- Buy an LG OLED TV. They're as gorgeous as they are notorious. I just got a 77" LG C6 and it is crazy good.
- Root it [0].
- Install Glasshouse [1] and disable all telemetry. YOU now own the glass. Now you can chromecast to the TV, use Adfree YouTube, access IP TV, etc etc etc. No point crippling your TV by pulling the wireless module and voiding your warranty.
- Install a bunch of cool apps to your TV [2] (there are many more out there besides those listed here)
- Restore to Factory Defaults if you ever want / need to unroot and get back to stock e.g. a warranty claim
The only issue is that LG recently closed the vulnerability that made rooting possible so you don't want any firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84. Hopefully a new exploit is found that makes rooting possible once again.
BTW, you might have heard of Dev Mode on these TVs but they don't allow anywhere near the functionality that rooting provides.
This seems excessive. Easier to disconnect it from the internet completely, and have it boot to HDMI1, hook up an external HDMI-CEC switch, and never think about it again.
With "Hotel Mode" you can make this effectively permanent and never see LG's UI again unless you want it.
Then just connect whatever HDMI-based box you want (Roku, Apple TV, Plex, Android, whatever) and use that for the content.
I used to work for an IoT connectivity provider (think SIM cards, eUICC etc); I know that some of the manufacturers of various devices have been investigating adding cellular and soldered eUICC (ostensibly for diagnostics, warranty etc).
So it's not even that it won't be long; I'm sure they already have designs and are just waiting for eUICC support to catch up.
Vehicles already have them, you don't need a lot of bandwidth just enough data to identify the members household which can be done with a wifi access point map and bluetooth MACs.
Then they'll quickly discover how bad cell coverage is in vast swathes of the USA and they'll have to be a lot more tolerant of bad customer sat scores and high return rates than they typically want to be.
I haven't seen an open WiFi network near any apartment I've lived in for more than a decade.
There has never been a shred of evidence for any TV model actually doing this despite how often it's speculated about in comment sections.
It's kinda weird how the most sensible, straightforward mitigation for the TV spying people claim to be concerned always gets this evidence-free FUD thrown out to claim it's pointless.
I have seen open wifi reachable from places i've lived on. Spotty and intermittent connection but there. Apartment buildings with businesses on the 1st floor are also common now, those businesses may have open wifi, etc.
Yes, but you can choose your adventure here. Better than having to replace the entire TV if you find one that doesn't do what you want.
Not to mention that technology moves forward and you can replace these if new models come out that have better features or are more aligned with your privacy preferences.
> have it boot to HDMI1, hook up an external HDMI-CEC switch
That's not actually how HDMI-CEC works. HDMI-CEC switches aren't KVM switches that only do HDMI.
An HDMI-CEC switcher box (or devices with that functionality built into them, like many soundbars) doesn't act as its own isolated sub-HDMI-CEC bus, where the switch presents to its downstreams as the root HDMI-CEC device, catching (without bubbling) <Active Source> messages from said downstreams, selecting one downstream to be active in an internal sense, and then presenting itself to its upstream connected TV or what-have-you as if it's one leaf-node source whose video+audio signals just-so-happen to be those of the currently-selected downstream.
Rather, at an HDMI-CEC level, an HDMI switch is a lot more like a USB switch: it passes through all the CEC message broadcasts from all of its downstream source devices through to its upstream receiver device (and vice-versa), sometimes also interpreting them in turn for effect; and the root host device can actually see the whole tree topology, including any switches.
(Fun fact: HDMI-CEC devices have four-step hierarchical addresses, that look like IP addresses, describing at each step the physical socket-number offset on the upstream device that connects said upstream to the given downstream. The TV is always 0.0.0.0. Whatever's plugged into the TV's first HDMI socket is 1.0.0.0. If that thing is an HDMI switcher box, then whatever's plugged into its first downstream HDMI socket is 1.1.0.0. And so on. All of these devices can see and talk to one another using these addresses, at all times. It's a network!)
Importantly, this means that if a TV is plugged into an HDMI switcher box, which in turn has several source devices plugged into it, then the TV will still be aware of, and can still hear and speak to, all the inactive sources downstream of the switcher box, not just the active one.
Which in turn means that if your TV is really stupid in the way it handles HDMI-CEC (e.g. trying to "argue" with sources about who's supposed to be active on wake, with the TV trying to force the last-active source and the source that woke the TV trying to force itself as the active source), then putting an HDMI-CEC switcher box in between will by no means improve things. They'll still be arguing, now "through" the switcher box; and the switcher box will itself be doing additional things in response to seeing these messages. Where previously you had O(N) HDMI-CEC problems, now you'll have O(N log N) HDMI-CEC problems.
But hey, at least your leaf-node sources in this tree all show up in the TV's input switcher menu! That was definitely worth making all this mess, HDMI Forum! :P
I've never really dug into it but this does explain a lot of the strange and flakey behavior that I've seen with switches purporting to offer HDMI-CEC support. All I really want is auto-input switching and being able to control the volume through the device.
It doesn't seem like it should be so hard, but it has broken and fixed itself so many times that I really don't know what I should be looking for.
Nope. The TV stores all the data it harvests and scans WiFi in search of an open network. Whenever it finds one (and LG could make commercial agreements with Telco operating open WiFi’s to use them) it will connect and exfiltrate whatever it found.
This has been mentioned in so many comments and there isn't a shred of evidence about it
It seems to be misconstruing the fact that TVs will scan nearby networks for fingerprinting, but they don't _connect_ to those networks. It would be very very easy for someone to reproduce if they did
I have a recent 60ish inch LG OLED that's not been connected to the internet AFAICT for over a year. It's not connected to a LAN and it's not configured for any WiFi network. I have never connected it to the internet at all. It's working like a champ. No crashes or other issues. I treat it as a dumb monitor. HDMI in, optical out for audio to my stereo.
> The only issue is that LG recently closed the vulnerability that made rooting possible so you don't want any firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84. Hopefully a new exploit is found that makes rooting possible once again.
I mean if you think about it, you're "stealing" from them. They (probably) calculate the value of selling user data and use it to offset the cost of the TV.
If you take away the user data, you are "coming out ahead". I'm guessing the days of selling hardware at a loss are mostly over, but the margins are probably pretty tight.
Why people subject themselves to TV operating systems (or chromecasts, apple TV, etc)? I just have a mini-ITX PC connected to my TV and a flymouse. You can even use pre-made mini-PC if you don't care about gaming. Using anything without ad-block is impossible these days.
Being able to pull out a full wireless keyboard+mouse when doing productivity work is great. Me and my wife regularly use the TV to plans trips, online shop and do spreasheet stuff.
Some of us rode the home-theater-pc wave back in 2003 and are sick of the jankiness of having to have a keyboard in your living room for the daily “occasional” thing you can’t do with the remote.
Yeah I agree no need for a janky setup like that these days. If you want control of your media, but don't want the dated HTPC setup, get something like a Ugoos am6b+ run Plex/Kodi/Jellyfin/Emby on a PC anywhere on your network and that can play all of your media using a remote and nice interface.
Because I have to go through it to get to my android TV and Linux machine, until glasshouse it was driving me nuts how poorly designed the LG home app was. I just want to click a button and get the input selector!
The LG G5 stock remote doesn't even have a input button... Or a mute button, But it does have, six apps I never want to use, a AI microphone button that isn't useful, an accessibility button (which wouldn't actually be useful if I needed those features, you have to hold it to get a useful menu, which I am sure is easy for people who have trouble with remotes.
I rebound the accessibility button (located top right, where you expect the input button to be) to trigger home assistant to send an IR signal to open the input menu, disabled the random apps (though I did consider assigning those to inputs) and made the ai microphone button a mute button.
Its a bit silky I need a WebKit vuln and a vibe coded homepage to get the TV to the same UX of 10 years ago, but I got there in the end.
All I want is to select my computer or streaming box and turn it off and on :/
I bought a Windows PC to run my TV before Android TV was a thing. It came with a remote, Bluray software, and a TV tuner.
The whole thing just felt half-assed. I'm not going back. MS really missed an opportunity, because if it wasn't for quality issues, it would have been halfway decent.
Prior to that I used a mac mini with a TV tuner. The TV tuner software was horrible; the UI for programming the DVR was like writing SQL queries. I have a degree in computer science so I could understand it, but there was no way I'd try to explain that to someone who wasn't interested in databases.
I’m going to give an earnest answer. first, most people don’t care they’re being spied on, don’t know they’re being spied on, or lack the knowledge to do anything about it or find alternatives. Some people just want to watch TV. Another big reason is that it’s nearly impossible to stream anything higher than 1080p from the major content providers unless you’re using DRM ready systems. The solution to that is torrenting media and running a plex/jellyfin server, which once again most people don’t want to do
Because Apple TV is fine, just works, and I’ve been scared by Windows Media Centre. Oh and it never quite works cleanly, whatever the OS / HTPC interface.
