A guy bought a $1,500 Samsung TV 3 years ago. He watched Netflix. He watched YouTube. He watched sports on the weekends. He thought the picture looked fine. He assumed that's just what a modern TV looks like. His friend, a home theater installer who's calibrated over 2,000 TVs for a living, walked into his apartment, looked at the screen for about 5 seconds, and said: "You're watching everything in demo mode. The motion smoothing is on. The eco dimmer is cutting your brightness by 40%. Your TV is taking a screenshot of your screen every 30 seconds and selling your viewing data to advertisers. And you're watching a $1,500 panel in the same picture mode Best Buy uses under fluorescent lights to make TVs pop on a showroom wall." He changed 9 settings in 12 minutes. The picture looked like a different television. The soap opera effect disappeared. The colors became natural. The TV stopped spying on him. He told him: "I install TVs in homes that cost $2 million. And I install TVs in apartments that cost $1,200 a month. You know what they all have in common? Nobody has changed the default settings. Every single TV I walk up to Samsung, LG, Sony, TCL, Hisense is running in a picture mode designed to look good in a store, not in your living room. And every single one is collecting data about what you watch and selling it to third parties. Out of the box." He said TV manufacturers make more money from your data than they do from the TV sale itself. "That's why a 65-inch 4K TV costs $400 now. The hardware is sold at a loss or near-zero margin. The profit comes from tracking what you watch, when you watch it, and how long you watch it then selling that behavioral data to advertisers. Your TV is a surveillance device that also shows movies. And the settings to stop it are buried 6 menus deep on purpose." Here are the 9 settings he changed: 🧵