If you own a FireTV stick or display you'll notice that the FreeVee streaming app has started to become more and more prominent. It's deceptively simple - they are taking old shows like Murder She Wrote and streaming them non-stop on a "channel" much like the old terrestrial broadcast networks did. They're solving the streaming problem for older customers that don't grok Netflix or Hulu.
These shows take pseudo-commercial breaks and send you 2-3 ads tailored to you specifically. My wife didn't believe it until I did a simple Amazon search on my phone for automotive batteries. Not more than 30 minutes later the ads switched to some random LiPo battery for RVs.
Linear streaming is central to PlutoTV, which has been around for a while and is available on many platforms.
It’s not really for people “that don’t grok Netflix or Hulu”. That’s one reason, I suppose, but the stronger reasons are:
1. Licensing and cost nonsense that none of us care about.
2. Channel surfing is an entirely different way to engage with low-attention content and has its own place. You may not “grok it” yourself, but the gist is that it greatly reduces the analysis paralysis of picking movies and episodes and doesn’t make you feel like you’re sitting down to watch something from start to finish. You just surf around and leave something and let it play. The lack of control is intentional and positive, and it can be a great avenue for discovery in a world where every on-demand front page has been lost to poor algorithm recommendations.
The casual discovery was the thing people missed the most about cable TV. This comes close, as in they're linear channels of the same program in most cases, but it's familiar enough to work.
I recently bought a "smart TV" and I was pleased to see that it comes with essentially 'cable TV' (IPTV, I guess?) without even needing to run an app or set up an account. You just click CH+/- or guide and you watch another channel. One of the channels plays 21 Jump Street (the 80's show) and a few other 80's classics, another 2 just play 80's/90's music videos exclusively. I think it's kind of neat that the internet has finally come around to make cable TV obsolete.
> I think it's kind of neat that the internet has finally come around to make cable TV obsolete.
As a counterpoint, decisions by the FCC (during the previous presidential administration), are effectively making the internet a requirement for OTA TV in the new ATSC 3.0 spectrum.[1]
Here’s hoping we get more consumer focused considerations in the future. The internet features are nice (if you have internet access) but shouldn’t prevent a consumer from accessing OTA ‘out of the box’
Funny thing I discovered with mine, when there's an ad during the show, I switch channel and come back.
The ad is gone and I now have a "we'll be back in x seconds" screen.
>These shows take pseudo-commercial breaks and send you 2-3 ads tailored to you specifically. My wife didn't believe it until I did a simple Amazon search on my phone for automotive batteries. Not more than 30 minutes later the ads switched to some random LiPo battery for RVs.
This is so depressing. We're living in the future and it's awful.
Terrestrial cable is the same, too. I had a normal cable package for awhile (around 2020) and the advertisers clearly knew that my wife was in a particular medical category.
Same w/ IPTV services like SlingTV, which I also used for a little while.
Amazon Video is also now including FreeVee garbage entries blended into “included with” results and it’s easy to miss unless you train yourself to check the source line above “Watch now” before pressing play. It seems this is mostly evident when looking at Customers also watched recommendations but I’ve seen it happen in the home sections, too.
The trick is to never give your TV access to the internet and to pair it with an Apple TV. If you buy a TV and it won't even boot or work without an internet connection - return it and get a different one.
That works fine with a TV. I bought one knowing that the "smart" features weren't all that great. I tried connecting it to the internet, and it felt more sluggish, although it's a brand new 2023 model. I was able to reset it to factory defaults and it's working well enough for what I bought it for (the image is very good, at least for my needs). For reference, it's a TCL with Google TV.
But the Fire TV TFA talks about... well, the whole point of the thing is to stream internet content. So not connecting it to the internet kinda defeats 90% of the thing's purpose.
you can still stream stuff - just use something else and just leverage it as a cheap display.
Unless it won't work if not connected to the internet (wouldn't put it past them).
I bought my Xbox mainly because it was the best/cheapest option for a 4K bluray player. I think I've loaded a game on it a handful of times at best, but watched lots of movies and other content with it. Thanks gamers for subsidizing a great BR player!
I’m sure we’ll see TVs with built-in AI tools to create new generative ads. Maybe they could include little cameras, so they could keep an eye out for any Amazon products in their house. This would help achieve Amazon’s apparent goal of advertising things I’ve already bought from them to me.
Or, they could just include a little cellphone radio. Probably only need to phone home once every couple months to get the new ads.
