As if there's any human-measurable way of confirming this. Yes they can be forced by a court. And no, the court can't know if they stopped all of the software copies on all TVs and no, the court can't know if they didn't re-activate them in the future back again.
What actual proof do we have that LG actually stopped? What actual proof can we have that Vizio will stop doing this?
Vizio is not an individual, it's a collection of employees and contractors, some loyal, and others who hate their corporate overlord and would love nothing better that to dob them in if they ever sneakily resumed the spying.
This wasn't an issue earlier. It was a known public fact. I stumbled upon the marketing page for this feature about a year ago by accident without even attempting to find it.
What Visio is doing has so little impact on privacy that it is embarrassing for our regulatory system that this is what they took action on.
Well, one could monitor all outgoing packets from your smart TV, but you would also need to know exactly how to decode what was contained those packets... unless of course they conveniently set the evil bit for you. With the poor level of development associated with this type of work, it would probably be enough to identify a different set servers for receiving the data.
With more sophisticated coding, you really do have to know what's in every outgoing packet. Perhaps it reduces down to problems similar to the discovery path of the VW Diesel emissions cheat - taking an interested hacker/researcher to examine the compliance.
I realize that a good router configuration (and a trusted router no less) might entirely eliminate the problem, but the thing is, there might be some other agreements between vendors we don't know about. For example, I have an ASUS router. I don't know if a Vizio TV can't send a packet to my router with which it gains unlimited and unfiltered net access. We simply don't know.
Anyway, probably my paranoia, but once you see things like the original post, you start to question a lot more. At least I do.
Easier - when I upgrade from my 6+ year old Sony, my TV will either be disconnected (ironically I trust the Xiaomi Mi Box more) or only allowed to access *.youtube.com. I realise this isn't tenable for most consumers.
This is probably gonna be the "temporary solution" which is gonna solidify as the permanent solution unless I really find some extra energy and motivation, yep.
As if there's any human-measurable way of confirming this. Yes they can be forced by a court. And no, the court can't know if they stopped all of the software copies on all TVs and no, the court can't know if they didn't re-activate them in the future back again.
What actual proof do we have that LG actually stopped? What actual proof can we have that Vizio will stop doing this?