A lawyer specialising in privacy and consumer-protection law, and sufficiently knowledgeable technically to know how to control the equipment as far as possible to protect his own interests….
The companies involved know there are too few people like him, genuinely sufficiently "tech-savvy" as the appalling slang has it, and sufficiently alert to comb through excessively long " contracts" and "agreements" ; to make much difference to them.
I wonder if the TV firms can get away with breaching the various laws the writer cites, because they not based in the UK so are beyond our jurisdiction.. I don't know the legal situation there.
Would it be possible to copy and print the "agreements" so they are easier to read and digest?
Earlier this evening I encountered another "dark" trick. Many web-sites now won't allow access unless you wade through their wretched cookie filters, turning them on or off with little slide-switch symbols. Some are fairly clear, but a lot, such as the one I gave up on, are wilfully ambiguous. They not only do not explain the meaning of On and Off with respect to the permission – and I would not it put past them to be liars anyway – but they do not label the switches.
The one in question described one set of cookies allowing "advertisements relevant to you" . Who the Hell are they to assume what is or not "relevant" to me?
The best defence is to have as little of this spyware in the house as possible, but how easy would it be to locate and blank off the microphones? Or if you really must have a so-called "smart" – speaker or TV, to add a physical hold-to-speak button and to hell with the guarantee that's probably of little value anyway?
(I wonder what the "service" provider's response would be when they realise their microphones rarely detect anything?)
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Mischievous thought time – if you have an eavesdropping device, make sure it spends most of its time up close to a sound source like the central-heating pump, 'fridge or water rising-main, or a radio in a spare room, tuned just too far off-frequency for clarity in the narrow gap between Radios 3 & 4. Or blow a ref's whistle LOUDLY into its microphone at frequent but irregular intervals. And let the parasites' precious "algorithms" try to decipher those.
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Cameras in "smart" TVs? As in George Orwell's 1984? Do they really have them or is that thankfully a myth?
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Samsaranda – did the ANC manage to stop that wholesale spying?