VESA mounted with a generic VESA plate "doubler" solved the aesthetics for me. Out of sight and all. Though I now need to replace its fan with the new one sitting in a drawer.
most of the world has no clue what you are talking about, or they are too old to understand or they don't care. I'm not criticizing you I'm just saying they aren't even aware this is an issue
make sure it’s a model where the latest firmware is rootable and never connect it to your WiFi until you have root
Everything you need to do to get root can be done with an Ethernet connected directly to the TV and your laptop. There may be modifications needed to the root toolkits but with good prompting, agentic Llm can figure it out.
If you bought one without root… you may have a chance never connecting it.
If it’s one on your WiFi that doesn’t have a root exploit the only safe thing to do is change your WiFi password.
Exactly: If you're super paranoid, the best approach is to pick a quality TV, never hook it up to the internet, and use an external device that you trust.
Make sure your TV and device enable CEC. (Allows your device to turn the TV on and off, select the input, and control the volume.) I know the NVidea Shield can do this, and the Chromecast can do this.
Then hide the remote from your TV and only use the remote from your device.
It's a little slow, but for me, it's nice that I can turn on my Switch from the controller and it turns the TV on; or that I can put a disk in my Bluray player and it turns the TV on.
Even if I never connected my TV to WiFi , Windows and my iPhone can find it somehow and connect, so there's other protocols that are exposed and probably vulnerable without updates.
If I understand well the rooting process basically asks me to tell a website my ip and exploitable tv version... Is that not basically inviting them to make me part of a botnet?
I mean LG spies on me but I suppose it doesn't use my connection to ddos people, crawl for AI, or infect other devices on my network.
My question is basically how I can have reasonable certainty that the guys running the root site are not going to abuse it. Or is there also a way to do it offline?
Forget the calculus of the rooting site... Just leave it offline IMO... One's spying, sneaking LG TV is a genie in a bottle so long as it's never connected.
This works great if you live alone or otherwise are the only one controlling the device.
This may not work so well if you have other people around that may connect the device to the internet, such as kids or family members during a holiday.
"Easily", you would use this word for such activity, really? And what's the criteria for "weirdness"? Are you inspecting payload for every packet of legit apps for weirdness? How do you know they are not exploited? And for how low do you propose doing this "easy check", 24/7 forever? I'm utterly baffled by people suggesting things like that with a straight face.
If you are not sure what to look for, an LLM might help you set everything up including alarms when something atypical happens between the TV and its content sources.
You’d need proper hardware support and I’m not sure a vanilla Linux kernel can do that, but WebOS has its own Linux kernel and LG MUST publish the source (we all love the GPL, don’t we?)
The route seemed to vary depending on the is version, starting from using the built in browser to a few other options. But basically I worry can I trust the guys more than LG? Like is there a business model behind the service?
Had to come and say thanks! Hadn't heard of Glasshouse, and it's exactly what I wanted. Just installed it on 2 LG TVs on my lunch break and it's perfect.
I was blocking the telemetry in DNS previously, and my TVs were already rooted but weren't doing much with it. Now I've got a nice clean home replacement and all of the telemetry gone.
Does this guide eliminate google play services? If not, then you still don't really control it. For reference, on my Pixel 6 Pro, GrapheneOS gets 2x the advertised battery life until you add Google Play Services back into a sandbox. At that point, it gets advertised battery life.
I assume the TVs Google backdoors are even worse (video scraping, etc, etc) since they are not power constrained.
If you'd never heard of WebOS (which sounds a bit like "eggs" in spanish), the story of how it was developed by Palm, then killed by HP and re-released as a TV OS after being acquired by LG is fascinating. It could do real multitasking on a tablet in 2010, years before either iPads or Android tablets could.
The battery drain issue looks like more of an issue with suboptimal power management in Graphene OS than Play Services. Or the sandbox interacts with them in a weird way, resulting in some kind of loop or bug that keeps the CPU alive.
You joke, but the IoT project I used to work on had a bootloader system that kept 2 firmware versions of our software in memory. If the "main" one entered a restart/crash-loop it would auto-revert to the old firmware.
If you don't flash the bootloader too you don't "own the glass".
One would think that TV manufacturers would provide the means the root TVs so consumer would still buy them. Our TV is kept offline and a fanless low power PC facilitates all content. We would have liked to buy a new TV, but being the real owner would be a hard requirement for that. And a new one would just need to be
able to do what the PC today already does.
Some TV already fail at just being a larger monitor and I think most products just suck.
The people running companies aren't interested in selling things with the intent for you to own them. Not when it is perfectly legal to essentially lease access to the metadata of your usage patterns.
I love this. Do simple procedures like this exist for every smart TV? For every smart device?
And how well does it work in practice? My experience with setting up my own media box suggests that online community solutions, no matter how well integrated, will always still have some rough edges that you don't see in commercial products (subtitle sync in my case).
I do think this kind of thing needs to become more commonplace, but it's clearly still going to be a steep barrier for most people.
I was literally about to remove the wifi/bluetooth module today on my C5 48 after reading about that in an HN comment a couple of weeks ago. I'll definitely be looking at this before I do that.
(It has never connected to wifi nor done any firmware updates, just my AppleTV and MacBook via HDMI. So I don't actually need to root it but I like the idea anyway.)
FYI, OP is wrong about "pulling the wireless module and voiding your warranty."
In the U.S., merely doing something like that will not void your warranty due to the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Companies will lie and claim that, but in my experience, they immediately backpedal when you ask for that in writing (or if it was already in writing, thanking them for admitting to breaking the law).
buying expensive equipment to deliberately take advantage of a now-exploit is such a bad idea, and it's bit me more than once in the past few decades.
and ethically, what's the point in giving hostile corporate groups any money ? I get that you're breaking out of their mega subsidized and profit-locked walled garden, but 'sold units' is still a metric they'll use to positively enforce their strategies going forward, and as with all goods the vulnerabilities will get more and more exotic until totally pushed out of public availability much like the newest console gens.
The manufacturer will price in the value of ads and the such. So if you never connect it to WiFi, you get a good deal on the hardware. The same is true if you buy a tv and connect it to a traditional antenna (all tv’s in America are required by law to support this). You can always take it back if the firmware is not the right version to root.
> So if you never connect it to WiFi, you get a good deal on the hardware.
Until it becomes harder, or even impossible, to root the hardware, as even the guide states:
> DO NOT UPDATE TO WebOS 26 firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84 (see the firmware list). Public root method got patched and this firmware currently cannot be rooted. If you will connect your TV to the internet to root it, first turn off autoupdate.
So if people continue to buy 'subsidized' TVs, companies will continue to produce them.
There needs to be an unsubsidized-by-ads option and people need to purchase it to show The Market™ that there exists demand for such a product. But the problem seems to be that all the current offerings are ads-based.
Vote with your wallet though. If the price is not an issue (like the OP seems to be saying "I don’t mind paying a premium"), then there's no point in encouraging these kind of practices, even if they're pretty common for these kind of device.
Unfortunately though I think you are right and the best thing to do is just get one that has the specs you want never connect it to the internet and just get a companion device for the connected stuff like a Shield Pro (aging device but I did not catch up to what was the cool new things for those)
Oh I absolutely don't have that kind of money, that's why I had no choice but to buy a crappy JVC TV that's definetly a spying tool rather than an actual device. But as I said, it does not seem to be the case for the person asking it in the first place as they are OK to pay extra for this...
This is kind of an annoying platitude until you provide some vote that's worth casting. Who do you think we can buy from for a high quality, modern, privacy-oriented TV if you're so confident that it's just a matter of voting with your wallet rather than buying the device that lets you do what you want to with a bit of finagling?
> sold units' is still a metric they'll use to positively enforce their strategies
Exactly, if we want change the sales numbers have to go down. That means don't by LG, Samsung and who have you, it also means telling friends and family to go buy something else... but what?
Organizing a national boycott would be a reasonable comparison to running for office.
In a capitalist system, most people primarily influence the expenditure of their dollars. In a democratic system, most people have their vote. In general the average person exerts an average-person-sized influence over the world.
It could be a loss leader where they make all their money with ads and spyware. I don't know if that's the case, but if it is, they'd lose money from the purchase and never make it back.
The one unit you buy is an insignificant drop in the bucket for them, and getting their actually good underlying hardware and display firmware is much more valuable for you in comparison.
If you're worried about giving money to these corporations, why don't you buy second-hand? It's not like a 9 month old TV model suddenly is obsolete. An excellent TV from 3 or 4 or 5 years ago is still excellent today. Resist turbo-consumerism and just buy second-hand!
