Cheap Internet might just be a privacy nightmare

A few months ago, the household decided we should get a TV, so I went shopping for one. As with any new electronic equipment I am about to acquire, I started a week-long research on all sorts of TV specifications and what they meant, looking for reviews and figuring a maximum I was happy with.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that it’s essentially impossible to buy a TV with modern specifications that doesn’t have any ridiculous “smart” features. “Smart” features which, when enabled, phone back to the manufacturer all the data it can collect. What’s worse, a lot of features in every TV required an Internet connection, guaranteeing that the TV would be able to deliver whatever it collected on me. After much discussion on the topic with the household, we eventually settled on buying a “smart” TV and never connecting it to the Internet.

This got me thinking: what’s stopping the TV from connecting to any open wireless network it finds? The fact that no TV (supposedly) does this means that there must be some reason for it, and I can think of a few technical reasons why not to do this, but I’m almost positive that none of them would be enough to convince an executive who really wanted to push for Always On™ connectivity. Maybe these TVs are already doing this, and someone has yet to discover it.

Some time ago, when reading some news on the number of satellite launches that Starlink had already made, things clicked in my head: someone had already done this, but it was with Kindle’s first edition, which didn’t need wifi . If we end up in a world where Internet connectivity is essentially free, will we see TVs that also don’t need wifi?

In fact, in a world where Internet connectivity is essentially free, do we have any hope at all of actually owning any of our devices? What would stop companies from declaring when devices get updates, when they upload/download whatever data they want, and so on? Is the last bit of device ownership sanity being held back by Internet not being ubiquitously cheap?