Super interesting to see the population's attitude shift over time with regards to privacy.
Feels like even the HN crowd is starting to get worn down and accept this sort of thing as a fact of life. It's absolutely going to get worse, and I'm surprised TVs aren't already using their cameras to measure physical movement during suspenseful scenes, or track how many people leave the room during commercial breaks.
Of course, most non-technical end users I know 100% just don't care about this sort of thing, which bums me out. "Well, I know I'm being spied on, but if it makes my life easier then does it matter?"
> "Well, I know I'm being spied on, but if it makes my life easier then does it matter?"
That is still a somewhat defensible attitude. But most tracking, Vizio included, doesn't give you any benefits. It doesn't make your life easier in any way. It exists so that other people can make more money selling information about you to people who make money trying to sell useless shit to you.
> But most tracking, Vizio included, doesn't give you any benefits.
It makes the products you want cheaper/more commercially viable.
It's usually not completely obvious, but look at the Kindle Fire tablets which have ads on the home screen for a $10 discount.
It's the same reason many computers come preinstalled with crapware; consumers want the cheapest price and are willing to tolerate crapware being installed by default for a cheaper computer.
Here's the thing with consumer "wants" - I feel it often is portrayed backwards. Consumers tend to not "want" stuff - they choose from what's available. There are no polls made in which consumers express an opinion that they'd happily buy a TV that tracks their watching habits if it was cheaper. Instead, somebody introduces such user-hostile way to make money on the side, allowing them to sell the product cheaper, and people start buying it because it's cheaper. Competition has to follow suit.
The point being, companies are guilty of putting such products on the market in the first place; you can't then turn around and say "look at the sales figures, it's obviously what people want!".
I couldn't find data on this, but I think the ads version of the Kindle Fire is the more popular one, and users have the option to pay more for no ads.
I don't know why everyone gets so torn up about this when we all know Netflix.and YouTube track what we're watching, and the dream of personalized content recommendations relies on this data. I'm guessing it's mostly because adtech companies and advertisers are generally disliked around here.
> Super interesting to see the population's attitude shift over time with regards to privacy.
Agreed, though I feel like it's shifting in the opposite direction to what you think. I bought a Google Home and the guy next to me wanted to talk about the NSA spying on me.
I think there's a lot of distrust of technology building up.
> "Well, I know I'm being spied on"
A lot of this is about framing; no-one wants to be spied on, but when you watch things on YouTube, you don't consider it spying that YouTube knows what you're watching.
Feels like even the HN crowd is starting to get worn down and accept this sort of thing as a fact of life. It's absolutely going to get worse, and I'm surprised TVs aren't already using their cameras to measure physical movement during suspenseful scenes, or track how many people leave the room during commercial breaks.
Of course, most non-technical end users I know 100% just don't care about this sort of thing, which bums me out. "Well, I know I'm being spied on, but if it makes my life easier then does it matter?"