LG's recent software update has forcibly installed Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant, on smart TVs without removal options, sparking widespread user backlash over privacy, bloatware, and loss of control. This highlights growing tensions in smart devices, where monetization often overrides user preferences.
This comes up a lot, and I don’t necessarily get it. I have all smart TVs, and I just never, ever, EVER let them connect to wifi even ONCE for any reason. It’s not like it NEEDS it for anything.
I see this take online a lot, but in person, everywhere I go people play netflix and whatever directly on their TV. I think there might just be a huge divide in perspective between those with and without game consoles of some sort always connected to their TV.
Totally, although the thing is I bet one day tvs will come with a built in sim card, or worst yet will disable themselves until there’s an active internet connection or some other scummy method
That’s the point when I will get a dumb corporate TV with a streaming dongle or media server connected via HDMI or DP…
Those don’t really exist anymore though.
There are displays and I will get them.
If I can’t afford it, I will not get any TV and use my computer or phone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fuck that whole industry. If they force me, I will do it another way.
I think they kind of do the active Internet part now. I don’t watch television and haven’t touched a TV for a long time, but recently I had to help a neighbour set his new smart TV up. It was one of the big brands, I don’t remember if it was LG, Samsung or something else. The TV couldn’t go through initial set up without me installing some app on his phone. If there was an option to skip I couldn’t see where it was, I only assume that if it was possible it was intentionally made un-intuitive or hard to discover. And of course, if you want the TV to connect to the app you must connect it to Internet. Again, it may have been a failure on my part, but I wouldn’t be supprised if they intentionally forced the user to do it this way.
Samsung had something similar on their cheaper phones (the A series) where during the initial set up it asks you to login or create a Samsung account and you have to jump through a couple of hoops to skip it, as well as some other part where I don’t remember what the phone asked you to do, but the “Yes” option was blue, while the button to skip was intentionally colored the same or very similar shade of gray as an inactive button. So if the TV was Samsung I don’t doubt for a second that they will do some shady practice like that.
Agreed. And that’ll be the time I’m up in arms.
This right here is the answer. There are so many devices you can plug into those things that you don’t really need the crap that they installed natively.
Not to mention they often cheap out on both the software and hardware, so you end up having to slowly navigate through poorly designed UIs that it struggles to display.