Is it permanently rooted? Or does it revert you if the TV decides to upgrade itself? Intentionally never upgraded my firmware, but it did it automatically once despite me not approving it.
Updates will revert it from my understanding. The homebrew app has a setting to block updates, but according to the rooting guide linked above apparently it's not reliable and it's recommended to block it with your router to be sure. https://tv.slada.sk/guides/blocking-updates
I wonder if it’s possible to hack my LG remote to use local voice models like Parakeet hosted within the LAN…? To trigger home assistant light settings, adjust blinds, switch on and off AV devices etc
The root is transient, and Samsung TVs also have Knox security which I presume you really don’t want to trip. Some parts of the file system are protected by SMACK which even root can’t access.
I’m working on reverse engineering the applications that run in that SMACK context to see if there’s any way to gain access.
The Magnusson Moss Warranty Act protects against that kind of thing.
If you modify function A, and then make a claim for warranty service for a defect in unrelated function C and they don't want to cover that because of the modification, then: The onus is on the warranty provider to prove that your modification of A caused the defect in C before denying the claim.
And they know this. The first layer grunt on the phone or in the chat box may think it is some other way but the larger organization definitely knows what their responsibilities are.
To the best of my knowledge, changing software does not cause damage to the TV that could result in warranty being voided.
If the new software burned pixels or did something like that, which I am unsure is even possible from software, then I believe that would cause the warranty to be voided as a result.
But the reason would be pixels being burnt by using the hardware wrongly (i.e. through a bad software). Not merely by installing the software.
Buy any tv with CEC support (almost all of them) and never connect it to the internet. Never. Never start any app on the tv. Hook a Kodi box to the hdmi port and use that, and only that.
For the Kodi box get series-7 Intel NUC with Kabylake-era processors, gen 7. They don't run Windows 11, so come very cheap second hand, but decode h264 and hevc in hardware and drive a 4K screen like charm. You can install a modern Wifi card in the NUC and a PCIe SSD.
This is what I do already but aside from the "neighbors open wifi" problem I'm more concerned about:
-In-laws or other visitors "finishing setup" to use their netflix while I'm at work or something.
-Future TVs including 5G modems.
-TVs demanding internet access to work at all or worse working but with a hidden time out that waits until after the return period to activate and disable the TV until I give in and let it on the internet.
Most TVs seem to have removable wifi modules, or at least they did. But throwing away the warranty removing it on day one doesn't sit great with me. And that doesn't protect me from point 3b.
Those hypotheticals sure would suck, if they ever happen. Until then you can easily avoid worrying about 2 and 3, and for 1, simply leave the PC's remote out, and put the TV's remote somewhere inaccessible.
Also for extra confidence on 1, you can often disable the TV's wireless/bluetooth scanning (so other devices can't access it), at the "cost" of the TV's own remote no longer working. At least my Samsung (QN90B) offers that.
I find the most important point just to be "and never connect it to the internet".
No matter which smart-tv you use, this is the one and only thing you have to do - just don't give it any way to exfiltrate any data. Use as suggested HDMI and your good to go. Extremely simple and safe. Can it still sniff and log data locally? Sure - but it will never leave your home.
Keep in mind some smart TVs will attempt to connect to open networks automatically so if your neighbor’s WiFi is open, you might end up connected anyway. I had a Vizio TV that connected to my neighbor’s fridge open WiFi (but not connected to the internet) and my TV operations became very laggy. I would buy a TV without smart features and without Wireless connectivity from a reputable brand (more a digital display than a TV) if privacy is your concern…
I wonder how likely it is though? The consumer access points don't come without passwords by default. Where I am, having an open access point without identifying the users is illegal, so it's unlikely a regular person would do that, and if some cafe does - it'd just have a captive portal asking for a phone number. And even if the business owner doesn't want to bother with that identification - there would 100% be a password on such a hotspot.
Fully anonymous open WiFi remains legal and common in many countries, including the US.
Even many guest or public WiFi captive portals in the US only seek to enforce agreement to a terms of service and/or privacy policy, not necessarily gathering identifying info and not locking behind a password. (Yes, there are also those which do require a password or identifying info, but that’s not due to a legal requirement.)
It’s relatively rare nowadays that I see a guest or public WiFi network with neither a captive portal nor a password, but again, those do still sometimes occur and are fully legal in the US. Organizations (and their insurers) do tend to like the protections of legalese and/or identifying users, but US law doesn’t generally force them into it in this context.
Did your TV connect to the fridge, or did your neighbor connect their fridge to your TV? Without some evidence I would be far more inclined to believe that a neighbor did something dumb (I've seen multiple of my neighbors try to connect to my offline TV via bluetooth) than that TVs connecting to fridges are slipping under the radar of tech journalists in the era when scrutiny has led to negative press for LG. Either way it's dumb that that network connection is possible, and concerning it could be possible without your consent, but it's also not nearly as bad.
But did it happen specifically in the situation described in the comment I initially replied to?
LG wants my data. Well Craftsman wants my data too. Current evidence suggests that the TV without network access is going to have as much luck reporting my data to corporate headquarters as the tools I used to mount it on the wall.
Faith in opsec against a determined and capitalized adversary—zero. One slip up and you're done. You will slip up eventually (they help with the banana peels) and probably already have.
We know cable providers sell access to networks through their customers. Wireless companies do directly as well.
If it is technically possible, encouraged, and worth money, you can bet someone is doing it in the 2020s. No need to wait for journalistic confirmation, a dying industry. Internet surveillance capitalism is quite mature these days.
At best we can say no one has gotten around to it, but that is just one update away from being false.
What a future. Now not only any fridge has wifi, no, my chinese tv will run an local agent swarm that will try to break into any wifi available to download ads. Maybe it's better if we hand sama all our DRAM and accept our fate.
These would be my preference unless I setup the Kodi box myself. Theres repeated, almost monthly, uncovering of supply chain compromise of cheap Kodi/android TV boxes.
This is what I'm doing, but we also have to admit that kodi kinda sucks.
It's really unstable, I can't find a browser, can be janky, unstable and don't forget unstable.
I can't even identify if it is some plugin that is causing the instability or not. Which should not be an excuse, because poor architecture is still the project's problem.
Is anyone working on alternatives? I would accept vibecoded stuff at this point.
You might as well start you own project. Buy a $200 subscription from one of the major AI providers. And guide it towards your goal.
It is likely that within a week you will have something that suits your needs, is fast and reliable.
An example of a prompt that you might use to start:
> Please build a home TV frontend similar to Kodi or Apple TV. But nicer, faster, more modern and with cooler features. Use modern software engineering practices. Keep the code well-organized, performant and readable.
If you have a spare android phone, you can buy a usb-c hub and plug the phone into hdmi.
Vibecoding android apps is easy. The Android SDK has built in components for web views and media players, so you can get it set it up with netflix, disney, whatever.
I've got mine set up with that, a weather display widget, and some vibecoded edutainment games for my kids.
The only tricky bit is keeping the android ui off the tv, so tell the AI to use Android's "Presentation API".
I have mine connected to wifi, isolated network, no cross client communication, and no internet access. That way I can still control it from Home Assistant, and the TV doesn't need any connectivity as all streaming happens from an AppleTV.
Depending on your usage that may not be an option, as appliances eg a gaming console (xbox/PlayStation) can require you to update their firmware through their DRM. So unless you keep updating the TV it only shows a black screen
NEC is great but their affordable panels are largely only seen on facebook marketplace. Great construction, panel quality and I/O, just a little bit heavy
Recently I've had to deal with this same problem - get a new TV for living room. Personally, I do not watch TV at all, but kids want to see cartoons when having their breakfast. I spent a week reading forums and came to conclusion that best solution would be to buy a "dumb TV" and connect it to a PC I trust, but it appears there are no dump TVs in my rage of 55" and larger. So, I bought "Google TV" based TCL.
When I brought it home, I never connected it to Ethernet or WiFi. Instead, I connected it to my laptop over USB, then using adb I uninstalled almost every application from it. It took me quite some time to figure out what app is possible to remove and what should be kept to let TV functionality to work. I even had to factory-default it a couple of times because some random apps I removed were crucial for Android to work. :) I think it took me 5-6 hours to clean it. Now it has only basic TV functionality like any dump TV does, I can watch air and cable TV channels, watch movies and play music from USB storage. If there's a need to watch something online, I connect it over HDMI to my small mini-PC that runs FreeBSD. I think I'm satisfied with the result. :-)
PS: Yesterday I opened the case and disconnected WiFi antenna. Just in case.
> PS: Yesterday I opened the case and disconnected WiFi antenna. Just in case.
While this couldn't hurt, it also won't stop the TV from being able to connect to wifi. I ran my desktop without an antenna attached for months. The speed noticeably improved when I attached an antenna but it was fine for browsing the web and downloading software updates without one.
