It's always amazing how many people plop anti-consumer comments out here. Like, of course you bastards deserve to be served ads on your own TV that you just paid $800 for. Because why? Because ... the market is wise, and "the market" is screwing us, so ... we must ... deserve to be screwed?
Whatever is being offered to us must be the best deal we can get, because ... it's being offered to us?
What drives this sentiment? Is it Stockholm Syndrome?
Exactly. The free market has very little recourse when companies basically all start doing the same thing, and more or less don’t tell you about it. You certainly don’t see “takes a screenshot of your TV every 2s and uploads it for us to analyze” plastered all over the boxes! I guess the idea is the consumer will be omniscient and that a company will come along offering a privacy protecting alternative… but those incentives just doooo not work!
Seriously, totally deranged to think the “free market” is capable of protecting humans against widespread nefarious behavior from colluding actors with vast amounts of money and power.
A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept and markets like electronics are nowhere near free. Collusion is something that happens in an oligopoly. The fact many markets degenerate into oligopolies and monopolies is why we need government. 30 years ago I feel like people understood this. Now it seems everyone thinks they know what free market means just because they heard the term one time.
"A free market would be great and perfectly capable of serving the public. The problem is free market is a theoretical concept"
How would we know the real-world properties of a theoretical concept from economics? We understand pieces of economics, but certainly not the whole thing. Let's say we make the market free-er and free-er. Apart from politics junkies, who knows for sure how that behaves?
I like this branch of discussion and I want it to keep growing. What has to happen to make an electronics market free? Is the situation about spyware TV/cars can not be improved in any kind of Libertarian or Anarcho-Capitalist world without the Government? Is bad government worse for the electronics market than absence of any governments?
All unregulated free market arguments rely on low/no barriers to entry. There are very few markets where this is true in reality.
Some things like semiconductor fabrication will have huge barriers to entry for the foreseeable future due to being massively capital intensive and involving lots of trade secrets etc. We can't really do much about this.
What we (ie. the government) can do is ensure no entities own the entire supply chain, so you can't run a fab and also market finished consumer goods. That way, manufacture of consumer goods (including the software) from the raw fabricated parts gets a much lower barrier to entry.
We can also force consumer manufacturers to advertise all "features" that we deem to be important. We already do things like energy ratings, why not privacy ratings too? The more information consumers have the better.
Make no mistake, any capital intensive industry like electronics will degenerate into an oligopoly without government, or you can dream of a day where everyone can print semiconductor wafers at home.
It's driven by the fact that many of these people work for companies doing similar things, and this is how they resolve the cognitive dissonance. Otherwise they'd have to accept that their work is unethical.
I've wondered about cognitive dissonance. Another "cog diss" possibility is, maybe I have a strong aversion to admitting that I'm getting screwed. Maybe I can relieve those feelings by arguing publicly that I'm not getting screwed. Or that it's "inevitable" for me to be screwed.
I don't know. It's one guess among many.
Because the companies are selling technology to us cheaper than cost in exchange for this? I do think they should be required to offer a revenue-neutral way to turn off ads but it would cost several hundred dollars and only me & 5 other weirdos on this website would buy it.
You can look at Vizio's quarterly statements before Walmart bought them: their devices were margin negative and "Platform+" (ads) made up for it: https://investors.vizio.com/financials/quarterly-results/def...
We all know that they would artificially increase the price of those models and exclude tons of features to punish users and say it’s not profitable.
They should not be allowed to track user at all as a hardware manufacturer, let the users purchase the tracking software themselves and get a rebate back.
That may be a good point. But I don't think it's an answer to my question.
My question was, Why do people get so passionate about being screwed? Say consumers really are receiving a $300 discount in exchange for being forced to watch say 30 hours of ads. Is that really such a fantastic opportunity that I'm going to go cheer for it publicly, or claim it's consumers' fault, or it should be mandatory, or we must just accept it because (whatever)?
I think most people don't see the basic trade of "you charge me less but get my data & my attention" to be a bad deal, particularly when the upside is a large TV which was a _huge_ status symbol (for better or worse) not even 15 years ago.
On the other hand Texas seems to have a problem with it. But say you're right. Does "not a bad deal" make people enthusiastic about it?
Why go out there and evangelize about a half-assed rewards card that comes with privacy leaks? That's what I'm asking.
I'll speak for myself. I think it's pretty universal that when someone says "I want X", people believe them. Where I find myself slightly rarer is that when someone's purchasing decisions says "I want X", I believe them.
People seem earnestly willing to trade their attention and data for ~a couple hundred dollars (this was my best estimate of how much cheaper ads make TVs - about $50 per year of ownership with 5ish years of ownership typical). I am much more worried that people who are not earnestly willing (me and the 5 other weirdos mentioned in my OP) don't really have a good outlet. It would be a genuine loss if the government no longer let people trade their attention and data for a cheaper TV, according to the people (I really had to resist capitalizing there) themselves. I don't have to like it to believe them.
I understand that you want to answer your own question, not my question. That's fine.
I don't like ACR at all.. but after reading all the raging about ads on TVs I thought they would be terrible. Then I got one recently - the ads are literally just links to watch movies & TV series I might be interested in, on my TV? Like yes I do want my TV to show me some things I might be interested in watching, the same way Youtube does. I don't like the increasing privacy violations like ACR being used to tune those "ads", but seeing recommendations on my TV is a feature I like..
Heck if I had strong guarantees that the data generated by ACR was used only to tune recommendations/ads using an anonymous advertising ID like IDFA and not linked to any personally identifying information, I would want that too. But sadly there is no privacy and no way of ensuring that now.
Not everyone feels like that. Yesterday the app of my tv provider on my Samsung TV home screen suddenly shows a Prime icon in its place, prompting to install the app if you use muscle memory to control the TV. I am unable to remove this annoying ad. I really really hate ads and will go to great lengths to avoid seeing any in my private home. So I see this as an invasion of my privacy. Not buying Samsung anymore.
My guess is that most people on HN work for companies that are in some meaningful way doing the same thing. What would be called spying 50 years ago is now the bedrock of how tech either makes money or improves their products.
I can not like something without wanting to make it illegal to do it. Simple as that. My preferences aren't necessarily someone else's preferences.
But I didn't really ask "why do some consumers prefer not to make certain unwanted features illegal"? I asked why some consumers are so wildly positive about being forced to adopt features they hate.
Lemme example. In the weed space, I don't think anybody would take this seriously: "well it's illegal and there's nothing we can do about that so it's pointless to discuss dissenting views." Or "it's going to be legalized and there's nothing anybody can do about that, so there is no possibility of debate." People would just laugh at that.
But when it's normal consumer activity, those same arguments seem to cut ice. Why?
I feel this is a generally strange situation. TVs seem to be pretty much the only tech that is somehow inflation proof, and that is largely due to the surveillance capitalist approach they come with.
I am a strong privacy advocate, but I also believe in customers choice. Hence, the primary issue I have with this technology is not its existence, but the lack of transparency in the pricing and the inability to truly properly opt out of this data collection.
At some point in the past year, I‘ve read someone suggest a „privacy label“ for electronics, akin to the energy efficiency labels that exist around the world. The manufacturers should be forced to disclose the extend of the data collection as well as the purpose and the ability to opt out on the product packaging, before the customer makes the purchase
HN tell me people want adverts, they are for my benefit so I can benefit from them.
HN is a haven for principled libertarians but I don't see many such comments in this thread.