(Image credit: Tom's Guide) Try a Pi-hole Trusting them to honor a checkbox or a settings change that cuts off a major revenue stream is understandably suspect. This is not an unfounded fear, because several major brands have been caught acting a little shady about these practices. There's also the justifiable fear that TV brands won't fully honor an opt-out request. There will very likely still be some information gathered on any connected device, and you will still be served ads and content recommendations, though they may not be fine-tuned to your tastes. Opting out of these practices will eliminate the majority of the worrisome behaviors, but it's not a cure-all. Data collection methods vary widely between brands, and the process is made a bit opaque by burying the options deep in the settings and using benign sounding names for tracking features. But it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. Turning off ACR will stop most data collection with a single setting change.
This lets the TV have a fairly high level of detail about your viewing habits whether you are streaming through an independent app or watching from an external device. This technology takes a small sampling of the pixels on your screen as a fingerprint to identify what content you're watching. The biggest offender comes in the form of Automated Content Recognition (ACR). Thanks largely to laws like Europe's General Data Protection Regulation and the 2020 California Consumer Privacy Act, TVs sold in the United States have to offer users a way to opt out of most tracking and data collection. Opt out of ads and trackingįinally, the easiest option is to opt out of the ads and tracking where you can. So here are a few things you can do to fight back against the march of intrusive ads and creepy monitoring. While there's plenty to say about the ethical concerns around these practices, one thing is very clear: People want a way out. And it includes granting the TV permission to snoop on your viewing habits. But those brief screens often include user agreements that can be dozens or even hundreds of pages long. Powering on a new smart TV invariably includes a few brief screens of user agreements that rarely get a second glance from users as they hurry to get online and start streaming. The worst part? You likely gave them the okay to do all of it when you set up your TV in the first place. More often than not, however, it's also being sold to third parties. In the best case, that data is being used to provide you with more relevant ads and better content suggestions. sysdeps/posix/system.Using a variety of technologies, from tracking what shows you watch and which apps you open to matching up your viewing data with web browsing from other devices thanks to location and IP address information, smart TVs are gathering a lot of information. This gets passed around until it finally gets dereferenced in vfs_memctx_fsp_extension(). This appears to be because vfs_btrfs enables compression support, and when macOS connects it calls dos_mode_check_compressed() which calls SMB_VFS_GET_COMPRESSION with a NULL files_struct pointer. If we combine vfs_btrfs with (at least) vfs_catia or vfs_streams_xattr, we hit a NULL pointer in vfs_memctx_fsp_extension().