Also so that any electronics don't get fried. Wi-fi board borking itself would be good, but I'd be worried about it affecting something else down the line.
Exactly. That's part of what I meant by "none the wiser." The other being that the xmitter could in theory detect a missing antenna from the impedance mismatch and try to increase its power (assuming it knows how to do so without frying itself).
"(assuming it knows how to do so without frying itself)."
Unlikely, as Wi-Fi is flea power (not high enough to do damage). Moreover, Wi-Fi chips have an inbuilt power limit so as to comply with spectrum management regulations.
Anyway, why wouldn't you want to fry the Wi-Fi chip if possible, that'd solve everything? If I had that problem I'd simply stuff the chip or short out its RF output (bridge solder across its antenna pins).
There are multiple ways of fucking the chip, likely the easiest is shorting B+ to the high side of its antenna pins (that'll likely do the trick). Another method is to hold the tip of a hot soldiering iron on the center of the chip until it fails.
Of course, you shouldn't do this unless you know what you are doing. The Wi-Fi chip may also control Bluetooth so if you still want that risky comms pathway then consult the chip's datasheet first.
If you know what you are doing and have explicitly disconnected/cut all antennas including entire MIMO arrays (many people miss one or more antennas) in the motherboard then the only remaining explanation is "accidental antennas".
This is only possible if the WiFi-chip has dangling metal pins/traces/joints whose length is comparable to that of its wavelength, in which case these will act as makeshift antennas. These will pickup ambient WiFi RF, but for this to work at all you need lots of RF power i.e. a very strong signal strength which means you have to be very close to the WiFi router.
The whole thing works because of Physics and not Engineering (the "accidental" part) and hence very iffy (may not work at all) and should not be relied upon.
You don't need an antenna. You can think of an antenna as simply being a signal booster.
That being said, without an antenna it is highly improbable that it could still find an open WiFi AP to connect to (especially if you don't have one in your house).
I would imagine the antenna just strengthens the incoming signal.
You could still get reception/communication if the gateway/router/modem was near enough and not a lot of electrical shit attached (I would imagine that would generate more noise that could interfere)?
As an example - if you have a motherboard on your computer that supports wifi and comes with a port/plug for an antenna, you could remove that antenna and still receive a signal (IDK about sending) but it would suffer more signal loss due to the lack of antenna.
All that is just a guess of course. People more knowledgeable than me could explain/clarify.
I am not the person you asked the question of, but here is the answer;
Smart TVs have a built-in "WiFi-Chip" on the motherboard and its antenna hidden in the TV frame itself, exactly like the antennas in a Smartphone. The different radios on a Smart TV viz. OTA, WiFi, Bluetooth, Satellite, Zigbee etc. all operate at different frequency ranges and hence need their own antennas. Many of these antennas are either a) etched on the motherboard b) hidden within the plastic back frame or c) directly taped to it.
Axiom of RF Wireless - There can be no transmission/reception without an antenna either external or internal.
PS: Since RF Wireless is everywhere today and most people do not have much of an idea of this technology, i very highly recommend the book The Essential Guide to RF and Wireless by Carl Weisman for study. Expressly written for a non-technical audience, it explains everything simply and beautifully. It really gave me the invaluable overview and the grounding i needed to understand this important science/technology.
This is not even a viable option these days: secondary processors, the potential for a backchannel to some installed app on a device in the home (this has not made headlines, but it’s possible), tying an account to the device proactively.. The TV industry really ran to collect “their” data
Some IoT providers' h/w products use globally viable sim cards that can connect to supporting networks. It doesn't have to be "open wifi" since a lot of IoT is for movable objects that are shipped around.
And it’s clearly less convenient for exfiltration vs most other options. Even closed implementation of HDMI eth to a soundbar of the same brand: then where to
Yes, that’s my second argument: even if it were implemented, you think Apple’s going to let just any ol’ POS IoT junk use an Apple TV’s connection? “Pass through using my IP address doing $DEITY-knows-what? Sure, random device, have at it!”
> I even had to factory-default it a couple of times because some random apps I removed were crucial for Android to work. :)
I had this same experience with my Samsung tablet - but for a TV that isn't connected to the internet, I couldn't really be bothered to adb uninstall apps - it's not like they're going to be doing anything anyway.
The last TV I bought was a Kogan, and at first power up, or after a factory reset, it let you select where you wanted it to be a dumb screen with inputs only, or run the Google TV OS.
This is somewhat an option. I have this TV too and when you set it up, you can choose to have it be a dumb tv, and even avoid Google TV if you want. In the US.
Our TCL has this option, but there are multiple buttons on the remote that open youtube or ask zuck to club baby seal to death or whatever, and if you press those (i.e., sit on the remote), it goes into a labyrinth of google bullshit that complains about how you are missing important notifications and need to debug your wifi.
F--- Google, but at least the kids know those menus are bullshit, and do not have the wifi password at any rate.
Also, we're probably already to the point where I could just put it on a firewalled network, and have a [chinese open weight] LLM pop the factory android, get root, and reprogram the remote buttons to no-ops.
Or, I could open the remote up, physically cut out the spam buttons, then 3d print an alternative top-half of the shell without holes for them.
At least on our TCL (which has an array of thousands of back lights) some of the unhance options actually need to be turned on.
We bought it because it has crazy high brightness (it is in a bright room with direct sunlight hitting the panel while we are watching it), and while it can beat back the sun, it cannot do so by just turning all the zones on 100% because it would melt or something.
So, if all the image slopping were turned off, the contrast ratio would drop 100x, and the TV wouldn't really be fit for purpose.
(For when the sun is not actively trying to kill the panel, I have a de-slop shortcut setup. That also has the backlight enhance stuff turned on -- as low as possible -- to get true black on the LCD. It works OK. OLED is not quite there yet for this corner case.)
This kind of trade-off is often a dark pattern used when forced to offer a feature by regulators or by competitors offering it. The evil trick is complying with the regs or being able to advertise the feature but making it so unattractive users won't activate it, enabling the manufacturer to still earn that sweet $35-$60 / yr from advertising, app install payments, rev share and selling your viewing data.
> the image enhancements.
Having spent a couple decades working in and around digital video production tooling and engineering, as well as being a filmmaker and home theater enthusiast, it's worth mentioning that today almost all television image enhancement features are net negative, even if they make the image subjectively 'pop' or motion appear smoother on typical scenes, they'll introduce artifacts or trade-offs in other kinds of scenes.
In my experience doing a lot of testing over the years with objective signal analysis tools at work as well as subjectively across 7 generations of upgrades in my own home theater, the trade-offs aren't worth it. There are a few context and content specific exceptions but they're quite rare and usually involve slightly improving significantly degraded signals which no longer exist in most home theaters (eg noise reduction in analog sources like laserdisc, DCT macro-block smoothing in highly compressed old MPEG 1/2 sources or dynamic range expansion on legacy SD sources).
With today's 4K and HD digital sources encoded at high bit rates in modern codecs, the director, colorist and mastering engineer can finally deliver their precise intent all the way to your eyeballs. The ~$20 chip calculating synthetic frames and pixels in your TV introduces surface curb appeal at the cost of artifacts and a poorly integrated image. If it actually made the image look better, the director and colorist have more and better tools than that $20 chip that they're already applying to the source. You're just turning a $20 chip loose on 'full auto' to guess at (and often undo or muddy) intentional enhancements manually applied frame by frame over days by experts.
Do whatever you like but I encourage you to critically audition each of those enhancements across a range of source types (4K, HD, HDR, HDR10, SDR, 24, 30, and 60 frame) and diverse scenes (low-light, quick panning, smooth dollies, and synthetic test signals, etc). Once you compare the before/after across that breadth back-to-back you'll see what I mean. I run my calibrated, high-end 3-laser projector (150" screen) as close to neutral, native settings as I can get and it looks sensational. And to be clear I'm not being a purist, if 'enhancements' really improved some scenes meaningfully without degrading other scenes, I'd be "Fuck the director's intent, it's just better." But for every scene an enhancement improves, I can queue up a scene from another film it makes noticeably worse. Fortunately, on most high-end Sony TVs you can get an un-hyped, accurate image in the standard UX without going to the calibrator or factory menus.
> Having spent a couple decades working in and around digital video production tooling and engineering, as well as being a filmmaker and home theater enthusiast, it's worth mentioning that today almost all television image enhancement features are net negative
Yep, generally you don't want anything the TV manufacturer markets as "enhancements." They basically all add things to the signal that were not part of the director's or video editor's vision. Any cinephile will remind you that there is one correct setting for "brightness," "contrast," "color," and "tint". "Sharpness" should almost always be zero, and any other setting that claims to "enhance" the picture should be turned off for correct output.
