Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Opinion At the end of last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five of the largest TV companies, accusing them of excessive and deceptive surveillance of their customers.

Paxton reserved special venom for the two China-based members of the quintet. His argument is that unlike Sony, Samsung, and LG, if Hisense and TCL have conducted surveillance in the way the lawsuits accuse them of, they'd potentially be required to share all data with the Chinese Communist Party.

It is a rare pleasure to state that legal action against tech companies is cogent, timely, focused, and – if the allegations are true – deserves to succeed. It is less pleasant to predict that even if one, several, or all of these manufacturers did what they're accused of, and were sanctioned for it, it would not put the safeguards in place to stop such practices from recurring.

At the heart of ...