[benced]

Because the companies are selling technology to us cheaper than cost in exchange for this? I do think they should be required to offer a revenue-neutral way to turn off ads but it would cost several hundred dollars and only me & 5 other weirdos on this website would buy it.

You can look at Vizio's quarterly statements before Walmart bought them: their devices were margin negative and "Platform+" (ads) made up for it: https://investors.vizio.com/financials/quarterly-results/def...

[itopaloglu83]

We all know that they would artificially increase the price of those models and exclude tons of features to punish users and say it’s not profitable.

They should not be allowed to track user at all as a hardware manufacturer, let the users purchase the tracking software themselves and get a rebate back.

[nyeah]

That may be a good point. But I don't think it's an answer to my question.

My question was, Why do people get so passionate about being screwed? Say consumers really are receiving a $300 discount in exchange for being forced to watch say 30 hours of ads. Is that really such a fantastic opportunity that I'm going to go cheer for it publicly, or claim it's consumers' fault, or it should be mandatory, or we must just accept it because (whatever)?

[benced]

I think most people don't see the basic trade of "you charge me less but get my data & my attention" to be a bad deal, particularly when the upside is a large TV which was a _huge_ status symbol (for better or worse) not even 15 years ago.