I want my TV to be a TV, not a security and privacy threat

Our TV just died. It was great, may it rest in peace in TV heaven. It was a good TV and it lasted longer than I hoped, but I finally got an excuse to buy a new one. Sadly, it was very difficult finding one and I had to compromise. Every TV I found appears to be a government spy, a major home security threat or a chaperone device making sure I only watch wholesome programming. My old one wasn’t and I’d much rather have a new TV that still isn’t, but I had no choice in the matter. All of today’s big TV’s are ruined by the addition of features and equipment that I would much rather not have.

Firstly, I didn’t want any built in cameras or microphones: I do not want some hacker watching or listening to my wife and I on our sofa and I do not trust any company in the world on security, so if a TV has a microphone or camera, I assume that it can be hacked. Any TV that has any features offering voice recognition or gesture recognition or video comms is a security risk. All the good TVs have voice control, even though that needs a nice clear newsreader style voice, and won’t work for me, so I will get no benefit from it but I had no choice about having the microphone and will have to suffer the downside. I am hoping the mic can only be used for voice control and not for networking apps, and therefore might not be network accessible.

I drew the line at having a camera in my living room so had to avoid buying the more expensive smart TVs . If there weren’t cameras in all the top TVs, I would happily have spent 70% more. 

I also don’t want any TV that makes a record of what I watch on it for later investigation and data mining by Big Brother, the NSA, GCHQ, Suffolk County Council or ad agencies. I don’t want it even remembering anything of what is watched on it for viewing history or recommendation services.

That requirement eliminated my entire shortlist. Every decent quality large TV has been wrecked by the addition of  ‘features’ that I don’t only not want, but would much rather not have. That is not progress, it is going backwards. Samsung have made loads of really good TVs and then ruined them all. I blogged a long time ago that upgrades are wrecking our future. TV is now a major casualty.

I am rather annoyed at Samsung now – that’s who I eventually bought from. I like the TV bits, but I certainly do not and never will want a TV that ‘learns my viewing habits and offers recommendations based on what I like to watch’.

Firstly, it will be so extremely ill-informed as to make any such feature utterly useless. I am a channel hopper so 99% of things that get switched to momentarily are things or genres I never want to see again. Quite often, the only reason I stopped on that channel was to watch the new Meerkat ad.

Secondly, our TV is often on with nobody in the room. Just because a programme was on screen does not mean I or indeed anyone actually looked at it, still less that anyone enjoyed it.

Thirdly, why would any man under 95 want their TV to make notes of what they watch when they are alone, and then make that viewing history available to everyone or use it as any part of an algorithm to do so?

Fourthly, I really wanted a smart TV but couldn’t because of the implied security risks. I have to assume that if the designers think they should record and analyse my broadcast TV viewing, then the same monitoring and analysis would be extended to web browsing and any online viewing. But a smart TV isn’t only going to be accessed by others in the same building. It will be networked. Worse still, it will be networked to the web via a wireless LAN that doesn’t have a Google street view van detector built in, so it’s a fair bet that any data it stores may be snaffled without warning or authorisation some time.

Since the TV industry apparently takes the view that nasty hacker types won’t ever bother with smart TVs, they will leave easily accessible and probably very badly secured data and access logs all over the place. So I have to assume that all the data and metadata gathered by my smart TV with its unwanted and totally useless viewing recommendations will effectively be shared with everyone on the web, every advertising executive, every government snoop and local busybody, as well as all my visitors and other household members.

But it still gets worse. Smart TV’s don’t stop there. They want to help you to share stuff too. They want ‘to make it easy to share your photos and your other media from your PC, laptop, tablet, and smartphone’. Stuff that! So, if I was mad enough to buy one, any hacker worthy of the name could probably use my smart TV to access all my files on any of my gadgets. I saw no mention in the TV descriptions of regular operating system updates or virus protection or firewall software for the TVs.

So, in order to get extremely badly informed viewing recommendations that have no basis in reality, I’d have to trade all our privacy and household IT security and open the doors to unlimited and badly targeted advertising, knowing that all my viewing and web access may be recorded for ever on government databases. Why the hell would anyone think that make a TV more attractive?  When I buy a TV, I want to switch it on, hit an auto-tune button and then use it to watch TV. I don’t really want to spend hours going through a manual to do some elaborate set-up where I disable a whole string of  privacy and security risks one by one.

In the end, I abandoned my smart TV requirement, because it came with too many implied security risks. The TV I bought has a microphone to allow a visitor with a clearer voice to use voice control, which I will disable if I can, and features artificial-stupidity-based viewing recommendations which I don’t want either. These cost extra for Samsung to develop and put in my new TV. I would happily have paid extra to have them removed.

Afternote: I am an idiot, 1st class. I thought I wasn’t buying a smart TV but it is. My curioisty got the better of me and I activated the network stuff for a while to check it out, and on my awful broadband, mostly it doesn’t work, so with no significant benefits, I just won’t give it network access, it isn’t worth the risk. I can’t disable the microphone or the viewing history, but I can at least clear it if I want.

I love change and I love progress, but it’s the other direction. You’re going the wrong way!