And remember: hard drive space is cheap nowadays. You might not ever connect your TV to the internet, but it can at least record fingerprints for everything you watch. Maybe your kids will connect it to the internet some day, or you’ll hand it down to somebody else, and then that poor trapped taste-profile information can finally make the trip back to Amazon’s servers.
I've had a TCL Roku TV since 2018 and it was always sluggish using the apps through its default interface. I got an AppleTV last year and the ease of use & lack of input lag or advertisements was a breath of fresh air.
Don't worry, smartphones will begin to fill the gaps, we pay for them, but the Industry does whatever it wants with them. In about a year, we may well have to watch 2 ads before making phone calls with the way things are going, while we of course pay even higher fees for mobile service (of course).
That only works as long as TVs connect to the internet via WiFi. Unfortunately there are protocols out there for IoT that bypass per device WiFi settings entirely by setting up mesh networks.
Meh, I own an LG CX and I have never seen a single ad on it - the app integration is so good I can't imagine needing to mess with another device just to use streaming services. Just don't buy ad-ridden crap from Samsung and others, I guess?
Ugh, the Vizio I have became cancer after awhile. Even with it offline, it will automatically change the input to their spyware entertainment app after 10 seconds of no input. No ability to disable this malicious automatic switch.
Do Apple TVs not display ads? I have Google TV devices, in part because I can install what er I want on them, including 3rd part launchers that don't have ads.
Apple TV advertises its own content when you are on the homepage (even as a non-Apple TV+ subscriber so it's a little more aggressive than like sitting on the Netflix homepage as a subscriber) but as far as I can tell nothing more than that.
Been a user for the last 7-8 years and I love the UX.
Apps pinned to the top row of the home screen can show their own custom content in the top portion of the screen when highlighted. By default, the Apple TV app is in that row and shows you slides for TV+ content. That is as close to built-in advertising as it gets.
My solution was to just get an old box that was cheap, plug it into the TV with an HDMI cord, add a wireless mouse and keyboard, and viola. I have a viewing experience that is on par with what most other people have without having to have a locked down device that I don't control attached to my tv and spying on me.
Plus I can use it to play Steam games, so gaming console and media device all in one.
I have a regular old computer connected to my TV, I find it much more robust and under my control than any purpose built device. Steam to stream games from my PC, browser or VLC for everything else. Haven't seen a recent apple TV in action though so maybe they're more capable than I think they are.
I have a Roku TV (it was free) that I've never connected to the internet. Even when starting it up with an Apple TV it'll still hang out on the Roku home screen for 5s before even starting the input change.
It's pretty infuriating and definitely an intentional dark pattern.
For cheapskates like me, Walmart sells an ONN Google TV box for like $20. Make sure to get the 2023 version, it's a much improved upgrade from one released a few years ago. I love that little thing, and if there are ads, I don't see or notice them. It's much nicer and more responsive than the actual Chromecast TV it replaced.
But, what you are doing, is selling your viewing history to marketers, albeit indirectly. For that $20 box, you are giving away everything you watch, when you watch, and very likely anything that goes through that box.
That said, you might be 100% ok w/that for the price and that's ok. But, you should go in eyes open about what these lower-cost pieces of hardware are doing to 'permit' you to pay less than they cost from competitors who may or may not be doing the same thing.
Apple TVs in the default configuration show large video ads for Apple stuff in the hero unit on the homescreen, same as Amazon is being accused of doing in TFA.
Fair criticism but to clarify: The default is that if you press home on the controller, it loads up the AppleTV app, where it will show ads for AppleTV content. Pressing home again goes to the actual home, where you select the app you want to watch (YouTube, Netflix, etc.). There are no ads there.
There is a setting to choose what the home button does. My Home Screen looks just like a grid of icons. No ads or anything. The Apple TV app is not the same as the Home Screen.
Some product categories are nearly monopolies too:
- Garage Door Openers. Chamberlain (also Liftmaster). They have like 80% of the market. Its them or Genie. Almost everyone else got out of the market. Decent products with OK prices. Competition would bring prices down some but not by a huge amount. However they are desperate to generate MRR and so despite originally having openers with WiFi and local APIs they've locked everything down to MyQ so they can force everything through the cloud and charge both you and 3rd party integrators money.
- Sink Food Disposals - Insinkerator (part of Emerson) has almost the entire US market. Three product lines for the low, middle, upmarket segments.
