Why are modern televisions so cheap?

My daughter has just moved house, and she’s been shopping for a new, large-screen television to go in her new home. She told me she could buy a 55”, 4k set with a daylight-viewable screen and a huge set of features for £279. I laughed at this – I’d just paid more than that for a 32” computer monitor. There’s no way, I said, that anybody could make a 55” TV for that price. I thought it had to be a scam.

Turns out I was dead wrong – you can buy a 55”, 4k TV for £279, and from a regular retailer, not some dodgy, online deal. In fact, three retailers within walking distance of her house had similar offerings, from various manufacturers.

I’ve never owned a regular television, so it’s no surprise that I’m out of touch with pricing. Still, it seemed obvious to me that such large, complex, feature-rich appliances couldn’t be that cheap without some kind of angle. So I investigated.

Maybe I’m the last person on Earth to realize this, but:

Modern televisions are surveillance devices.

OK, this should have been obvious. Modern, “smart” TVs – and they’re all “smart” these days – are just like smartphones with much larger screens. If smartphones are surveillance devices, there’s no reason TVs should be any different. All modern TVs are based on a software platform provided by one of the tech giants: my daughter’s is an Amazon Fire device, but there are similar offerings from Google and others.

All these platforms spy on their users in a variety of ways. They all record what channels you watch, when, and for how long. They record what external services you use, to do what. Since they all have voice control capabilities, they can record your voice. Some even have built-in cameras.

Everything that’s bad about a smartphone, from a privacy perspective, is also bad about a modern TV. But TVs go even further than smartphones in some respects. You might think that if you just use your TV as a display device – perhaps playing content from a DVD player or games console – it won’t have anything to report to its overlords. But, no – the horrors of Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) ensure that everything you consume is potentially known to the platform provider. All modern TVs support ACR; here is where Amazon explains how it uses this technology.

Even leaving aside the horrors of ACR, everything about a modern TV is designed to bully its owner into buying or subscribing to more of the vendor’s services, so it can slurp up even more private data. Amazon Fire TVs support Netflix and YouTube – but you won’t be able to watch either of these without signing up for an Amazon account. Hitting the “YouTube” button on the controller just brings up the “Log into your Amazon account” screen. Neither Netflix nor YouTube is an Amazon service, so why does Amazon insist the TV’s user has an Amazon account? It’s so our viewing habits can be cross-connected with other information that Amazon holds about us.

All this, of course, is so Amazon, Google, et al., can continue to make an obscene fortune by selling advertising. At present, smart TVs don’t seem to display advertising over the top of the program you’re watching – thank Heavens – but they don’t miss many other opportunities to advertise. You can, in principle, turn off targeted advertising, and reduce the amount of surveillance. However, you’ll still see a load of advertising, which is an aesthetic problem, if not a privacy problem, and there’s a measure of surveillance that can’t be turned off.

I thought it would be instructive to find out how much my personal information is worth to the TV’s vendor, by comparing the prices of “smart” TVs with similar-sized “normal” TVs, that is, TVs without surveillance features. This turns out to be impossible: for screen sizes over about 42”, no such device exists. You can buy a “dumb” 42” monitor for commercial signage from a specialist supplier, but nothing larger. If you want a 55” TV (or larger, even) you have to buy into some tech giant’s platform, and all the creepy spyware that goes with it.

Just out of curiosity, I tried to set my daughter’s TV up without an Internet connection. I reasoned that if it doesn’t have a connection, it can’t do anything with the data it collects about me. If I just want to use it as a display device this is, in fact, possible. In fact, it’s the only thing the TV can do without an Amazon account. It can’t even display Internet TV channels from the Freely system, even though these aren’t associated with Amazon, and I can watch them on my Linux PC without signing up for anything.

It seems that the only way to use a modern TV without throwing your privacy away is never to connect it to the Internet, ever, and use it essentially as a computer monitor. However, the Fire TVs make this very difficult, by prompting the user to create an Amazon account at every opportunity.

Why do I care about any of this?

My old video projector is coming to the end of its service life, and I’ve been toying with the idea of replacing it with a large-screen TV. It would need to be a huge TV, to have a screen size that even approaches that of a projector, and I just can’t buy a TV of that size without privacy-busting “smart” features. The product I want doesn’t exist, at any price.

It’s a shame: you get quite a decent display for £279 – but the hidden cost is further erosion of your privacy. I guess I won’t be buying one, after all.