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Most likely case is that the tv is computing hash locally and sending the hash. Judging by my dnstap logs, roku TV maintains a steady ~0.1/second heartbeat to `scribe.logs.roku.com` with occasional pings to `captive.roku.com`. The rest are stragglers that are blocked by `*.roku.com` DNS blackhole. Another thing is `api.rokutime.com`, but as of writing it's a CNAME to one of `roku.com` subdomains.

The block rates seem to correlate with watch time increasing to ~1/second, so it's definitely trying to phone home with something. Too bad it can't since all its traffic going outside LAN is dropped with prejudice.

If your network allows to see stuff like that, look into what PS5 is trying to do.

That sounds so expensive it's hard to see it making money. You'd processing a 2fps video stream for each customer. That's a huge amount of data.

And all that is for the chance to occasionally detect that someone's seen an ad in the background of a stream? Do any platforms even let a streamer broadcast an NFL game like the example given?

It’s far less important for ad-free content. They mainly want to connect your ad watching behaviour to an email and then have loyalty program data connected to the same email so that they can identify which ads convert vs not.

This is especially annoying and just incredibly creepy -- I was watching a clip of Smiling Friends on YouTube (via my Apple TV), and I suddenly got a banner telling me to watch this on HBO Max.

I never felt more motivated to pi-hole the TV.

So potentially completely noncompliant if used in a business. E.g. it may have HIPAA, top secret etc.

I'd like to weaponize all this scanning into a force for good. Instead of phoning home to Roku, send the fingerprints up to an ADID database registering every ad on the planet. Open up an API so that any video stream can detect an ad and inject Max Headroom replacement clips.

Come on hackers. We could murder the global economy with this shit.

The PS5 doesn't need to, they get it all in metadata because they control the full stack — TVs do it because they have less control over sources.

Time for me to get Apple TV.

> > Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution.

Isn't that too much data to even begin to analyze? The only winner here seems like S3.

You mean like GDPR but stronger?

ACR — Automatic Content Recognition: tech in some smart TVs/apps that identifies what’s on-screen (often via audio/video “fingerprints”) and can report viewing data back to vendors/partners.

VPPA — Video Privacy Protection Act: a U.S. law aimed at limiting disclosure of people’s video-viewing/rental history.

HDCP — High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection: an anti-copy protocol used on HDMI/DisplayPort links to prevent interception/recording of protected video.

DRM — Digital Rights Management: a broad term for technical restrictions controlling how digital media can be accessed, copied, or shared.

MPAA — Motion Picture Association of America: the former name of the main U.S. film-industry trade group (now typically called the MPA, Motion Picture Association).

TV / TVs — Television(s).

Next stop: auto manufacturers and location data.

This is an excellent idea.

another POV is, stop using a TV

This is what seemingly every app does. They add 15 different categories for notifications / emails / whatever, and then make you turn off each one individually. Then they periodically remove / add new categories, enabled by default. Completely abusive behavior.

I firewall my TV from my Printer just so they don't get any ideas.

I have a Hisense TV which recently did the same. It turned on personal recommendations and advertising. I have no idea where the ads are or how it works; I only use devices over HDMI. I'm sure the TV is spying on me incessantly nonetheless.

I’m using my tv with all the stuff disabled (the ones it’s possibly disable), but even then I realize I don’t trust them and I don’t trust their choices. Because they get to say sorry and not held responsible.

I want smart tv because I want use my streaming services but that’s it. I also want high quality panels. Maybe the solution is high quality TVs where you just stick a custom HDMI device (similar to Amazon fire stick) and use it as the OS. Not sure if there are good open source options since Apple seems to be another company that keeps showing you ads even if you pay shit load of money for their hardware and software, Jobs must turning in his grave

I call this Zucking.

When a new permission appears without notice and defaults to the most-violating setting, gaslighting you into the illusion of agency but in fact you never had any, you've been Zucked.

The real trick is to never connect your TV to the internet under any circumstances. These things are displays, they don't need the internet to do their job. Leave that to the game consoles and streaming boxes.

If the lawsuit goes forward, it'll be really easy to force the same on Vizio.

Well it wouldn't be Texas if there wasn't some grotesque corruption involved. Vizio is the absolute worst of the TV manufacturers when it comes to this shit, so now it's clear Texas is really just trying to bully Walmart's competition rather than do something positive for consumers.