- Luxor. Owns basically all retail eyeglass sales in the US. Charges literal 10x-100x markups on simple plastic frames. Also the easiest slam-dunk for anti-trust action even under the super high bar used by the government today... but no one seems to care.
For everything else we have a missing middle situation. You can't buy a "decent" TV, microwave, toaster, etc. There's only bottom-feeder dreck or high-end. Everyone else disappeared or doesn't want to serve that market.
A lot of the products are objectively worse than they were 20+ years ago. We have a restored Sunbeam Radiant toaster... besides automatically lowering and raising the toasted items it also makes toast about 2x as fast as anything you can buy at Target/Walmart today regardless of price.
Kitchen appliances are similar. Your standard GE/Whirlpool/etc ovens, fridges, washers, and so on are uber cheap, not as repairable as they used to be, and are intended to be used for about 10 years then thrown away. To get a well engineered appliance that has proper service manuals and are designed to last you have to make a huge jump to something like Thermador, SpeedQueen, etc.
TVs? The only way to get one not jammed with ads and tracking garbage is via "commercial signage" which is what I ended up doing. I bought a Sony Bravia "commercial signage" display. It runs Android but you can reject Google's license agreement and the TV works as a display anyway. It also has a documented API I can use to control it. Oh and it has a higher brightness rating than equivalent consumer TVs and is rated to be on 24/7. The extra money was worth it to me.
And why not? From the perspective of any individual company, it's free money. Some consumers will leave or switch to other products, but most won't, either because they're already locked into your product ecosystem or because there's no equivalent competitor. So you just need to make more money overall than you lose on the minority of sales or subscriptions that you lose.
My wife and I bought a Fire TV for a particular use case:
- The hot tub room in the winter
- The outdoor patio in the summer
It was so cheap, we don't mind the ads on the home screen. If it dies from the moisture, we'll just buy another one. The apps are the key anyways, as I use a few totally ad-free apps to stream stuff:
- JellyFin
- VLC
- HDHomeRun (for my antenna on the roof)
PlutoTV is not ad-free, but has so much amazing shit, I don't mind it much.
Meanwhile, the big LG OLED we bought, I have been on a crusade to neuter all the ads without causing issues with downloading apps/updates/streaming. The RootMyTV exploit no longer works:
I have found blocking the IP of the local Akamai peer works for blocking some ads and the OS update check, but at the cost of other things which also use the CDN. It seems to use internal DNS, which complicates things.
I also have a modern LG. I have rooted it, but it lives on its own VLAN on a default-outbound-blocked firewall config. I log all its requests, it's always trying to access something.
I give it access to a local DNS and NTP server (with restricted responses) and Jellyfin. I've also experimented with a squid proxy to allow specific web traffic that worked well (need to get around to setting up a CA and installing it on the TV). But for me it's just a Jellyfin streaminh screen.
Have you found a way to block ads while preserving the voice recognition feature? I have a C1 and a C2 on which I have successfully blocked all ads, but I can no longer use voice recognition for things like searching. It's a fair trade, but I wish I could have both.
Amazon's FireTV experience is pretty bad. Even as someone who pays for Prime, it's hard to escape the "ad carousel" interface when you just want to watch TV.
That being said, I still use mine regularly for one reason; sideloading. You can install YouTube clients with SponsorBlock and ad-skipping built in. You can download Steam's streaming client and connect a controller, or load up Kodi with SFTP streaming from your local network. The quality of third-party apps is so good that I just ignore the FireTV experience as a whole and skip straight to the apps.
Hopefully someone makes/has made a launcher app that bypasses Amazon's stuff. The underlying hardware is perfect for my needs; the first-party software is the crutch.
> Even as someone who pays for Prime, it's hard to escape the "ad carousel" interface when you just want to watch TV.
I've recently (last week-ish) started to get the ads, too (I'm in France). But they don't seem to have made their way in the actual Prime Video app. I actually always used the "app" because I much preferred the organization.
Yeah, tbh, the fact that they allow side loading makes up for this, IMO. I still wouldn't necessarily buy one. I've found that I like the Google TV ecosystem a little better.
But being able to sideloaded whenever needed makes it much better to me than some of the "less intrusive" options.
And on other devices, Prime Video is getting incrementally worse, in recent months and weeks.