The worst ones now are the "motion smoothing" modes that take your normal FPS movie and try to interpolate them up to 60FPS, 120FPS or even 240FPS, giving them that cheap, crappy "soap opera" effect. Turn it off as soon as you turn on your TV for the first time.
While this is generally true, there are some notorious cases where the director's intent was terrible, and the image definitely needs more contrast and brightness to see what's going on.
>motion smoothing works nice on my 30fps video games.
Of course a modern console only managing 30fps is the actual 'bug' :-). But I agree that's one of the narrow exception cases where an 'enhancement' might be a net benefit. Although if you're going to use synthetic frames, doing it in the console can be better because intra-frame motion hinting might be available and, even if it's not, the console's frame gen is trained on game content where a TV's chip is cross-function and far less capable (both in look-ahead and motion vector count). But I know some consoles don't have frame gen, so in that case it's a win.
1) Would you consider publishing which apps you removed? (A wiki on making smart devices dumb - cars, TVs, refrigerators, tractors ... - would be useful, though I'm not suggesting you make and manage it yourself.)
2) Why bother removing the apps if it has no network connection? Defense in depth is sensible to me, but maybe there's something else I'm missing ...
3) Why not buy a large desktop computer monitor, or are those no longer 'dumb' either?
1) All the google data gathering crap, and all the "give permission to garbage preload to turn on the microphone" bullshit (and look for a physical mic switch; ours has that. Also, turn off notifications, because, do you want notifications telling you the wifi does not work? If you have an android phone, do this on your phone first.
2) Less crap = less backlog of surveillance data if you ever accidentally need to put it online. Also, see (1).
3) You can't get a nice 55"-100" desktop monitor for < $2K.
Who's gonna fine a manufacturer for a modem when governments mandate they are fitted to cars? And now mandate driver facing cameras? They want to know what you're watching.
Stop with this "they". I'm sure most people on HN live in democracies. We are at fault for not raising our voices. We've become lazy participants in the democratic process. Blaming "the government" is only gonna cause disillusionment and further the causes of evil.
What do you mean? Obviously consuming too much media, or consuming anything too much of it is not good, but how does that negate concerns about inadvertently inviting for-profit corporations to your breakfast and every intimate conversation at home?
I fully share your sentiment, someone buying a tv specifically so the kids don't let their brains rest during a 15 min breakfast seems insane to me. That said I guess better they watch without spyware than with..
First of all, open the TV and disconnect the wireless radio from the main board, on mine (Samsung) it was just unplugging one cable (AI or Google it). I dislike doing stuff like that, but it was easy in my case, maybe you'll be lucky, too.
Second, never use the "apps" built into the TV.
Next, don't plug Ethernet into the TV. Plug HDMI cables into the TV.
Use a box of your choice on the other end of the HDMI cables. This is now the box that you trust. (Roku? Shield? Blu-ray? MacBook? PC? Linux? Playstation? XBox? Whatever you want.)
The Smart TV itself is now fine. Choose the devices you plug into it to play content. The TV just shows it.
The thing I'd be worried about when doing this is spending $1000+ on a TV, then realizing it has some sort of pre-downloaded ads that it shows on the main screen ("sign up for your free six months of HBO Max!") or otherwise has a nag prompt that appears to tell you to connect to WiFi. I think that would be basically intolerable.
Been a few years since I had to get a new one, but I booted mine up, switched to the HDMI input for my AppleTV, and never looked back. Just boots straight into the AppleTV input when you use the AppleTV remote to wake it up.
We have to use the actual TV remote to debug some audio issues or disable the motion blur stuff again every once in awhile, but otherwise it might as well just be a display for the AppleTV. I’ve only seen the actual home screen of the TV a handful of times.
I guess it’s probably still spying on us somehow, and it seems like different models make using the AppleTV remote and booting right into the AppleTV harder than others, so your mileage may vary.
You have to be careful with this path. Some manufacturers embed LED's into the bezel and blink them at you (part of the IR sensor for the remote, to prevent you from taping over with electrical tape) if they do not have network.
Yeah and if it was using LoRa or something similar, ot could reach hundreds of meters through buildings or many kilometers in open space, with a very small antenna. If they built in a big antenna into the TV chassis itself, it cpuld get quite and insane reach but it would be more expensive.
What it would connect to ? To other TVs (comfortably connected to mains power) forming a mesh network. A bunch of Internet connected gateways planted by the manufacturers would capture the data from the network.
MeshCore and MeshTastic have demonstrated community networks like this, so I would not put it past TV manufacturers to try missuse the same idea.
My xfinity modem helpfully defaults to providing an open network that others can connect to. If I didn't know to disable this, it would be the first network it could find.
I think the more logical concern would be that it would wait until it could find any potential unsecured wifi to use. I live in an apartment building and there a few wifi access points that I can reach from my apartment with no security. Though one of them appears to be an air conditioner??
Say the TV finds such an access point and uses it. It phones home and so now the manufacturer now knows that such and such serial # TV is located in that neighborhood.
They still need to tie it to you. If you've not given it a shred of personal information, it has to be fingerprinting via surreptitious audio/video recording, or else by obtaining the purchase info from the retailer (like the name and billing address from your credit card) and matching that by serial number (which would have to be recorded during purchase).
I wouldn't be surprised if they did audio fingerprinting. But even if they don't, the third parties who are buying the data can easily re-identify the users by doing data fusion with other sources (smartphone location data from other vendors)
Not that I have any evidence it's happening, but it'd be more likely for TV manufacturers to partner with ISPs that offer public WiFi using the access points they rent to their customers.
The low bandwidth always on kindle modems could also be feasibly built into TVs for telemetry, and may be cheaper than the money they could get from selling the data.
it's not just your wifi you have to worry about. neighbour can have insecure wifi. or deliberately open ones like coffee shops, free municipal hotspots, etc.
This is trivial to test yet not a single person claiming TVs will connect to open networks all on their own has ever provided a shred of evidence of it actually happening.
The one we have is even worse. It won't really work well outside of things like airplay or chromecast, and those require wifi. It was extremely cheap though.
(It has an HDMI port, but it's clearly a second class citizen in the menus, etc. Default to HDMI on power up is intentionally broken. It's also intentionally designed to turn into a brick if we ever lose the remote. At boot, it puts a screen up saying to press a button on the remote if you want it to display anything else, and that screen never times out. If you plug in an HDMI input, it says "HDMI input detected; press OK.". There's no "OK" button on the projector itself. You have to press the OK button on the remote.)
Not from privacy issues, but all the typical ones from projectors never went anywhere: low brightness, high heat, low maximum operating lifetime, fan noise, and hard to set up (impossible in some places).
I don't think this apply to most UST projector nowadays. I mean, operating lifetime is probably still an issue, fan noise while higher than a TV (which doesn't have it) is not an issue anymore, heat.. well, come close to my (old, ok) OLED LG TV and you can still warm your hands (although not like the previous plasma one I had, that's true).
For the setup I don't know exactly but there are online shops that gives you the 1st setup for free (at the cost of doing the unboxing for you). Also probably nowadays with an LLM almost anybody that care enough to research and buy a projector can do it, I guess.
Yes, I want to buy a projector this Black Friday (Hisense PX3-Pro).
Any chance the TV can phone home via that? One would have to make sure the HDMI cable physically doesn't have the Ethernet pairs, or set the trusted box to filter the traffic.
The HDMI standard defines an Ethernet channel as an optional feature. Approximately zero consumer products have ever implemented it. There's no need to worry about an unsuspecting consumer having supporting devices at both ends of the cable.
I don’t know of any consumer laptops or tv boxes like shield/Apple TV that implement that so that. It’s basically a non-issue unless it’s implemented on the HDMI devices.
If you use something you can control, like a Linux box, this isn't an issue. Even if the device did get added, and then udev or network manager auto configured, a firewall script should protect you.
> disconnect the wireless radio from the main board
Can you explain why you can't just not give the TV your Wi-Fi password?
Or are we worried about the case when the TV did have Wi-Fi (due to it being mandatory for some initial setup, say), but we don't trust that "Forget Network" and "Wi-Fi off" are actually honored?
Suppose the device surreptitiously reconnects to Wi-Fi in spite of being told to forget it. You may be able to block it in your router and failing that, change the access point password.
People believing even without proof that TVs connect to open WiFi. This would be trivial to prove if true, yet there is no evidence. In addition, it doesn’t make any sense for any of them to bother. 99% of consumers willingly connect their TV to WiFi because they want to use it with the built-in streaming apps. It wouldn’t make any sense for them to waste time capturing the 1% of users most likely to be evade them anyway just to cause a PR and/or legal fiasco.
Xfinity runs an open WiFi for its customers. If you instead their gateway and don’t change anything (which is 99% of users) any Xfinity customer can get online. Several of my neighbors have them, and you can’t walk around in my commercial district without seeing the “Xfinity WiFi” SSID. It would be smart for TV mfrs to do a deal with Xfinity and their equivalents world wide in order to sell viewer data to advertisers and receive “fresh” ads, even if the TVs are excluded from the residential network.
