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 :)
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.
It will be a dark day indeed when I allow my TV to connect to the internet. These things are glorified monitors.
You're right, we should start putting ads on all monitors
Somewhere, an ad exec just stiff.
Is American football not merely a vehicle through which advertising can be pumped? You’d think the entire sport had been designed from the ground up for such a purpose.
Four seconds of action, six minutes of commercials….3.6 seconds of action, 47 replays, five minutes of commercials.
P.S. Smart TVs can eat shit and die.
I went to a game for the first time a few years ago. I recall the moment where everyone was sitting around and not doing anything because they were waiting for the commercials to finish. It felt like watching actors drop their characters the moment they step out of the spotlight.
This (and the ridiculous, eye gouging price) is why I'd never go to a UFC event. It's bad enough when I'm home and I have to go clean the kitchen or fold my laundry for 30 minutes if a fight finishes even slightly early, but having to stand around waiting for ads to finish on a PPV card would turn me into Ted Kaczynski
It's come full circle.
Back in the early 00s, I invited my buddy over to watch the super bowl commercials. Neither one of us gave a damn whatsoever about football, put the commercials were always lit.
Tangentally related, FUTO put a bad taste in my mouth when they were harassing the graphene os team https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113443396794247106
Return it. If you hold on to it (even if you block the ads and all) it will signal the manufacturer, that this practice is fine.
Why the fuck does your television have a home page?
Never give the TV the wifi password.
Why the fuck does your television have a home page?
FLauncher is pretty great :)
A cheap computer/laptop. HDMI cable. Ublock origin (sprinkle some sponserblock and privacy badger in there). A TV that is never connected to the internet. Voila. No ads. None. Zilch. Zero. Ad free.
Streaming platforms that have gone to ad supported formats make me laugh because it's just a 3-5 second black screen, not the ad, and it's back to the content. Been doing it for decades. Don't sit there and get reamed by their bullshit.
AFAIK this will only get you 720p to 1080p depending on the streaming service. No 4K, no HDR.
Plenty of 4k with HDR on Real Debrid. Or even better quality and bitrate ripped from BRs, in the open waters.
HDMI 2.1 can support 4k. Find a ship that doesn't sink. Voila. No ads. Zilch. Zero. Nada. No HDR? Better than a single second of an ad.
It'll be 4k if you install the windows app for the service or watch in Edge.
Buy a smart TV box like Apple TV or Nvidia Shield. You can get full quality streaming with some ads but not nearly as bad as the software that’s built into some of these TVs.
I made my Smart TV into a dumb TV by never activating the smart TV functions. And then I plugged a relatively cheap computer into it. So I don't have this kind of problem.
Your grandma does.
I installed her TV and internet last week. She barely understands the concept of switching TV inputs, and her Roku smart TV doesn't let you rename inputs from HDMI1 to [ISP NAME] unless the thing is connected to the internet. It also defaults out of the box to show the smart TV bullshit every single time you turn it on, instead of just showing the last used input before the TV turned off. So she's completely baffled how to watch simple television channels unless I spend 10 minutes reconfiguring this garbage so it's usable.
Go visit your grandma, everyone. And reconfigure her smart TV. I'm joking but I'm not. I can only visit so many grandmas per day.
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.
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.
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.
I have a very old 4K Toshiba TV with a built in "smart browser" that, due to me never plugging into the Internet, has a home page with news about how well Obama's doing in the polls for being a relatively unknown junior senator.
Which only works for now. They've already gotten you to be ok with the upcharge price for the "smart" hardware. Soon they're going to require online activation for "reasons". So choosing to not connect it won't work. And they'll do regular ad connection checks and if it fails to update ads after so much time the TV will prompt an error to please correct the network.
Hate it all you want, it's going to happen.
I bought a new TV last year after my Hisense kicked the bucket and had a similar experience.
Not sure if it applies to your situation, but I just factory reset my TV, never enabled wifi, and hooked up a smart device I had lying around (Nvidia Shield). Now it all works great and if the smart functions upset me I can throw just the smart TV part in the trash and go back to my VCR.
Most smart TV OS are Cancer doesn't matter how much you paid for it
LG TVs, at least three one I have, have a pretty good operating system. I've never seen an ad (yet)
My TV has an even better operating system, Linux, because it's a display panel with an old laptop connected to it. Imagine seeing advertisements on your television screen, couldn't be me.
This might depend on the version the OS is. I have an LG that's been great for years, then it got a ""fresh new look"" that featured a giant banner for "recommendations."
I had auto-updates off, too. Thankfully, they still had an option to revert to the previous menu - but who knows how long that'd stay an option? It pissed me off enough to finally setup AdGaurd Home on my home server.
Fun Fact: It's increased my phone's battery life by ~48 hours (excluding the rare occasion where its being actively used all day).
LG is one of the worst. Only TVs with ROKU are worse for privacy concerns. ROKU, LG and Samsung make Google look good when it comes to invasion of privacy.
I've been against the idea of smart TVs from day one. A good panel will easily have a longer life than whatever smart box they shoe horn into TVs now. That's reason enough to avoid that trap.
Mark my words on this: on top of the privacy invasion Future smart TVs will be designed to slow down to the point of being unusable well before their panels wear out to force upgrades and prevent third party repairs.
This feels like my Philips. It has gotten so damn slow lately. I thought I had partially cleaned the system and yesterday I did a check and removed 25 apps thanks to adb. 25. I could not remove them from the TV setttings. Most of it was co.uk.freeview shit... was it there on my previous cleanup? Doubt. Did I install that? No.
cant one simple adb debloat any droid device? i mean adb list those packages, maybe even backup some and then remove the obvious ones?!
Not if they're baked into the system. Although that may get into GPL violations, I forget. God knows a device can come with locked firmware though.
i dont know what you mean by baked in really. all services are packages i guess and a quick google search says stuff like that at least exist at some point, e.g.https://github.com/tutyamxx/androidtv-debloat-script
i wish op the best of luck to escape telemetry hell.
Adb is just an interface between computer and phone, the packages it lists may not be every system component, you can add anything in at kernel level, or also just not list it in that interface.
Disable all internet functionality, set the time to the 1990s to prevent many timers from going off, attach the tv to another device that doesn’t have ads via your cable of choice. But why was your smart tv 1700? Did it have some special features?
Not disagreeing, but at some point this won't be enough. Assuming companies aren't already, "offline" devices will get shipped with the ability to utilize unsecured networks and/or other devices. Better hope any neighbors are privacy conscious too.*
(they're not)
I’ve been recommending physically snipping radios, but that can cause issues if you don’t understand what you’re doing. Any chance you know whether it’s possible to simply delete drivers and backups on modern smart tvs? Mine is ancient, so I have no clue what they’re doing to y’all, nowadays.
Apple TV was the best media thing I’ve bought in over a decade. No ads ever, incredibly responsive (league of its own compared to stuff like Roku), and is able to stream from my Jellyfin server. Beautiful interface, fast, clean, simple controller with a battery life that is easily over a year. Just a really good product. Roku can suck by nuts. Literal full page ads in a product that advertises that it has zero of them. Even the most expensive version. Fuck Roku.