I tried Prime Video with-ads, and it was not only unpleasant sucking of my attention and interruption of the show, but creepy with the targeting/mis-targeting. When the whole purpose is to relax and wind down for the day.
Once I've run out of ads-free good content on Prime Video, I'm going to have to go through my GnuCash, to see whether the 5% rewards I get with my Amazon credit card is worth the Prime membership fee, compared to my normal 2% cash rewards Fidelity card.
Hopefully, Netflix, Max, etc., will have ads-free accounts at reasonable prices.
Prime Video is by far the worst app on AppleTV. The are so cheap they don't even use 4k resolution icons and thumbnails. It shows how much they care about their customers.
I bought a dumb TV from Walmart a few months ago (65" 4K). The brand is Sceptre.
Picture quality is pretty much the same as any other 4K TV that you will get for <$500. Audio quality is horrendous and that is not an exaggeration. This appears to be due to the speakers more than anything else. I got a dumb soundbar from Best Buy for about $150 and that solved the problem (as much as a $150 soundbar can).
I am not the kind of person that is willing to spend $1000+ on a TV and I don't expect to get the same audio/video quality as that kind of TV will offer. But at my all-in price of about $500, it is outstanding package. We've got an AppleTV, a Wii-U, and a DVD player hooked up to it, as well as an OTA antenna. Our total usage is probably around 5 hours a week, and I can't complain at all. No menu lag, no long boot up, no advertising, etc. Highly recommended.
Our previous TV used the Roku OS and also had the option to use the device without an account or internet connection.
What we found was that it still dedicated a lot of space to features that required the non-existent internet and on more than one occasion it started suggesting that we should connect to the internet. I am pretty sure that if your kids accidentally click on some internet-required thing, it will take that as a signal that perhaps you've changed your mind and want to start using it as a smart TV. I find that annoying. Also, menu navigation was agonizingly slow :)
I have written about this before, particularly as it pertains to Vizio.
My conclusion is simple: Government intervention is now required.
I hate to take that path. I just don't see anything at all limiting what TV manufacturers are doing. They are completely out of control.
The way I put it is that you buy a TV and they deliver a data-gathering, privacy-abusing digital advertising device into your family room, bedroom, etc.
The level of surveillance and abuse on consumers is truly unbelievable. And nobody is even talking about putting a stop to it. HN often focuses on solutions to such problems that only techies would generally be able to or consider implementing. The vast majority of consumers are unsuspecting victims. They don't really understand that the home page is a bunch cost-per-click ads and that every single action they take is being logged and sold. Most people just don't know.
And this is why legislation is required, not a techie solution or work-around. This needs to stop.
So...I did something about it. I wrote to my congressional representative, explaining the problem and asking for action. The response, a few weeks later, was a form letter thanking me for contacting the office. So much for taxation with representation.
Readit News
These shows take pseudo-commercial breaks and send you 2-3 ads tailored to you specifically. My wife didn't believe it until I did a simple Amazon search on my phone for automotive batteries. Not more than 30 minutes later the ads switched to some random LiPo battery for RVs.
It’s not really for people “that don’t grok Netflix or Hulu”. That’s one reason, I suppose, but the stronger reasons are:
1. Licensing and cost nonsense that none of us care about.
2. Channel surfing is an entirely different way to engage with low-attention content and has its own place. You may not “grok it” yourself, but the gist is that it greatly reduces the analysis paralysis of picking movies and episodes and doesn’t make you feel like you’re sitting down to watch something from start to finish. You just surf around and leave something and let it play. The lack of control is intentional and positive, and it can be a great avenue for discovery in a world where every on-demand front page has been lost to poor algorithm recommendations.
As a counterpoint, decisions by the FCC (during the previous presidential administration), are effectively making the internet a requirement for OTA TV in the new ATSC 3.0 spectrum.[1]
Here’s hoping we get more consumer focused considerations in the future. The internet features are nice (if you have internet access) but shouldn’t prevent a consumer from accessing OTA ‘out of the box’
1. https://youtu.be/nClxgUunmeE
That's because internet is cable TV these days.
This is so depressing. We're living in the future and it's awful.
Got a lot of ads for the Texas Lottery with Spanish audio.
Comparing against the baseline of terrestrial broadcast, this is a far better experience than before.
Same w/ IPTV services like SlingTV, which I also used for a little while.
I hate it.
But the Fire TV TFA talks about... well, the whole point of the thing is to stream internet content. So not connecting it to the internet kinda defeats 90% of the thing's purpose.