This is actually so very doable in US, cutting deal with those like XFinity.
But if the TV manufacturer is smart in their spying game, they could also be probing for any public SSIDs to connect to when no local internet access is setup.
It doesn't sound insane, actually. Keeping in mind, Windows XP did exactly that for a while until everyone realized, "hey, that's a security issue". I would swear MacOS too, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
>It would be smart for TV mfrs to do a deal with Xfinity and their equivalents world wide in order to sell viewer data to advertisers and receive “fresh” ads, even if the TVs are excluded from the residential network.
Doesn't exactly sound like a thing to be that concerned about if you never plug in your TV. If you buy a TV right now and never plug it in, how would it know about any future deal with Xfinity to connect to its open networks? And if it had a feature to connect to random open Wi-Fi networks right now, that wouldn't be hard to prove. My LG has never shown up in my Wi-Fi client list despite my open guest Wi-Fi. You can even test it by naming your guest network "Xfinity WiFi".
Taking apart your TV and pulling out the wireless radio sounds like absolute overkill to me. Feel free to do it if it makes you feel better. It will definitely not allow it to send data (over Wi-Fi) under any circumstance. I'm just not convinced that the alternative is that much riskier.
Our Samsung fridge will mesh network with any Samsung TV specifically to exfiltrate marketing info, at least according to the manual. (The fridge even has marketing surveillance cameras in it).
I assume at some point, appliance manufacturers will start "partnering" with things that actually need WiFi for exfiltration purposes. Phones would be a good place to start.
That way, we'd need to either Faraday cage our friends' phones, not invite them over, or send marketing pervs video feed of our moldy pickles.
We're worried about it connecting to a neighbor's unsecured network or some sort of unpublished mesh capability for exfiltrating your data and downloading ads.
So, I have an Nvidia Shield TV Pro. I dislike how Google had to put ads on the homescreen (ads which are not suitable for my children), and I just checked: it has Android patch level Jan 2026. It is, as of today, Nov 2026. 10 months without patches. So no patch for eMudhra, no patch for Brotli, and you name it.
Other than that, I agree regarding TV, with one caveat: you might want to update the firmware right away, or at some point. The device might need to phone home for that. In order to achieve that, you can put up a temp WLAN AP with your smartphone.
With regards to my STB: I am considering cancelling all my subscription services and simply downloading everything to my NAS. This already runs Jellyfin. Then all I need is a Jellyfin client and HDMI. Perhaps a RPi 4 or RPi 5 would be suffice there.
Yes, I use that on my Shield(s) and my Xiaomi android TV boxes (4 in total). It can completely take over the home screen and you can strip everything out of it so it is just a list of exactly what you want to have available.
While practical advice its just odd to me there's no major legislation or movement or activism or boycotts about this. We just accept our TV might be silently recording everything we say in our home and the fix is to not plug it into the internet.
So your idiot brother doesn't connect your spy TV to the WiFi when he comes to visit, instead of using the goddamn Chromecast that is already plugged into it. >:(
This. I've had this happen with relatives who come to visit. It's unkind to tell them "Don't fuck with the TV" or "Ignore the TV if it tells you it wants to connect to something."
They want to be "helpful" and show me they can "work tech" by doing stuff like this. They don't understand that the TV is manipulating them. I don't want to have to explain to them that I'm basically a neurosurgeon and they just tried to impress me by drilling a hole in somebody's head. Because the TV told them to.
Disconnecting the wifi avoids the need for unpleasant conversations.
Even if you never connect the TV to your WiFi network it will constantly scan for public networks and also scan for any devices that will respond. “Off” doesn’t actually mean off anymore. :(
Do you have any specific examples of devices where this has been implemented? Because I've heard this idea thrown around a lot as a hypothetical, but never any concrete evidence that it's been done.
Hypothetical is beside the point. The hardware is there, the software is closed and you can't verify what is really happening, so the potential threat exists.
Connecting to open wireless networks is exactly the sort of behavior that would be trivial to confirm the presence of, if it were actually present. You wouldn't even need any unusual tools - just set up an open access point and see if the TV connects to it.
Why would I care that some device to which I never gave a shred of my personal information of any kind (e.g. not logging it into any online account) found an open public network that I don't use and that has no connection to me?
Sure, I would be disturbed that it's doing that sort of thing in spite of Wi-Fi being explicitly turned off.
Because it's acting with your IP address, so attempts to prevent whatever shady botnet things it gets up to may also interfere with legitimate use by humans on your network.
Samsung TVs were literally recording people with microphones and doing voice recognition. Unless you don’t speak in your home, it will have you identified quite quickly.
If we want privacy, should we be buying a TV which has these peripherals? I don't think a TV should have such things, so I would sooner rip out or damage the microphone and camera if I had to get such a TV. The ability to connect to a network could be useful; I'd not mess with it.
They have your location, and can detect your interests from what you watch, and fingerprint you. Things like this are pieces of a larger, comprehensive picture of your life.
Also, how do you pay for streaming channels, etc., if you don't give it any information?
The assumption here is that we don't give the TV any personal information; it's just used as a monitor. The content comes from some other device connected to an input (e.g. HDMI1). (That device may raise privacy issues, but we are concerned with the TV).
Without either doing the fingerprinting from surreptitious audio recording in the room that other commenters mention, or else matching the unit serial number to the purchaser (requiring the retailer to leak personal info to the manufacturer), they can't match the unit's location to our identity.
I see. Roku, for example, takes screenshots of the TV N times per second (and sends them home).
Remember that it doesn't take much to identify someone: Gender, birthdate, and (zip code?) uniquely identify ~80% of Americans. From viewing habits, it should be easy to fingerprint someone - Chicago Bears fan; strong technology interest; on your city block; likes AI porn with Lara Croft; home during day Sa, Su, Tu, Th; watches YouTube videos about ...
Because the TV is recording your voice, what you watch and possibly taking pictures, depending on the brand, and it needs a connection to send that information to whoever will pay for it.
While I've certainly heard plenty of theorizing about the possibility of this happening, I have yet to see any conclusive evidence that it has ever been done.
EDIT: What I am referring to here is the specific allegation that smart TVs will connect to open wireless networks without being commanded to do so. It's not a catch-all for any nefarious thing involving TVs or wireless networks.
And that isn't even the same thing either! (This seems to be a recurring theme.) If it were true that LG TVs "spy" on ambient audio, that would certainly be bad, but it wouldn't also establish that the TVs were connecting to open wireless networks to exfiltrate that data.
Comcast runs a separate "Xfinity WiFi" on all their routers, any Comcast user can connect to it with their credentials. Would they strike a deal with TV manufacturers to let them use it? It would not surprise me.
Pretty sure this is a known offering from Comcast, you just have to talk to the right sales rep... I haven't yet seen any evidence of a TV using it (yet), but hve been told they will sell a company IoT or fleet device access to their wifi endpoints for enough money. I'm not sure it would be cost effective for mass market device surveillance, though.
Also Amazon does this same model with their Sidewalk service, which can run over bluetooth or lora, instead of wifi... and is specifically priced to be usable for large numbers of devices.
All the TV manufacturers have to do is make a deal with Xfinity to jump on their AP, and you're toast. I don't know why anybody would defend them or give them any bit of slack on this. Once they figure this out, they will do it.
> Use a box of your choice on the other end of the HDMI cables. This is now the box that you trust. (Roku? Shield? Blu-ray? MacBook? PC? Linux? Playstation? XBox? Whatever you want.)
If they choose a Firestick or Roku what's the difference? XD
No, it doesn’t in any real sense. Nothing ever implemented it and the channel was reallocated to eARC with different encoding so they couldn’t even co exist.
But what if you do want to watch Netflix and Nebula? Then you're going to need a network anyway. I'd like a TV that does that without even trying to spy on me.
VA panels aren't great (they're fine, just not great). 350 nits also isn't great. Most people are probably looking for more. It's also pretty overpriced, but I guess that's the price of privacy?
I do and I used mine yesterday, but I bridge that gap with an HDHomeRun instead of using my TV's native tuner. There are a lot of good, high def channels available in major metros beyond the required broadcast channel. It is useful to have access to local news now and then with the national feed right after. Likewise, most sports are still available on local broadcast (with some exceptions, like Amazon taking Thursday Night Football). Your experiences aren't everyone's.
>I went and researched this, and found that basically none of the TV brands were anything but creepy on privacy.
Yeah they do. Go to your shopping center or airport and you'll see LG and Samsung displays everywhere. And that's the key word, 'displays' not 'TVs'.
Both sell large displays meant for 100% user ownership with no spyware or mandatory internet connection, you just have to buy those and not their TVs.
