After the WikiLeaks revelations should your views on Smart TV’s change?

With the recent WikiLeaks revelations regarding your smartphones and smart TV’s and how easy they can be used to spy on you, are smart TV’s something that you need? Sure, smart TV’s offer you the ability to go online from your TV and stream content from the likes of YouTube and Netflix and many now offer this via voice control, but are you now rethinking your opinion on them?

The conversation about smart TV’s should have started 2 years ago when it was revealed that some of Samsung’s smart TV models could be spying on you, but we can start having that conversation now. With smart TV’s the smart technology is built into the TV and if you disable the smart settings via the TV’s settings you should be safe but the WikiLeaks revelations might make you rethink that.

However, there is a way that you can have most or all that a smart TV can offer you without worrying if your conversations are being listened to or recorded. The technology used in smart TVs is also now incorporated in external devices such as set-top boxes, some Blu-ray player models, games consoles and digital media players. When you turn these external devices off and unplug them they have no way of acting malicious and doing Big Brothers bidding.

If you are looking to buy a new TV you can buy a non-smart TV which will save you money and then buy an external device which can give your TV smart technologies that you can control. When you are buying an external device for your TV the following suggestions will look after your every need:

• Apple TV
• Google Chromecast
• Amazon Fire TV Stick
• Smart enabled Blu-ray player.
• Games consoles such as the PS4 and the Xbox One.
• Digital media players.

But be very wary of the cheap Android TV devices as they can be prone to hacking, and as for smartphones, that’s a conversation for another day.