Humans are intensely social creatures, and are not adapted to feel the same way about things done invisibly versus visibly. That's how you end up in weird situations where people know the pervasive spying we're subjected to is wrong, but can't muster the will to act on it most of the time. It's cases like these where "voting with your wallet" produces terrible results. On one end you have organized groups of people figuring out chinks in human instincts, and on the other you have an unorganized mass of people doing what feels right or is expedient. You need coordination on both ends for competition and optimization to play out and find an acceptable compromise.

Exactly. The free market has very little recourse when companies basically all start doing the same thing, and more or less don’t tell you about it. You certainly don’t see “takes a screenshot of your TV every 2s and uploads it for us to analyze” plastered all over the boxes! I guess the idea is the consumer will be omniscient and that a company will come along offering a privacy protecting alternative… but those incentives just doooo not work!

Seriously, totally deranged to think the “free market” is capable of protecting humans against widespread nefarious behavior from colluding actors with vast amounts of money and power.

It's driven by the fact that many of these people work for companies doing similar things, and this is how they resolve the cognitive dissonance. Otherwise they'd have to accept that their work is unethical.

Because the companies are selling technology to us cheaper than cost in exchange for this? I do think they should be required to offer a revenue-neutral way to turn off ads but it would cost several hundred dollars and only me & 5 other weirdos on this website would buy it.

You can look at Vizio's quarterly statements before Walmart bought them: their devices were margin negative and "Platform+" (ads) made up for it: https://investors.vizio.com/financials/quarterly-results/def...

I don't like ACR at all.. but after reading all the raging about ads on TVs I thought they would be terrible. Then I got one recently - the ads are literally just links to watch movies & TV series I might be interested in, on my TV? Like yes I do want my TV to show me some things I might be interested in watching, the same way Youtube does. I don't like the increasing privacy violations like ACR being used to tune those "ads", but seeing recommendations on my TV is a feature I like..

Heck if I had strong guarantees that the data generated by ACR was used only to tune recommendations/ads using an anonymous advertising ID like IDFA and not linked to any personally identifying information, I would want that too. But sadly there is no privacy and no way of ensuring that now.

I can not like something without wanting to make it illegal to do it. Simple as that. My preferences aren't necessarily someone else's preferences.

HN tell me people want adverts, they are for my benefit so I can benefit from them.

HN is a haven for principled libertarians but I don't see many such comments in this thread.

The problem is that consumers are not savvy. They go to the store, and compare TVs based on features presented. Colors, refresh rate, size, etc.

Its only when they get home (and likely not even right away) that they discover their TV is spying on them and serving ads.

This is a perfect situation where government regulation is required. Ideally, something that protects our privacy. But, minimally something like a required 'nutrition label' on any product that sends our data off device.

The problem is lack of information at time of purchase, in both cases. It's so onerous to figure out what these products are doing that people give up. Same in the airline case. If any of the airlines actually provided better service at a higher price, they'd have a market, but it's impossible to assess that as an end user with all the fake review bullshit that's all over the Internet these days.

The only cases where it's clearcut are a few overseas airlines like Singapore Airline who have such a rock solid reputation for great service that people will book them even if the price is 2x.

I don’t agree with this. The only way this would make sense is if consumers were made aware of spying vs not spying prior to purchase.

But TV manufacturers can change the TV’s behavior long after it is purchased. They can force you to agree to new terms of service which can effectively make the TV a worse product. You cannot conclude the consumer didn’t care.

A situation in which many people care a little,but a few people care a lot in the other direction,is almost exactly what government is for. Ken Paxton has issues, for sure, but good on him in this case.

> If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.

I am not convinced of this. there is more recurring revenue involved in spying on people

> Sadly, it seems like the contingent of people who have a problem with Smart TVs is small but noisy, and has no real market power.

No one cares. Smart TVs are super awesome to non tech people who love them. Plug it in, connect to WiFi - Netflix and chill ready. I have a friend who just bought yet another smart TV so he can watch the Hockey game from his bar.

> If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.

What happened to that Jumbo (dumbo?) TV person who was on here wanting to build these things? My guess is they saw the economics and the demand and gave up. I applaud them for trying though. I still cling to my two dumb 1080 Sony TVs that have Linux PC's hooked to them.

"If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one."

The problem is easily solved and I'm surpised more people don't do it. For years I've just connected a PVR/STB (set top box) to a computer monitor. It's simple and straightforward, just connect the box's HDMI output into a computer monitor.

Moreover, PVR/STBs are very cheap—less than $50 at most, I've three running in my household.

