We’re Apparently Scanning Our TVs for Viruses Now ⇥ techdirt.com

Jon Porter, the Verge:

Samsung has reminded owners of its smart TVs that they should be regularly scanning for malware using its built-in virus scanning software. “Prevent malicious software attacks on your TV by scanning for viruses on your TV every few weeks,” a (now deleted) tweet from the company’s US support account read alongside a video attachment that demonstrated the laborious process.

Karl Bode, Techdirt

The problem is if you’ve shopped for a TV lately, it’s effectively impossible to find a “dumb” television that simply passes on signal from other devices. As in: they’re simply not available at any meaningful scale, even if you were willing to pay a significant premium for them. Many people certainly are; most embedded TV OS platforms are kind of terrible, and users would rather buy a new streaming box (Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV) every few years than be forced to buy an entirely new TV set because the embedded streaming hardware becomes outdated (something TV vendors clearly would benefit from).

While some set vendors might argue that dumb televisions don’t exist because there’s no market demand for them, the fact is they haven’t even bothered to try. And they haven’t bothered to try because they’re fixated on accelerating the TV upgrade cycle and collecting and selling your personal usage data to a universe of partners. Which again, might not be quite as bad if these companies had done a good job actually securing and encrypting this data, or designing television OS’ that didn’t feel like they were barfed up from the bowels of 1992 GUI design hell.

One of the truly great mistakes of the past fifty years or so — but particularly within the last ten — is treating data as inherently financially valuable. I think we’re only just beginning to see the repercussions of that choice in Facebook’s full house of scandals and the fallout from the breaches of Equifax, et al. It’s going to get worse.

Happy Monday, everybody.