Maciej Rutkowski

Starting in 2027, smartphones sold in the European Union will be required to have user-replaceable batteries designed for greater durability and more charging cycles. Manufacturers must also provide spare parts and repair manuals for at least 10 years after a model is released. This is real pressure against planned obsolescence. It should mean phones that actually last longer, cheaper fixes, and a lot less electronic waste piling up. About time.

Your streaming device is watching you watch. Researchers crawled more than 2,000 Roku and Amazon Fire TV channels and found traffic to known trackers on 69% of Roku channels and 89% of Fire TV channels. They documented collection of persistent identifiers including device IDs, serial numbers, WiFi MAC addresses, and SSIDs, and concluded the built in ad tracking limits on those platforms were practically ineffective. The tracking infrastructure has only grown since. The mechanism most people have never heard of is Automatic Content Recognition. ACR fingerprints the audio and video frames playing on your screen and matches them against a database. And it does not stop at apps running on the TV. Vizio's own policy says its Viewing Data can cover content playing on the display and identify connected devices including a streaming stick. Sony documents that Samba TV, when enabled, can recognize content from set top boxes, Blu-ray players, Roku, and Apple TV over HDMI. The honest ranking on platform privacy. Apple TV sits at the top, narrowly. Apple does NOT document ACR on the Apple TV box. App Tracking Transparency forces third party apps to ask before tracking. Apple is not invisible though. The Apple TV app itself collects playback, search, purchase, and connected app activity for personalization unless you turn off Use Play History and disconnect connected apps. Roku is middle tier. Smart TV Experience uses ACR when enabled, and you can turn off Use Info from TV Inputs and reset the advertising ID. The device still exists to sell ads. Google TV is also middle tier, for a different reason. Setup requires a Google Account. Recommendations pull from watch activity, connected streaming services, and entertainment searches tied to that account. Apps only mode still shows sponsored content, and ads cannot be turned off entirely. Only the ad ID can be reset. Fire TV is last. Amazon openly sells sponsored rows, feature rotators, sponsored tiles, and sponsored screensavers as Fire TV ad products, and Amazon's help pages expose ACR and over the air viewing data controls on Fire TV smart TVs rather than avoiding the capability altogether. If you do one thing tonight: disable the panel's viewing data feature.

Kit built this, should we ship it? (sound on)

Firing a submachine gun underwater