I’m seeing that the old mantra is alive and kicking: "If the product is cheap/free, you are the product! Pay for the product!" Turns out that now both is true—t

I’m seeing that the old mantra is alive and kicking: "If the product is cheap/free, you are the product! Pay for the product!" Turns out that now both is true—they’ll charge you a steep price comparative to other brands, and they’ll _still_ spy on you. Why are some still defending corporations? It’s incredible how these brands are, one by one, destroying any affinity and good will left for them (LG, Sony, Microsoft, etc.). Nowadays whenever I hear a company has a custom OS I think custom what? Custom tracking and ad pipeline? This just makes me turn elsewhere entirely, not want to "upgrade" to an even more expensive product that _might_ not track me. Might isn’t good enough. I’ll take a cheap TCL panel with all the latest bells and whistles, and be done with it. Sure, the software will be janky, but it will be cheap and just as good at showing moving pictures, if not better. If I suspect something nefarious, I’ll get an old Android box and install a rooted system on there that I control, and use that instead of the inbuilt Android TV. But I _won’t_ be paying extra for the trouble.