So, buying a cheap Amazon fire TV and not connecting it to the internet is a reasonable choice for a cheap ‘dumb’ TV.
Unless it won't work if not connected to the internet (wouldn't put it past them).
I bought my Xbox mainly because it was the best/cheapest option for a 4K bluray player. I think I've loaded a game on it a handful of times at best, but watched lots of movies and other content with it. Thanks gamers for subsidizing a great BR player!
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I hate that I’ve turned into something of an fanboy but Apple TV follows the same old story from Apple: expensive but it consistently just works.
Or, they could just include a little cellphone radio. Probably only need to phone home once every couple months to get the new ads.
And remember: hard drive space is cheap nowadays. You might not ever connect your TV to the internet, but it can at least record fingerprints for everything you watch. Maybe your kids will connect it to the internet some day, or you’ll hand it down to somebody else, and then that poor trapped taste-profile information can finally make the trip back to Amazon’s servers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Sidewalk
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b?node=21328123011
The lower the cost, the more likely this crud is. If you buy a $250 55” TV you’re (unknowingly) signing up for ads.
Sadly, there isn’t much middle ground anymore. Ads and spying, or a ton of money (and spying).
https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/320778-how-to-stop-l...
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Been a user for the last 7-8 years and I love the UX.
Plus I can use it to play Steam games, so gaming console and media device all in one.
It's pretty infuriating and definitely an intentional dark pattern.
But, what you are doing, is selling your viewing history to marketers, albeit indirectly. For that $20 box, you are giving away everything you watch, when you watch, and very likely anything that goes through that box.
That said, you might be 100% ok w/that for the price and that's ok. But, you should go in eyes open about what these lower-cost pieces of hardware are doing to 'permit' you to pay less than they cost from competitors who may or may not be doing the same thing.
Tbh this is every industry at this point and its driving me nuts.
- Garage Door Openers. Chamberlain (also Liftmaster). They have like 80% of the market. Its them or Genie. Almost everyone else got out of the market. Decent products with OK prices. Competition would bring prices down some but not by a huge amount. However they are desperate to generate MRR and so despite originally having openers with WiFi and local APIs they've locked everything down to MyQ so they can force everything through the cloud and charge both you and 3rd party integrators money.
- Sink Food Disposals - Insinkerator (part of Emerson) has almost the entire US market. Three product lines for the low, middle, upmarket segments.
- Luxor. Owns basically all retail eyeglass sales in the US. Charges literal 10x-100x markups on simple plastic frames. Also the easiest slam-dunk for anti-trust action even under the super high bar used by the government today... but no one seems to care.
For everything else we have a missing middle situation. You can't buy a "decent" TV, microwave, toaster, etc. There's only bottom-feeder dreck or high-end. Everyone else disappeared or doesn't want to serve that market.
A lot of the products are objectively worse than they were 20+ years ago. We have a restored Sunbeam Radiant toaster... besides automatically lowering and raising the toasted items it also makes toast about 2x as fast as anything you can buy at Target/Walmart today regardless of price.
Kitchen appliances are similar. Your standard GE/Whirlpool/etc ovens, fridges, washers, and so on are uber cheap, not as repairable as they used to be, and are intended to be used for about 10 years then thrown away. To get a well engineered appliance that has proper service manuals and are designed to last you have to make a huge jump to something like Thermador, SpeedQueen, etc.
TVs? The only way to get one not jammed with ads and tracking garbage is via "commercial signage" which is what I ended up doing. I bought a Sony Bravia "commercial signage" display. It runs Android but you can reject Google's license agreement and the TV works as a display anyway. It also has a documented API I can use to control it. Oh and it has a higher brightness rating than equivalent consumer TVs and is rated to be on 24/7. The extra money was worth it to me.
I've had great luck with Sceptre's offerings.
https://www.sceptre.com/
Maybe someday, we can hope.
- The hot tub room in the winter
- The outdoor patio in the summer
It was so cheap, we don't mind the ads on the home screen. If it dies from the moisture, we'll just buy another one. The apps are the key anyways, as I use a few totally ad-free apps to stream stuff:
- JellyFin
- VLC
- HDHomeRun (for my antenna on the roof)
PlutoTV is not ad-free, but has so much amazing shit, I don't mind it much.
