I just hope they never start embedding mobile radios in TVs to circumvent people who know better than to connect their TV to their network.
This is my concern with almost any "smart home", IoT type devices now.
As we've already seen with cars, it's entirely possible for a whole industry to shift towards anti-consumer measures like mandatory remote access, and for neither market competition nor laws and regulations to rein them in.
In other news, car theft was essentially a solved problem, where it had become so difficult to drive away that the most effective strategy was literally to break into someone's home/office and steal the real keys. Today, car theft is on the rise, and numerous researchers have demonstrated compromising the security of numerous models from entry-level to expensive prestige vehicles in a matter of seconds.
Not all remote control is good. Not all data sharing is good. Being permanently online is not always good. At some point, we as a society need to realise that and start regulating the products and services we use accordingly... Ideally before some mass hack breaches the privacy of millions of families with smart devices putting cameras and microphones in their homes, or causes every car of a certain model to suddenly accelerate to full speed in the middle of town or slam on the brakes on a high speed road, or otherwise causes some other kind of widespread damage that can't just be ignored or recovered afterwards.
Back in the late 90s when digital TV was being rolled out, RTÉ in Ireland developed a technology called WiNDS. You won't find much technical information about it online because it never moved beyond the prototype phase. WiNDS provided a return path for ordering PPV events and other interactivity by embedding a GSM data modem in your set top box. It would transmit back to base using your regular TV antenna.
Why would we need 5G to do this? Is there something cheaper about it?
I thought it was just faster, and generally only usable at closer rangers because of higher frequencies. And those higher frequencies make it less capable of penetrating into buildings.
I would imagine they can exfiltrate their tracking info with very little network traffic over LTE.