Every time I buy any piece of technology, seeing "smart" in the title makes me immediately look for something else.

I want a label printer. Not something that only works with a mobile app, not something that requires proprietary drivers and doesn't work on my OS, not something that can only be used with your specific software, not one that requires your labels with a special NFC tag to use, just a label printer that is just as compatible as any regular printer.

I ended up paying about a 5X premium compared to alternatives on the market for that, and I would do it again.

Lol, it's like this with everything.

USA is tracking every single movement in your house, and throws a fit when China collects some meta data.

They just act like the survelliance is bad by blaming a foregin state, then doing something way worse.

It's not that your own country can be trusted, but another country can use it to harm another country.

The US government has no problem harming US citizens if it suits their needs.

The US government doesn't want China or any other country harming its citizens or the country though unless they are in on it.

It's the same all around the world.

So to be clear, this is the right thing for the wrong reason. If Westinghouse still made TVs and they were doing this too, I would bet a year’s salary that they wouldn’t be included in the suit (as long as they were shoving their data in a US data center).

10-15 years

It would have been crazy in the CRT age and maybe the early LCD age. But then we got screens that require significant electronics to even be able to show an image, built into smart internet-connected TV’s which sometimes also have microphones and cameras built in. At the same time we also kind of dropped actual TV, and switched to streaming, where the streaming provider automatically and necessarily knows exactly what you watch, when you’re awake, what languages you speak, and so on.

Which IMHO makes it even more crazy to say it. Like why would a sane person say any of this is secret.

Not too long ago.

But when you set up things like AdGuard at home, you'll quickly see that most people are probably not nearly paranoid enough. I work in IT, and even others in IT that should in theory know better think I'm being too paranoid to use various protections when using the 'net.

I don't even have that many IoT devices in my house or enshittified products like Alexa, etc...and something like 20+% of DNS queries are blocked in my house...

I have Samsung in my house and of course they were known for being the worst/earliest offender when it came to "smart TVs", but they are hardly the only one. Certainly you can do a lot to block them, but I am quite sure most people never even bother.

it will just record you the whole time.

Something something something....... broken clock

IMO the problem is where the pictures go. If they were American companies they would not care at all.

And license plate readers.

whose trucks? their personal ones? arent phones already doing that lol on top of a lot more shit