Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
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There's hope for privacy yet (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I ran my old 2004 Samsung television into the ground: the EL backlight was so worn out that the picture had large dark holes in it, and the TV would take 20 minutes to warm up and display something.

And today it wouldn't start at all anymore. It's deader than a dead dodo. But hey, 20 years for a modern TV ain't bad. I'm pretty pleased with that.

So I went to the supermarket to find the cheapest set I could find. I asked the salesman if they had a cheap, but most importantly NON-SMART TV - thinking non-smart TVs are probably the cheapest of them all, if they still existed at all.

The man said "We have this dumb 43" TV here, but it's the last one, and then we won't get anymore dumb TVs for 3 months."

I looked at the price and it was - gasp - $20 MORE than the cheapest Android-encumbered smart TV of the same size.

I asked the man how come and he said "Well, dumb TVs are hard to get and they sell almost immediately. So they're worth more than the smart ones."

Wow. So people actually WANT dumb TVs and are willing to pay a premium for em. It means attitudes towards the value of privacy are changing and that's great!

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I suspect the vast majority of people are buying dumb TVs because android TV sucks, not for privacy reasons. I'm willing to bet most go home and plug their Chromecast or FireTV stick right in.

So as long as android TV sucks, its good news for us.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

I dunno that's entirely accurate - we have a Sony Bravia android TV (working on moving away from default OS but that's another story) that is perfectly usable with Stremio and Jellyfin and doesn't have massive invasive ads. One of my parents has a dumb TV with a Chromecast and it's nothing but a PITA to use by comparison.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Not all android TVs are bad, but I think a lot of the cheap ones are pretty bad. Mine is horribly laggy, and will occasionally refuse to turn on unless I powercycle it.

Which Chromecast do your parents have? The ones pre-Google TV are pretty brainless to use, but I hate the new google TV ones as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

My Sony Bravia had an update that made it horribly laggy. After screwing around a bit I found out that closing apps made it run faster. Somehow they broke the suspension system with the update and it keeps running out of RAM is what I'm assuming happened.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

Mines always been bad, but I use a Chromecast all the time anyway, so it doesn't matter. I'd be livid if I had bought it, but it was free :shrug: