Technology

I'm pretty sure this won't fly in court because this is a significant change to a product long after the product was purchased, which could potentially fly in the face of false advertising laws, since this "feature" was not advertised, and they're not being denied access to a product they purchased. It's clearly coercive.

However, this is the USA and stupider shit has happened. Judges here love to gargle corporate balls. See: Clearance Thomas.

When we make lobbying illegal in ~~this country~~ the United States

Europe is doing it. Look at Apple vs Spotify, as well as Apple forced to open their app stores to 3rd parties. Those are consumer oriented laws. In the USA, lobbying prevent those from happening.

US: best we can do is a other corporate tax cut

There will certainly be many lawsuits about it, no doubt. They e shot themselves in the foot for no reason here. What a dumb move.

I have a smart light switch I can't use anymore because they updated the app to force you to make an account to use it and I refused since it worked fine for the last 3 years without them needing to sell my data.

Maybe just buy a monitor, particularly if you only need streaming.

Smart TVs are usually sold at a loss because they expect to make the money back through ads, so if you never connect one to the internet in the first place, you get a cheap decent TV and you cost these cockroaches money

My setup is a Samsung that doesn’t have WiFi setup. It supports HDMI CEC, as does my game console and streaming box, so I basically never touch the TV remote. It’s effectively a dumb monitor.

I mostly stream via my Xbox and AppleTV since they’re performant systems.

Most LGs can be set up without internet at all.

Scepter seems to be the well recommended budget option

Rtings is a good site for tv reviews across a wide range of price levels. I’ve used several their reviews to make purchases and have been satisfied thus far.

Best Budget TV’s

Do it, its worth the effort

I honestly think a lot of these terms of service agreements are legally unenforceable, but they don't get contested in court very often.

Like if they say "you consented to the arbitration agreement" I could just argue I never physically signed anything and it was actually my 5 year old who agreed so he could watch TV.

But don't you see, the consumer surely benefits. After agreeing they get to continue using their tv under our new and wonderful terms of service. /s

I let my cat step on the remote. Fucker doesn't pull his weight, so if the lawyers come after him he's on his own.

Yeah, this is really dumb. There's no way they can prove the owner clicked on it and they can't hold anyone else to the terms.

It isn't, an 8 year old can't be held to a contract like this. IANAL.