If you live in the glorious People's Republic of China, you now have the honor of providing all your personal data to the government while you watch TV!

Like many good stories, this one begins with a man frustrated with his TV. A user on the Chinese V2EX forum shared that his smart TV had been lagging and that he'd done a bit of research to figure out why.

In the process, he discovered that the TV was scanning his WiFi network every 10 minutes and sending a bunch of related data back to Gozen Data, a Chinese analytics firm that partners with various TV makers and is of course, like everything else in China, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

Here's what the television reported back, according to the user:

"What smart devices are used at home; whether your phone is at home; who is visiting and using your Wi-Fi; what's the name of your neighbor's Wi-Fi; all of these are constantly being collected and uploaded."

Think about what you could do with that data.

Let's say you were, I don't know, a power-hungry totalitarian government that enslaves over a billion people in the world's most sophisticated police state.

Let's say 270 million of those citizens owned smart TVs and you felt it would be convenient to use said technology to know if people are home at any given time, who is at their home with them, and what other networks are nearby. And that's just the tracking we know about.

This is about 1 step away from literal 1984 telescreens.

Emperor Xi Jinping must be feeling pretty good about his ability to keep tabs on his subjects:

On the Chinese social app Weibo, there was a torrent of backlash against the discovery, with many people noting that maybe, just maybe, it isn't the best idea to have "smart" replacements for every device in your home.

Here's my advice: when in doubt, stick with what's old school: