Instead of ‘splurging’ on a dumb tv bc they’re more expensive now thanks to the data sompanies sell off of smart tvs I was considering getting a smart tv and dumbing it down. Is the way to do this never connecting it to the internet? And is that the only way?
Yes. If you don’t connect it is pretty dumb and shouldn’t be able to send your data for harvesting. You sould research if you can set it to one of the outputs permanently then you can use some external device that you trust.
It is my understanding that some smart TVs won’t do anything without you connecting and accepting the license agreement.
Connect, agree, disconnect.
I wonder if they require you to reconnect on a regular basis. Would this strategy have gotten you past the last Roku agreement issue?
If it’s not connected to the internet, it can’t update or retrieve those changes. So no, it would not be impacted until the next time it was connected. I’ve never had a smart TV that required a persistent connection to work at all, and I wouldn’t ever buy one that did.
But it could require an internet connection every x interval. Is yours one of the Roku TVs?
Unless someone has an open WiFi near it and it connects without asking.
I’ve heard that several times but I can’t find any confirmed case where that happened.
Same. I saved your comment in case anyone can provide am example
Where did you look?
Everywhere
It wouldn’t be in your sock drawer
As long as you deactivate the wireless LAN it shouldn’t be at risk doing that. From my understanding of US FCC and EU rules doing so despite manual deactivation of the “radio emiting technology” would lead to a market ban of the device (it has led to the EU banning other,mostly chinese, electronics in the past and Amazon was in hot water for a while).
I’m sure it’s in the policy we all agree to, and thus not illegal.
Nope, not that easy. I can only speak for EU regulations (but at least my colleagues who did FCC were complaining that they were stricter) but they require to make it clear that the user needs to be made directly aware that the device emits radio waves, define which frequencies/techniques are used (so they can’t make you think they are using Bluetooth for the remote but in reality also have a NB-LTE card in the device) and the device must (and this is seen very strict) keep any radio emitting off when it’s configured to do so. (This brought Samsung,Sonos and Amazon and Xiaomi in trouble in regards to “airline” modes that didn’t really deactivate everything or devices that could self activate).
So yeah, they could surely build the TV in a way that it only works with WiFi/whatever turned on(basically any Alexa device works that way),once there is a (software) switch they cannot silently still transmit, even if you agreed to it in some obscure TOS- this would lead to a market ban. And they need to tell you which frequencies they use - so you can be aware of it.
This is just the radio frequency side of it - I am fairly sure that there is at least one EU country that requires users to be able to switch off each frequency band on it’s own (may also be in EU consumer regulation laws,but I come from MedTech, not my field)