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Smart TVs Are Watching You | Feisty Duck
(www.feistyduck.com)
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
If you block ALL traffic from it? Sure. It's possible but more involved and requires the right hardware to block their tracking domains while leaving streaming apps working.
It's best not to use smart TVs as well smart TVs. The apps they have are almost always slower or inferior in some way to the versions you get on streaming devices, updated less often, etc. I recommend pairing a TV with a quality streaming device like an Nvidia shield (or shield pro) or an AppleTV*. Alternatively if you want something a little cheaper in Androidtv space there is the Walmart brand Onn 4k pro.
*warning with Apple is while they're pretty good on privacy (meh, there are no excellent choices that support streaming apps in 1080p quality) and don't have ads their app-store is a bit more locked down. They have all the major streaming services but if you do high seas type stuff it will be more involved and difficult. Though if you have a local media collection (source your own discs or high seas) and run Plex or Jellyfin they have apps for both of those that work great as well as Infuse which usually requires a subscription unless you don't need 4k or any proprietary audio codecs like dolby for any of your media. I personally can say I enjoy my AppleTV 4K and I think it's a great device but I run my own media-server and have some common streaming services I pay for.