It's always amazing how many people plop anti-consumer comments out here. Like, of course you bastards deserve to be served ads on your own TV that you just paid $800 for. Because why? Because ... the market is wise, and "the market" is screwing us, so ... we must ... deserve to be screwed?

Whatever is being offered to us must be the best deal we can get, because ... it's being offered to us?

What drives this sentiment? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?

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 feel this is a generally strange situation. TVs seem to be pretty much the only tech that is somehow inflation proof, and that is largely due to the surveillance capitalist approach they come with.

I am a strong privacy advocate, but I also believe in customers choice. Hence, the primary issue I have with this technology is not its existence, but the lack of transparency in the pricing and the inability to truly properly opt out of this data collection.

At some point in the past year, I‘ve read someone suggest a „privacy label“ for electronics, akin to the energy efficiency labels that exist around the world. The manufacturers should be forced to disclose the extend of the data collection as well as the purpose and the ability to opt out on the product packaging, before the customer makes the purchase

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.