Tele-Vision
I was recently at Walmart with a couple of good friends of mine. We tend to go over to the tech section of the store, as all of us are relatively into technology and like to see what's new. In the technology section, they have a ton of televisions, or TVs for those of you who don't know the full word, hung on the wall constantly spewing advertisements for their products. I was interested in what these TVs run on, as I'm going to possibly need to buy on in my near future. That's when I looked at all of the different brands I could choose from. There were quite a few models, but nearly all of them used one of 3 software:
- Roku
- Amazon Fire TV
- Apple TV
- Google TV
There was also something that all of these had in common:
They require an account to use them.
To use your brand new television you likely spent hundreds on, you're required to sign up for their services. That means you cannot use the TV you just bought without providing them your E-Mail address, a password, and, in some cases, your phone number. Aside from that, they also require a Wi-Fi/Ethernet connection to send that data to their servers. You wouldn't mind though, as you're going to need a network connection to use your TV anyways. You, of course, need to pay for the 10+ pay-by-month services to watch everything that you're interested in.
Why do they require an account?
I realistically don't know, but there's one thing that I can assume: they need to tie your data to something. Your TV software shouldn't really be serving you anything personalized to you, so it shouldn't need an account. It's just the software you're required to use to get to your favorite applications:
- YouTube
- Pluto
- Peacock
- HBO Max
- Netflix
- Etc.
What would they actually track?
Well, you use applications. They can track how long you spend on certain applications. If you don't spend long enough on a specific app, there's something they can do to fix that. All of that data is likely sent to apps like YouTube, Peacock, and Netflix so they can be better than their competitors. Just so you know, the data that these software send are on top of the data the private companies already track. I'll get more into that in another post.
What can I do as a consumer?
Don't buy TVs. They're getting away with this because you're feeding their bottom line. There is absolutely nothing a TV can do that a mini-computer can't. Many people on Reddit suggest to just buy a Raspberry Pi and a nice monitor. Nearly every application that exists on television also exists on your computer. Back in the day, you needed a TV to have cable. Now, cable is a thing of the past. The only problem with that is...