The catch? They come at steep prices compared to consumer TVs, unless you can land a deal on the used market. But that's the cost of turning a profit on screens with no spyware and ads.
The other catch is that those displays are built for heavy duty use, not for picture quality, and as such aren’t going to look as good as even a budget consumer OLED TV.
Disagree. They look more than fine, much better than the budget TV with their fake saturation turned to 11 out of the box. If you think that looks good you might have gotten used to it.
Hotel TVs, same panels as consumer models with different supporting hardware and stock calibrations. These are actually dimmer than the consumer models to increase panel longevity.
They tend to lack gaming features like high/variable refresh rate but they're more functional as normal TVs than digital signage displays.
They have similar OSes as the consumer models and can run the same apps but don't have ads unless the operator wants them to and can be centrally managed, support internal IPTV networks, etc.
If you put the model number in to your search engine of choice it should return a number of sellers focusing on the hospitality and B2B markets offering these products. Some are "call for quote" bullshit but others have a price listed and an "add to cart" button. I haven't actually tried to buy one, I have a CX that lives on an allowlist-only VLAN and I'm fine with that.
The ones the serve menus and the ones that serve eye-level video ads are definitely also built for picture quality. Still IPS for the most part, but uniformity and colour calibration can be movie-worthy
However any of the midrange ones will be brighter than the equivalent consumer (they have to operate in full sun 24/7)
You will not find an oled though, because they have yet to be full duty cycle (well I've not looked, but if they do exist, they will be many monies.)
Get yourself a nice NEC 4k, you'll be happy. unless you want 8k (good luck finding a source for the 8k) or you really like the motion smoothing of poorly setup consumer TVs.
Are you sure those displays have everything needed for a smooth TV experience? Do they have eARC to connect a sound bar, and stuff like that? Modern TVs are also quite good at upscaling 1080/720p content, screens often aren't.
it's funny, I used to think and care about this (or thought I did) back when 1080 was the common thing and 4k was new and exotic, but now I really don't care.
I think what changed was the realisation that even with 4k hardware in theory, what you're actually seeing is so variable based on bandwidth and different services' support for different shows you basically don't know anyway and thus it doesn't really make much sense to care about it.
Besides which, you realise that things that are made to be more enjoyable on 4k, like where that would actually make a difference to how good it is, are probably not that much worth watching anyway outside of demos. Certainly it's not, for example, a factor on which you want to be choosing what series to watch.
Or jailbreak/defang the consumer TVs to have privacy anyway, and teach others how, and screw over the entire profit model of the surveillance-subsidized TVs to force things to be sold at a real cost.
>Or jailbreak/defang the consumer TVs to have privacy anyway
And how will my 50 year old mom and 70 year old grandpa know how to do that? "Hey Claude scan the wifi for a LG TV, hack it, root it and give me the keys to install what I want, then lock out LG from access it?"
As always, the sane fix is in government legislation and enforcement of privacy regulations. But this isn't happening since knowledge of smart device spyware across politicians and the voting population is small and governments want to use that data dragnet that smart devices enable for their own means.
> As always, the sane fix is in government legislation and enforcement of privacy regulations.
While I do not disagree, we all know that may not happen in grandma and grandpas remaining lifetime, so lets help out the older generation where we can, and shame lazy hackers that participate in these systems.
And that is why I gave my family access to GPUs I racked up. We do what we want. Cheaper than the subscriptions over time too and we never get rate limited!
I have bad news for you. Those commercial TV-s also phone home if connected to the internet. For software updates, analytics regarding digital signage usage etc.
For a long time they haven't been just dumb displays. They also run Tizen or WebOS for digital signage applications.
> that's the cost of turning a profit on screens with no spyware and ads.
I don't think that the cost of TVs has gone down when they added spyware and ads.
You could say that that's the cost of turning less profits, rather, and I suspect that TV manufacturers keep the costs of normal displays high just to discourage their purchase by normal people.
> Amazon Sidewalk[0] is a low-bandwidth long-range wireless communication protocol developed by Amazon. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for short distance communication, and 900 MHz LoRa and other frequencies for longer distances.
There was definitely evidence, just the mainstream was never loud with it. I'm on the privacy train for more than a decade now, and smart TVs were always considered abysmal in this regard - bad defaults, low configurability, and no alternative firmware.
Some people still want to receive content on their TVs in the old fashion way, using radio waves, even in their more modern form, DVB. Unfortunately a Faraday cage blocks both input and output.
In reality that'll never work because the front of the tV needs to be exposed. At best you can make your whole room/house a faraday cage, but that'd be insanely expensive to do correctly. You might think a microwave is a faraday cage, but a phone can still get calls even if you put it inside.
Wifi can be effective up to about 300'/100m outside, but houses in the boonies are seldom that close together. If your neighbor has a smart farmhouse fully Alexa-fied, a mere tenth of a mile away, your devices won't see it.
> It’s a bit annoying if I want to switch to a game console
Yes because you have to fetch a shitty TV remote with buttons inspired by a Boeing 747 cockpit, which must be aimed directly at the TV because it uses shitty infra-red.
Our TV remote can actually control our Apple TV. It's definitely good enough, and through some witchcraft, it works when the TV is not connected to WiFi.
TV manufacturers are not just creepy on privacy. They are outright stalkers.
The whole TV medium was fully and expertly enshittified by advertising decades ago.
The next level is today: Now you buy a giant plastic browser that includes a fully enshittified surveillance OS.
There is even a spec (as yet unused...) for Ethernet over HDMI (HEC , HDMI 1.4). Silicon Image (founder of HDMI) and Broadcom demonstrated the capability to TV manufacturers behind closed doors (says $searchEngine).
Whatever screen you use to watch movies, you will inevitably find your captain's log will contain more joy for the crew by discovering Jellyfin and sailing into deeper waters.
Completely wrong. Apple goes to extraordinary lengths, to the point of harming the usability of their products, to protect user privacy and avoid collecting user data.
Apple could easily make tens of billions dollars extra if they spied more on their users.
Not completely, not anymore. Apple's gotten a taste of advertising dollars via the App store. Search for product A and product B will pay money to come first. Apple TV advertises for the shows they've made in the Apple TV app instead of going to your library. Same for Books.app.
The biggest indightment of Apple in my mind is the copy and pasting of links into iMessage. iMessages "helpfully" renders a preview so a dumb consumer doesn't have to see an ugly long text of a url. But in doing so, it also happens to hides the utm code that is used for tracking by marketers.
They've got their eye on that tens of billion dollars extra.
While I dislike Apple’s move to ads, I’m at a loss how accepting money to degrade search results is a privacy issue rather than just a UX quality issue. What information is Apple sharing with advertisers?
Apple collects your data into a walled garden in proprietary protocols and ecosystems, uses that data to optimize how they manipulate people into buying their products, then charges you for access to your own data and backups.
Sounds like surveillance capitalism to me.
What the parent is saying is that the desktop versions of those programs are not remote friendly and the interface is not ideally scaled for 10-foot use. What you want are the Android TV versions, running on Waydroid or an x86 build of Android TV. See my other reply.
I just run stock ubuntu with an airmouse, freetube, a browser, and kodi. Works just fine on my projectors and tvs around my house for me and even non technical guests.
Yes, and I have done the same for a long time. It works, and the browser is key when you don't have native apps. But I recently spent some tokens on an Android x86_64 TV build with ARM support and it is far better than a Linux DE with the scaling cranked up. It's all scaled correctly, the UI can be navigated with the D-Pad alone, and all the apps are also designed that way. It's a massive improvement over a UI primarily designed for keyboards and mice.
Jellyfin and Plex cannot stream from major streaming providers. Yes, I know the answer is pirating content but that’s a complete paradigm shift compared to what most people are used to. It’s an absolutely enormous extra requirement when you’re suggesting someone switch their TV to Linux.
No one seems to have a problem dealing with multiple streaming providers. They’re essentially just different submenus on the TV app.
Compare that to setting up a home server with a ton of storage, setting up torrenting/newsgroups, software to check for new releases and automatically download them, probably a VPN too… it’s a whole different world.
When you tell people they can save a couple thousand dollars a year and never be tracked or watch an ad again on their tv if they learn how to setup a VPN and a seed box, a lot of people are quite happy to learn.
How is that working out in China where Apple caved and gave the CCP control of the HSMs? Apple can and will cave to government pressures for enough money, and will not give technical consumers source code to verify if the privacy claims from yesterday are true today.
Every Apple device is one software update away from giving a full backdoor to anyone that asks Tim Cook nicely with an secret executive order, or simply as a favor for political points given he paid a million dollars just to be seen sitting next to a far right President on TV.
It is not ever okay to recommend people to submit themselves to power dynamics like that.