If one wants the internet on the same screen just connect a PC to another input on your monitor. This way you've total isolation, spying just isn't possible.

I think government is the only way to regulate below pain threshold nonsense that weighs down society.

but I think small issues in society might translate to small issues for government action, and regulatory capture has a super-high roi overturning "minor" stuff.

I suspect only showing real harm for something is the only way to get these things high-enough priority for action.

I kind of wonder if the pager attacks, or the phone nonsense in ukraine/russia might make privacy a priority?

isn't a smart TV that's not connected to the internet just a dumb TV?

Hope does spring eternal, doesn't it 8-/

If no one manufactures such a product, how does the "market" express this desire?

Buying one toaster, that would last your lifetime, is easily manufactured today, and yet no company makes such a thing. This is true across hundreds of products.

The fact is, manufacturing something that isn't shit, is less profitable, so what we're gonna get is shit. It doesn't really matter what people "want".

This is true for toasters and TVs...

If there were any significant number of people who would pay for a dumb high end TV, the market would sell them one.

I don't think they would. There are some TV manufacturers that are better about not nagging you (which is one of the reasons why I bought a Sony last year), but as time moves forward, companies have been less likely to leave money on the table. This is just the logical result of capitalism. Regulation will be the only way to protect consumer privacy.

Similarly, air travel gets worse as consumer protection regulations gets rolled back

Dumb TVs are hard to find: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/the-ars-technica-gui...

This isn't really an accurate analysis because it assumes the only parties involved are the TV manufacturers and the purchasing consumers. In fact the third party is ad brokers and so the calculus to alienate some users in pursuit of ad dollars is different.

This sounds like victim blaming to me. "What do you mean you don't understand how software and the internet works and thought this was just a TV?!"

If you want to make a free market argument you need to look up what a free market is. In particular, consumers need to have perfect information. Do you really think if manufacturers were obligated to make these "features" clear that most people wouldn't care?

This is called contextual advertising. It's becoming more popular as cookies are becoming less effective.

AT&T sounds like the same thing, Google sounds different because they theoretically claim to not sell your data, and instead sell ads, and Google can show you an ad you want to see because Google knows you so well. It doesn’t precisely sell you to advertisers in the same way.

Anyways, the whole thing sucks for consumer privacy and needs to be outlawed. The problem is that companies come up with unique, tricky ways of exploiting you, and people can never fully understand it without a lot of effort. Someone might be ok using Google and seeing contextual ads, but wouldn’t be ok if they knew Google was saving a screenshot of their browser every second and uploading and reselling it. The first can feel innocuous, the second feels evil.

One does not want to end up on the bad side of Nevada's Gaming Commission [1]. They can and will rip you apart.

[1] https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000298248/hearing-in-la...

The thing is, I want smart features, I just don't want those smart features to be tied to the display. A separate box allows more consumer choice, which is generally a better experience. Easily flashable firmware would be an acceptable alternative for the same reason.

Just don’t connect your TV to the internet.

Yes I know there is a theoretical capability for it to connect to unsecured WIFI. No one still has unsecured WIFI anymore

I would much rather buy a dumb TV. I feel that the smart TV experience is an opportunity it eventually make TVs feel dated and slow. I would rather buy a standalone streamer that I can plug in. Buying a new $100 dollar streamer every couple years is cheaper and produces less e-waste than buying a new giant TV.

I isolate smart TVs and other IOT devices to a separate network/subnet, and usually block their network access unless they need an update.

A related alternative would be that the listed tv price included the price of time spent viewing ads, and the sale price of your usage data (and that changing the price, say by showing more ads, required agreement).

A DUMB TV costs $x, while a badly behaved smart TV costs $y up front, plus $z per hour for the next few years, where y is potentially slightly less than x.

They say you can just get a large PC monitor, for me it's the ads that would drive me nuts

The exist, for commercial/enterprise use (usually digital signage and meeting rooms). They cost a few times more than consumer-grade, because of the word 'enterprise'

I have this article growing in the back of my head that is currently mostly a rant about how impractical technology turned out by comparing the current state with the old days. It's hard as there are countless examples and I want to address only the most embarrassing ones. Dumb vs smart TV alone could fill a tomb worth of downgrades. Do you remember the variable resistor, the rotary knob that provided volume control? The ease of use, the granularity, the response time!

I currently have volume control on my TV, one on the OS on the computer that drives it and one on the application that makes the picture. That is only half the problem

https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/pblj86/windows...