Meanwhile, the big LG OLED we bought, I have been on a crusade to neuter all the ads without causing issues with downloading apps/updates/streaming. The RootMyTV exploit no longer works:
https://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io
I have found blocking the IP of the local Akamai peer works for blocking some ads and the OS update check, but at the cost of other things which also use the CDN. It seems to use internal DNS, which complicates things.
I have the same TVs I resolved this with my router utilizing a firewall rule that redirects all udp port 53 traffic back to my pihole.
Like, it seems like it has its own truly internal DNS resolver, which gets updated I presume via OS updates.
https://gist.github.com/throwaway96/e811b0f7cc2a705a5a476a8d...
I also have a modern LG. I have rooted it, but it lives on its own VLAN on a default-outbound-blocked firewall config. I log all its requests, it's always trying to access something.
I give it access to a local DNS and NTP server (with restricted responses) and Jellyfin. I've also experimented with a squid proxy to allow specific web traffic that worked well (need to get around to setting up a CA and installing it on the TV). But for me it's just a Jellyfin streaminh screen.
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You're like a Environmental Hero to me.
Point of fact, we use the (many, free) electronics recycling programs available to us in our area.
Thanks for making dumb and uncharitable assumptions.
That being said, I still use mine regularly for one reason; sideloading. You can install YouTube clients with SponsorBlock and ad-skipping built in. You can download Steam's streaming client and connect a controller, or load up Kodi with SFTP streaming from your local network. The quality of third-party apps is so good that I just ignore the FireTV experience as a whole and skip straight to the apps.
Hopefully someone makes/has made a launcher app that bypasses Amazon's stuff. The underlying hardware is perfect for my needs; the first-party software is the crutch.
Edit: prayers answered? https://gitlab.com/flauncher/flauncher
I've recently (last week-ish) started to get the ads, too (I'm in France). But they don't seem to have made their way in the actual Prime Video app. I actually always used the "app" because I much preferred the organization.
But being able to sideloaded whenever needed makes it much better to me than some of the "less intrusive" options.
I tried Prime Video with-ads, and it was not only unpleasant sucking of my attention and interruption of the show, but creepy with the targeting/mis-targeting. When the whole purpose is to relax and wind down for the day.
Once I've run out of ads-free good content on Prime Video, I'm going to have to go through my GnuCash, to see whether the 5% rewards I get with my Amazon credit card is worth the Prime membership fee, compared to my normal 2% cash rewards Fidelity card.
Hopefully, Netflix, Max, etc., will have ads-free accounts at reasonable prices.
Picture quality is pretty much the same as any other 4K TV that you will get for <$500. Audio quality is horrendous and that is not an exaggeration. This appears to be due to the speakers more than anything else. I got a dumb soundbar from Best Buy for about $150 and that solved the problem (as much as a $150 soundbar can).
I am not the kind of person that is willing to spend $1000+ on a TV and I don't expect to get the same audio/video quality as that kind of TV will offer. But at my all-in price of about $500, it is outstanding package. We've got an AppleTV, a Wii-U, and a DVD player hooked up to it, as well as an OTA antenna. Our total usage is probably around 5 hours a week, and I can't complain at all. No menu lag, no long boot up, no advertising, etc. Highly recommended.
https://support.google.com/googletv/answer/10408998?hl=en
What we found was that it still dedicated a lot of space to features that required the non-existent internet and on more than one occasion it started suggesting that we should connect to the internet. I am pretty sure that if your kids accidentally click on some internet-required thing, it will take that as a signal that perhaps you've changed your mind and want to start using it as a smart TV. I find that annoying. Also, menu navigation was agonizingly slow :)
My conclusion is simple: Government intervention is now required.
I hate to take that path. I just don't see anything at all limiting what TV manufacturers are doing. They are completely out of control.
The way I put it is that you buy a TV and they deliver a data-gathering, privacy-abusing digital advertising device into your family room, bedroom, etc.
The level of surveillance and abuse on consumers is truly unbelievable. And nobody is even talking about putting a stop to it. HN often focuses on solutions to such problems that only techies would generally be able to or consider implementing. The vast majority of consumers are unsuspecting victims. They don't really understand that the home page is a bunch cost-per-click ads and that every single action they take is being logged and sold. Most people just don't know.
And this is why legislation is required, not a techie solution or work-around. This needs to stop.
So...I did something about it. I wrote to my congressional representative, explaining the problem and asking for action. The response, a few weeks later, was a form letter thanking me for contacting the office. So much for taxation with representation.