Crossposted from https://infosec.pub/post/52518361
The TV world has been a pot of controversy thanks to a two-hour-and-15-minute video from Gamers Nexus claiming LG TVs are nefariously spying on everything you do. They can record and store audio even when they seem to be off, track everything you watch, and could even be hacked remotely and turned into covert surveillance […]
That might literally be true.
Imagine there are two factories. One spends $100 a week disposing of toxic waste. The other one saves that $100 a week by dumping their toxic waste into the local river. Absent of a robust regulatory state that can prevent and punish that kind of behavior, even if the first factory wants to be responsible environmental stewards, they might literally go bankrupt trying to compete with the evil factory.
You can apply this to anything that can be regulated. Companies might not have a choice between doing the evil thing or not; it might literally be a matter of “Well, everyone is doing it, and if I don’t, then I’ll be driven out of business anyway.”
A functional government gets out in front of this phenomenon, makes doing evil shit illegal, and levies fines and punishments against companies that do evil/illegal shit such that doing the evil shit is no longer profitable.
But instead we’ve got… [gestures broadly at our current nightmare reality].