It's not China doing this, it's manufacturers, wherever they are.
DJI happens to be a Chinese company but Samsung isn't, and they have been tracking what people watch on their TV (even if you're using HDMI and your own input) for years.
Big European, Asian and American brands are doing the same, washing machines requiring an account to access basic capabilities, cars phoning home, computers phoning home, phones phoning home, they all want it, they all do it.
Blaming China for this is deflecting the true culprit: the rampant notion that everything that could be sold has to be sold. Privacy doesn't matter, just put a red ribbon over it and force user to create an account and share their data in exchange for the priviledge of accessing what they thought they bought.
China didn't invent that, they sure love it, but they are not responsible for it alone.
... and they have been tracking what people watch on their TV (even if you're using HDMI and your own input) for years.
How? If you didn't give it an internet connection, how is it sending any tracking data back to the mothership? It can't guess your wifi password or anything.
I’m a layman but have asked this question somewhere once after noticing my “never connected TV” knew who was playing in a sports game it was promoting to me (basically it knew current events that only could have came from an internet connection of some sorts as it was months after its manufacture.) Apparently there a few avenues to consider, probably more than this actually. But this is what I’ve seen discussed so maybe do some more research or perhaps maybe someone will chime in.
For starters, where do you think your router was manufactured? Can you trust it to only allow connections with your WiFi credentials?
Beyond that, there’s a broad range of products and manufacturers in an average house. Assuming none have struck a deal to do a credential-less connection with the router itself, they may be talking to each other, basically asking “do you know the WiFi?” To every device in your home. Then, they share the info with each other even though you haven’t granted it.
One of the comments in my past discussion on this topic noted that he didn’t even have his Wi-Fi setup, had just moved in to a new apartment, yet apparently his TV was knowledgeable about something similar. I don’t remember how he knew/found out but he suggested that it discovered his neighbors TV which was the same manufacturer and his neighbor did have it connected to their WiFi so the commentor’s TV leveraged the neighbors WiFi without being provided the credentials by a human.
TVs can be aggressivetring to connect to any Wifi network. Apparently some now also come with SIM cards.
My xiaomi TV is making thousands of request per day to their domains. I block them all using adguard/adblock, but imagine the amount of information they can get from a connected TV.
Samsung and LG and many others do this.
Look for Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) in Samsung's privacy
This interesting study from last year: A First Look at Automatic
Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
More and more devices are coming with SIM cards baked in. You don’t pay for them, the manufacturer does, but they harvest your data whether you give them internet or not. For now I’m only aware of cars having these, but I suspect it’s just a matter of time before even cheap consumer gadgets have this too.
Really, the only answer is privacy regulation. Any other solution (just let the free market handle it, don’t give it internet access, etc) is not workable in the long term.
Only fools think the government is going to save them from corporate abuses, because they're in league. Half the time the government is the one forcing them to do it.
I'll care about protecting consumers once I figure out how to protect myself. Consumer products are an optimization algorithm where people get what they're willing to tolerate. You can either profit off it or build something better. I don't have a whole lot of respect for people who try to impose their will on the world through purely political means.
I don't believe it is China's fault. It is result of over-finalization of markets. Line must go up forever. Whatever can be done for that must be done. All theoretical future revenue streams must be presented to justify the line going up.
