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.
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I just finished setting up a custom router with dns ad blocking. Next comes a media player so I can purge this smart TV filth from my household.
Huge shout out to Louis Rossmann and the FUTO communuty contributors, check out the wiki on self-hosted software if you haven't already.
I haven't had a living grandmother in... I don't even know how many years at this point.
But the fact of the matter is, the older generations don't really use Smart TVs, they're still using Comcast boxes and accessing regular TV. Some of the more tech savvy will engage Netflix or Disney+ but beyond that, it's doubtful they even know anything beyond those exist.
I'll reiterate that I'm in a half dozen living rooms every day, and most of them are senior citizens. I've been doing this for years. They all have smart TVs, whether they use the features or not.
I'll also reiterate that they flat out will not even use a TV sometimes because they're defeated by the smart TV features that prevent them from getting over to their Comcast box. Did you even read my comment?
They get suckered by the cheap TV in middle of the aisle at Walmart or Costco and buy three. You can't even go out and buy a TV that isn't a smart TV without specifically looking for it. They don't even know to begin to look for these things.
Do you think they're still on an old CRT with a VCR hooked up via RCA? They had to go down some weird upgrade rabbit hole that they still don't fully understand because they ended up with a DVD of some classic movie, went and got a DVD player only to find out they didn't have HDMI ports so now they had to go buy some garbage TV thats subsidized by advertising companies. Again, I've seen this exact scenario play out a hundred times.
The fact of the matter is that your fix reeks of 'I got mine' energy, and it doesn't fix anything. Large swaths of people will still get these ads in their faces and these companies won't stop. Quite the opposite, they'll keep looking for more ways to fuck their customers.
Yes I did read your comment and here you just proved my point. And my solution was not for old people. Point I was making in my comment was that old people are already lost cause. They don't understand technology and therefore will not benefit from it. So yeah they get suckered into buying these TVs and then they never use them properly or they get somebody younger to set them up so that they can use either Netflix or Disney+ since those are the only things they know of to watch whatever programs they can pull up or they pay someone to get a cable box plugged in and surf like they did in the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s.
My "fix" is for younger people, twenties to '50s, who don't want to deal with the ad-pocalypse. I have been able to set it up multiple times with various sized computers right down to a Raspberry Pi. And yeah, of some ain't tech savvy enough to plug a computer into an HDMI port and use it to watch stuff on their TV, I have no sympathies. We live in a digital age and if you're younger than '50 years old and can't work a computer, you're dead out of luck when it comes to digital entertainment and you might as well get used to having ads shoved in your face the rest of your life.