My Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app
I'm the author and linking to my tweets is a bad idea because they auto-delete after 14 days.For future HN context, as the author I'm reproducing them here in full:My @Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app from https://samba.tv  and boy oh boy... this is worse than recent @facebook stuff.From their own privacy policy: https://samba.tv/legal/privacy-policy/ … they track what you watch, when you watch it, your location, your interactions with other apps. And they share this with... well, everyone basically.This information is then used to market to you within the TV and offer you a "hot list"... but it is also used to "Detect, investigate and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities and protect the rights, safety and property of Samba and others"If you have a "Smart TV" from any brand and it's doing an update you will 100% want to disable Samba.Samba is not a feature for you, it is a snitch in your living room, snitching on everything you watch on your TV, it's a feature for corporations only.To disable Samba the soft way... don't agree to their T&Cs post OS upgrade.To disable Samba the hard way... use Android system settings to disable the app.This is a good time to say that if you own a "Smart TV" 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.Ideally you run a TV on a different VLAN.And this is where I wish that dumb panels were all the rage, and that the only "smart" 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.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.Perhaps @Google could even call it Pixel TV.