What your TV remote knows

A plug meter on my television read about twelve watts with the screen black. Under one watt after I turned the quick start setting off.

Twelve watts costs nothing worth mentioning. What the number told me is that the set was awake at three in the morning, listening for a paired radio device, and that is a different fact from the electricity.

The remote is why. And the remote is the object in that room nobody files under privacy, because it is a lump of plastic with rubber buttons on it.

The microphone question, settled

Most voice remotes are press to talk. The microphone opens while your thumb is on the button and closes when you let go. A set with a far field mic in the bezel behaves like a smart speaker instead, listening locally for a wake phrase, with nothing leaving the house until it decides it heard one.

I rent out mobile data lines, so my week is mostly spent watching what small devices send when nobody is looking. Audio is expensive to move and expensive to store. Events cost close to nothing. That gap settled this argument years before anyone started having it in public.

The genuine fault in the voice story is the false trigger. Wake detection is loose on purpose, and the loudest source of near misses in a living room is the television. Those clips leave with everything else. Delete them, then stop worrying about the microphone.

This is not the screen sampling argument

I have written before about the other television record. That is the one where the set samples the picture every few seconds and matches it against a library to work out what is on screen, including material arriving over a cable it has no other view of. Real, present in most sets, hidden under a menu name you would never guess.

This piece is about a separate record, written by your thumb. It runs whether or not the picture matching is switched on, and on most sets there is no toggle for it anywhere in the menus.

What a button press is worth

Every press is an event with a time attached to it.

Woke at 9:08pm. Input moved to the second HDMI socket. App opened. Playback started. Paused at eleven minutes. Resumed. Stopped. Home screen scrolled through six rows and nothing chosen at the end of it.

A week of that says more about a household than a list of titles ever could. It carries the hour you sit down, how long you last, and which things you gave up on.

Abandonment is the column with money in it. The film you started at eleven at night and quit four minutes into never turns up in a survey, and you would not admit to it if one asked.

Two logs, one thumb

Two companies are writing here, and people discuss them as though they were one.

The platform is the software the set boots into. It sees the wake, the input change, the app launch, the session length and every move on the home screen.

The streaming service keeps a finer record inside its own app. The exact second you stopped. The intro you skip every time. The episode you never came back to.

From the sofa the split is invisible, because the same remote drives both and neither of them tells you which one is writing.

The buttons are a media buy

There are four branded buttons on the remote in front of me for services I have never opened once. They are not there because a focus group asked for them.

A branded button is a placement, negotiated and paid for, and the position carries its own price. The one under your thumb costs more than the one down by the bottom edge, for the same reason a shelf at eye level costs more than the shelf near the floor.

Which makes the remote the only piece of hardware in the house that is also an advertising slot. I find that clarifying rather than sinister. It says out loud who the paying customer is.

It also works, which is the part worth respecting. A button becomes a shortcut, a shortcut becomes a habit inside a fortnight, and the habit is what was bought.

Saying it out loud files it somewhere else

Hold the button, say the name of a show, and that audio clip leaves the building and lands with the company that built the platform. Their retention rules apply to it. The streaming service never receives it at all.

Type the same title into the search box inside the app and the record sits with the streaming service instead.

Same show, same intention, ten seconds apart, and the two versions end up at different companies under different rules with different deletion pages. One of those companies you have probably never signed into on a computer.

I still use voice search, because typing on a grid with a directional pad is miserable. The useful habit is knowing which account catches it and opening that account once.

Why the set never really turns off

An old remote was infrared. Line of sight, one direction, no pairing, no memory. A voice remote is a bluetooth peripheral: paired to the set, reporting its own battery level, talking in both directions.

Five second test. Point the remote at the wall behind you and press volume. If the volume moves, you are holding a radio. If you want to see the other kind, hold the nose of the remote up to your phone’s front camera and press a button. An infrared emitter shows on camera as a pale purple flash your eyes cannot see at all.

For a set to notice a press from a paired radio, the radio has to stay powered. So a television in standby is a computer with its network up and its bluetooth listening, with only the screen switched off. Quick start is the setting that buys eight seconds off the boot in exchange for a machine that never stops.

The settings that exist

Delete the voice history and switch off the storage of it. That control is in the account you set the television up with, on a website, rather than in the television menu where any sensible person looks first.

Reset the advertising identifier and turn on whatever your set calls limiting ad tracking. It does not stop the log being written. It makes the log harder to join onto the rest of your life, which is a smaller win than people hope for and still worth two minutes.

Find the picture matching setting while you are in that menu and turn it off. Different record, same trip.

Turn off quick start if you can live with the boot time.

And the biggest decision on the list gets made once, in a shop, while you are comparing black levels: which platform you hand the log to.

The setting that does not exist

No set I have looked at has a control that says stop recording which buttons I press. Nobody presents it as a privacy feature because nobody presents it as anything. The log is how the software decides what to put in front of you next, and the same records go out of the other door to the advertising side of the business.

Which brings me to advice I used to give and have stopped giving in that form. Keep the television off wifi, feed it from a separate box.

What that actually does is move the log to whoever made the box, because you are now using their interface, their home screen and their remote. If you trust that company more, it is a real improvement and I would still do it. It is not an air gap. Relocating a record is a different thing from ending one, and I would rather somebody picked a platform whose deletion page works than felt clever about a television with no wifi password in it.

The part I got wrong

For a couple of years my position was that the button log is boring. A list of app launches. Who could possibly care.

Then I sat down and read one, an export a few years deep.

It had every night I started something at eleven and gave up before quarter past. The week I watched the same forty minutes of a series three times over because I kept falling asleep in the same chair. A run of things I would not have described to anybody as what I watch.

Nobody needed to hear a single word said in that room to know any of it.

I had waved it off for being dull, and dull is precisely the property that makes a record cheap to keep for a decade and easy to bolt onto everything else already known about you. The dramatic data gets a law written about it. The boring data just gets kept.

One remote, four people

The set has no idea who is holding it. Profiles exist on some platforms, hardly anybody sets them up, and the hardware level records sit underneath the profiles regardless.

So the log is a household flattened into one composite viewer. A teenager, somebody who falls asleep at ten, somebody who only ever watches sport, averaged into a single person who was never sitting in the room.

That is why the recommendations drift and why the ads occasionally make no sense at all. It runs the other way too. A blended household record is harder to pin onto one individual, which is the closest thing to good news in any of this.

What I changed on my own set, in order, is here.