I own a 60 year old black and white tv. If the volume knob vanished people would know the problem is in my head.

Look at "Commercial" TVs. This is what they call dumb TV's nowadays. I guess they're mainly targeted at businesses who want a TV to for things like informational displays, conferences, etc.

I only found this out because I thought my 15 year old plasma TV had died, but it ended up being the power cord.

I've been using my pi-hole as my DNS and then also firewall blocking the TV from phoning out on port 53 in case the manufacturer has hardcoded DNS. Though I agree with the point and I shouldn't have to do this. This is just mitigation.

You say "only", but if it is illegal, optional, and can be detected freely, it is very likely to not happen. For all the snark one can muster about DOJ, with those three things in place, it could get expensive very quickly to try to circumvent the law.

What about cheap cellular modems built in?

A broken clock is right twice a day!

Perhaps. But you also need to ask why Paxton is doing this as this case will vaporize as soon as that is accomplished. I would be much more optimistic if California were also signed onto this.

Paxton, however, doesn't give one iota of damn about individual freedom. So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge.

Unfortunately, we don't have Molly Ivins around anymore to tell us what is really going on here in the Texas Laboratory for Bad Government.

Sony, Samsung, and LG are not Chinese companies but they are being sued. It's more likely that Vizio is not included because they already got hit by the FTC (but not hard enough to disable ACR).

Doesn't the $2 million fine paid by Walmart just make this a cost of doing business? Doesn't seem enough to be a deterrent.

So.. if it was American companies doing the spying it would be a different story?

And of course: casual reminder that Vizio does extensive ACR and ad targeting, and even bought a company doing it to facilitate that:

> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]

But I'm sure Texans are fully aware and consented to this, right?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizio

That exists, it's called a pi-hole, and it's very popular. It will block the 'tv spy' apps.

You probably overestimate the market for something like that. Most people don't know or care. Those that do are more likely to hang out on HN or adjacent places and know how to deal with it themselves anyways.

A sibling comment says "just use Pi-hole" which kind of works and is also inadequate. A similar system is Ad Guard Home. These work at the DNS level with preset lists of bad domains. They aren't necessarily going to catch your TV calling out to notanadserver.samsung.com because that domain name is not recorded in the list of naughty domains. They are definitely not going to help if your device reaches out via IP.

Another approach is to disallow all DNS or only allow *.netflix.com for the TV. In my experience attempting to only allow certain domains is a game of whackamole where everyone in the house complains their stuff is broken because it needs undocumentedrandomdomain.com.

Until Samsung builds a fridge that won't cool if it goes more than some period of time (a week?) without pinging their servers. They'd probably get away with it given the friction of getting a large appliance out of your home and back to the store. Bonus evil points for making this feature active only after the return/warranty period expires.

How do you watch streaming content? If you choose a movie in Netflix, I expect it makes an outgoing connection to Netflix's servers.

> they will be the next Google

No, Google will copy them and shut them down.

Probably because Ken Paxton has no issue with surveillance.

I loathe whenever an older family member ends up at the TV menu, since chances are they will not be able to find their way back to whatever external device they were trying to use the TV as a monitor for. TVs using android seem to be irritated that you even plan on using some external device plugged into the HDMI ports.

That still doesn't escape ACR, AFAIK. These "smart" TVs still capture screenshots from HDMI inputs.

That's one of the reasons I only buy Sony for years now. ACR & the like are opt-out at the first terms/privacy screen, and you can even go into Android/Google TV settings and just disable the APK responsible. (Samba something-something)

You may want to look into an AVR (audio/video receiver), also known as a home theater receiver. Aside from powering speakers, that's their core function: connect a variety of inputs (HDMI, AirPlay, radio, composite, etc. etc.) to one or more outputs.

Imagine looking around in the year 2025 and concluding that TV prices are high.

I mean, I expect it to happen in my lifetime.

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

So you buy a big TV, unbox it, and disagree to the TOS. Can it still be used through one of its HDMI ports?

I was going to say the same thing. I am really surprised to see Texas did this. I will now follow this keenly to see the resolution

He probably already got one, from Vizio, for leaving them out of the lawsuits.

I was going to say, "at last, something good out of Texas". Maybe you're on to something?

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It’s impossible to offer any differing opinions or discussion on the differences between the smart TV thing and your whataboutism without triggering a flame war and being downvoted to oblivion.

What does this have to do at all with the posted article about smart TV’s?

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