It was genius. Instead of installing surveillance systems in everyone's homes, they marketed the surveillance systems as luxury products and let our consumerism do the work. Instead of forcing it on the general public, they made us want it to the point where they can cite consumer demand as the reason they don't even offer products that don't invade your privacy.

Someone who was 55 in 1996 lived through an era where you could start a new life by moving a part of the way across a state in the US and nobody would think to research, or it wasn't uncommon for people to have two whole families that never knew about each other (bigamy). Who cares about security cameras because nobody has time to look through all the footage? Who cares what you got up to in your 20s^1^ when you've got a family and a job in town?

Then storage got cheap enough to store it all, and computers got fast enough to look through it all (but there's still no time to figure out who egged your car over a weekend). All those old people don't have to live in the world they built, either, AND the world is built so it can't be undone. All that data will always have value to someone, and storage is only ever going to get cheaper in the long term.

[1] Old busybodies need to get off their high horse judging people. Data miners are already working their way backwards looking for something of value, and if you spent a nine month summer in Europe sometime in the late 50s then it'll eventually come it if someone bothers to look.

RIP anybody in a NYC or Tokyo high rise with a few thousand neighbors in wifi range.

I am pretty sure my Debian box that runs Kodi has fewer trackers than my TV.

Yes.

There is a lower volume of extraneous calls to advertising networks from an appletv box than from a Samsung or lg tv. Users see a lower volume of what they recognize as targeted ads (you gotta think about the confirmation bias here). The devices themselves can decode more complex stream types because they are spending less processing power taking screenshots and running image recognition models on them. A tv from a major manufacturer tends to cost more if it’s the “dumb” or digital signage variant, whereas a streaming box (that’s not like roku or whatever the bottom of the barrel option is) costs $100+.

Yup, 'smart' TVs should never get a live internet connection, ever. Don't give it a WIFI password, if you have made that mistake change the password now. Attach a computer, preferably Linux, and use it as a monitor. Even if you then go ahead and use a streaming service (boo), at least you're not just giving audio/video of your living room to Samsung as well.

Completely false. I stream without problems, while still retaining all my privacy. (I stream from my friends jellyfin servers)