concern, connecting to a decoy SSID that isn't actually connected to the internet may be the play.
If the device (TV) in question is doing sketchy things like sniffing for open wireless networks, I don’t think pointing it manually at a zero-access WAP stub is going to stop it - it’ll probably just dump that connection and look for another one that works.
So what would you suggest as a countermeasure? In theory rendering the on-board wifi inoperable would work, but this requires an actual alteration to the device and some technical knowledge on how to do so without damaging the TV itself.
Edit: in addition to privacy issues, this sort of behavior would be an actual cybersecurity risk.
Testing the connectivity of your connection is trivial, and the system could easily try to find another of you had no access.
Has there been any evidence of internet-enabled TVs actually doing this, or is it speculative?
The plot below shows the price of TVs across Best Buy’s Black Friday ads for the last 25 years. The units are “dollars per area-pixel”: price divided by screen area times the number of pixels (normalized so that standard definition = 1). This is to account for the fact that bigger, higher resolution TVs are more expensive. You can see that, in line with the inflation chart, the price per area-pixel has fallen by more than 90%.
Yay! Now do computer ram from 1980 to 2020 before Ai was involved, and discuss size per dollar. You wanna do CPUs or hard drives next?