I will need to buy a new TV soon, and the single biggest factor won’t be price, features, or quality, it will be the absolute minimum smart features available. I’m fine with a sleep timer, and built-in audio smoothing would be great, but I can add anything else I want with a dongle that costs less than $100 (or just attach a full-blown computer to it). I’m not made of money, but I’m fortunate enough that I can afford to buy a TV with something other than an opportunity to invade my private life for marketing.
The other thing I’m looking for is a decent non-Google/Apple smartphone with an eye to privacy. A decent Linux phone would be great, Sailfish OS looks promising, maybe there are other options. Hopefully my Samsung lasts until then. When one of their updates came out whose main feature seemed to be the ability to spy on you everywhere, I closed my account and don’t even have that logged in anymore. There are a number of interesting features I can’t use, and a lot of terrible features I don’t want, that aren’t available to me anymore. A smartphone that belongs to me, and not some corporate conglomerate would be nice. We’ll see.
Sailfish isn’t bad but its a compromise. I don’t like that it’s not open source. I’m happy to pay for it, but I’d prefer if it were a community project rather than something buiut behind the closed doors of an understaffed company.
That said I’m using it to type this comment so I must still think its better than the alternatives.
We bought a smart TV a couple years ago, and it was so hard to find a model without a built-in microphone… No I don’t want my fucking TV to listen to every word said in the room.
Please click here to agree to our new Samsung privacy policy.
I’m sure that they would choose to interpret the swipe to clear it as a click
but yeah my last phone I did that for several years. nope, no thank you.
every time I start my TV I have to say I don’t want the new firmware because it comes with a new privacy policy / user agreement
I will need to buy a new TV soon, and the single biggest factor won’t be price, features, or quality, it will be the absolute minimum smart features available. I’m fine with a sleep timer, and built-in audio smoothing would be great, but I can add anything else I want with a dongle that costs less than $100 (or just attach a full-blown computer to it). I’m not made of money, but I’m fortunate enough that I can afford to buy a TV with something other than an opportunity to invade my private life for marketing.
The other thing I’m looking for is a decent non-Google/Apple smartphone with an eye to privacy. A decent Linux phone would be great, Sailfish OS looks promising, maybe there are other options. Hopefully my Samsung lasts until then. When one of their updates came out whose main feature seemed to be the ability to spy on you everywhere, I closed my account and don’t even have that logged in anymore. There are a number of interesting features I can’t use, and a lot of terrible features I don’t want, that aren’t available to me anymore. A smartphone that belongs to me, and not some corporate conglomerate would be nice. We’ll see.
Sailfish isn’t bad but its a compromise. I don’t like that it’s not open source. I’m happy to pay for it, but I’d prefer if it were a community project rather than something buiut behind the closed doors of an understaffed company.
That said I’m using it to type this comment so I must still think its better than the alternatives.
We bought a smart TV a couple years ago, and it was so hard to find a model without a built-in microphone… No I don’t want my fucking TV to listen to every word said in the room.