My Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app
I&#x27;m the author and linking to my tweets is a bad idea because they auto-delete after 14 days.<p>For future HN context, as the author I&#x27;m reproducing them here in full:<p>My @Sony &quot;smart&quot; TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv</a>  and boy oh boy... this is worse than recent @facebook stuff.<p>From their own privacy policy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy-policy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy-policy&#x2F;</a> … they track what you watch, when you watch it, your location, your interactions with other apps. And they share this with... well, everyone basically.<p>This information is then used to market to you within the TV and offer you a &quot;hot list&quot;... but it is also used to &quot;Detect, investigate and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities and protect the rights, safety and property of Samba and others&quot;<p>If you have a &quot;Smart TV&quot; from any brand and it&#x27;s doing an update you will 100% want to disable Samba.<p>Samba is not a feature for you, it is a snitch in your living room, snitching on everything you watch on your TV, it&#x27;s a feature for corporations only.<p>To disable Samba the soft way... don&#x27;t agree to their T&amp;Cs post OS upgrade.<p>To disable Samba the hard way... use Android system settings to disable the app.<p>This is a good time to say that if you own a &quot;Smart TV&quot; from any company you should run it on a different network than your NAS and other computers. And that all other devices best require passwords to connect to them.<p>Ideally you run a TV on a different VLAN.<p>And this is where I wish that dumb panels were all the rage, and that the only &quot;smart&quot; functionality was external to the display itself. But when @netflix and other content providers decline the use of their apps outside of integrated devices this is the hell we live in.<p>I really wish that @Google provided a TV box that was the full Android TV, but that was vanilla Google with the ability to install @netflix, @BBCiPlayer, @mubi as apps. That I could just plug this into any display panel, including dumb displays.<p>Perhaps @Google could even call it Pixel TV.