The only device someone can trust is one with community created and audited software. Software with accountability to the users.
You know why. Nobody wants to sysadmin their “friendly Linux distro” just to watch shows. Kodi is amateur hour compared to tvOS. Nowhere do people care more that it “just works” than the thing their TV remote talks to.
You don’t have HDR and can’t pair and then send audio to bluetooth speakers via only the remote in 100 seconds. These basic things are table stakes. It does not “just work”.
The standard that the comment you're responding to is that the whole solution must be effortless even for someone with an IQ of 75. Don't try to stoop to their level, no amount of freedom or control justifies any level of effort to people like that. They'd rather have a system that forces them to view and verbally respond to ads every 10 minutes than one that requires them to learn anything more complex than what a toddler can figure out.
Even smart people have limited time and limited capacity for effort. Failure to Just Work is sand in their gears. Hand-rolled Linux TVs are a nonstarter.
> You must realize there are things like 3blue1brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile on YouTube, right?
And my family and I watch those on Freetube without tracking, ads, sponsored content or even a Google account all from a remote control.
Can your Apple TV do that?
In the amount of time most people spend watching ads they could have taken an hour of that time to plug a mini pc into their tv and hit next a few times on a Linux installer to never watch an ad again.
I think the problem here is that a bunch of people in these threads are pursuing different goals (those who want a non-spying TV for themselves, those who want it for their relatives, those who want the entire spying TV ecosystem destroyed), and each of them treats the other groups as if they were misplacing the goalposts from their own preferred location.
> You must realize there are things like 3blue1brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile on YouTube, right?
There are things like "Left: the Bible in Chinese, Right: Mozart's 40th symphony" on YouTube too, but I wouldn't take that as evidence of the existence of a significant contingent of polyglot religious split-brain multitaskers. Conversely, I do in fact know several people who run explainer videos in the background simply because they like the feeling of a reassuring voice making intellectual noises at them.
My non-engineer wife literally installed ubuntu on a mini PC in our living room. HDR was two clicks and 7.2 surround sound worked out of the box. Took maybe an hour.
There are just no excuses for a technical person being too lazy to do that.
And we have a real big screen web browser with ad blockers etc, a terminal, and Kodi with every movie and TV show we could ever want to watch, and zero internet required to watch any of it and no company gets metrics on what we watch. No ads, etc.
Nobody in the general public wants to do that, but I'd think some in the HN audience might feel differently (I mean, setting this up is part of the fun).
Personally, I use an RPi4 with libreelec, and it works great - including responding to my remote via HDMI-CEC. (There's also no need for any sysadmin with libreelec, which is designed to work out of the box.)
i've had absolutely worst experience, regarding drivers and customization and libreelec on my raspberry pis. had a much more headache free experience just with running raw raspbian autobooting into kodi directly
Buy any TV you want, ignore all instructions to connect it to the internet, then look for an HDMI port on the back. Plug an HDMI cable into one end, and in the other end plug in a cheap Linux computer like a used Intel NUC from ebay. Then use a nice air-mouse remote like the Pepper Jobs W10.
I watch any movie or TV show I want in 4k via Kodi, but then can alt tab to a Terminal or a real web browser.
Privacy, and dramatically more functionality than any TV would ship with anyway.
Using this setup to type this message right now on pc hooked to a projector in my garage from my couch.
It turns out we never needed Smart TVs in the first place. Just treat it as a screen for a desktop computer.
Samsung TVs (and probably others) will connect to other Samsung TVs in range and exfiltrate data via that route… merely not connecting the TV doesn’t present data harvesting
Iirc, Amazon uses a tool they call “sidewalk” for this purpose
There’s something called Wi-Fi Direct but it requires explicit pairing. And Sidewalk isn’t on TVs. There’s no evidence of Samsung TVs trying to use each other as relays.
>Samsung TVs (and probably others) will connect to other Samsung TVs in range and exfiltrate data via that route
Do you have a source for this? Because the implication is that my Samsung TV will connect to my neighbours Samsung TV, and send my PII through their network without my consent, which would be a huge deal in Europe.
In that case, jailbreak it, or open it and unsolder the wifi antenna, or put some well placed copper tape until you no longer see any wifi traffic from the TV from other wifi capable devices running a wifi packet inspector.
The TV belongs to you and it will obey you with modest effort.
Sony has treated me well and I don’t have it internet connected. It’s the one brand I haven’t seen nag when you have the internet disconnected. Was also easy to just opt right out of connecting it. Pretty standard google tv too.
I want to know how to disable their external communication via wifi, I'd like to see how they are exfiltrating info. If I don't connect them to my wifi, apparently they connect to Xfinity wifi at your neighbors house.
There is no way any guest in my home would not know my views on such things. I would respond to this in the same way as finding out a guest hid a microphone in my living room.
Or use something Kodi as the OS and just have a TV like interface. You can also run a Jellyfin client on linux or with Kodi and have that as a reasonable interface for the TV too.
Sceptre, in southern California, has a line of dumb displays.[1] HDMI/HDCP in, and that's about it. Walmart sells them, and of course they're on Amazon.
If you are open to projectors they still make “home cinema” projectors that don’t have any smart features or connect to the internet.
I have a BenQ (710tki iirc) that is like this and I believe it meets all your stated requirements (size, resolution, etc). I’ve been very happy with it.
We use a secondhand university projector and a pull-down projection screen.
It's not great for daytime viewing and there's some friction setting it up, but we appreciate that. It's a dedicated movie-night appliance, not something we have on in the background all the time.
How well do modern projectors which cost comparable to consumer TVs do when the room may get indirect sun through windows? This is my one fear that would hold me back from serious projector consideration.
With my 3200 lumen projector it is good at all times of day in my living room projecting on a wall that doesn't get direct sunlight shining onto it. It just can't make anything darker than the wall itself, so blacks are gray, which is not really an issue for me, although it might be if I were watching more movies during the day.
Previously, I had a portable project that only advertised 1000 lumens, and it was difficult to use during the day.
I would say that with a powerful enough projector it isn't really an issue unless you care a lot about black levels during the day.
It's honestly fine, but it does depend on your tolerance for washed out blacks. I have a 1300 lumen projector, stretched to just about its max size (120") and for me it's alright watching in the day. Then it gets even better as it grows darker. As I said, the main issue is that the dark colors are a bit more washed out
This is what I landed on as well - projector connected to an Apple TV. It cost a bit more, and there’s some extra setup, but the results are excellent.
The main issue switching to a projector is figuring out where you are going to position it (different projectors have different throw distances).
More money and more setup, but very worthwhile in the end IMO.
Just get a computer monitor and speakers. Here's something the enthusiasts won't tell you: a smaller screen looks fine if you're just not so far away from the TV. Huge screens are necessary for movie theaters since they seat so many, but the huge 70+ inch screens people are buying these days are totally unnecessary.
What are you talking about? Are you going to buy a chair and sit close to the monitor?
People have TVs in their living rooms and like to seat on their couches which are a few meters away from the TV, that's why you need to buy a larger screen.
I don't think I've ever read a comment as dumb as yours.
This may shock you, but living rooms with TVs existed before people had enormous TVs. My understanding is when guests came to visit your home, the polite thing to do would be to hand out one of those old-timey monocles so people could watch the TV. I believe those old-timey monocles only went out of fashion around 2012 and later when TV sizes approached modern standards.
Buy any TV, just don’t connect it to the internet at all, ever.
Plug in an Apple TV or any other streaming device if you want digital content.
If your want terrestrial content ensure the TV has the relevant input connections on the back.
I'll purchase a LG / Samsung Digital Signage Display. Basically a stripped down panel with no features, and then just run something like apple tv, or something else on it. For broadcast television (yeah I still occasionally watch that), I have a hdhomerun plugged into the network, and I use VLC/Infuse to stream the channels available.
I'm completely done with the malware that is modern televisions
I recommend a projector. When we moved into our current place, I considered a TV and went with the projector instead. Because:
- A TV has a backlight. It doesn't feel as 'natural' to the eye when watching because you are staring directly at an LED.
- A TV is smaller than a projector.
- A TV, when it is off, imposes itself on the room. It's a large plastic/glass object which is obviously electronic. It invades the space.
- Most TV's are full of surveillanceware.
- A TV can be watched even during the day, when it's bright outside. The projector, by contrast, is much less pleasant during the day; I consider this a feature - I should be doing something else when the sun is out. (The only time this kinda sucks is sports. We make do with closing the curtains).
- Movies were made for the silver screen, imho. This might be a hipster opinion but in my view, the medium really does make a difference in this regard; the moviegoing experience is better.
To specifically answer your question - most projectors are just a dumb HDMI cable. Computer, media center PC, apple TV, etc. None (unless I'm not aware of newer models) have an app store, tracking, or other garbage.
I've wanted a projector for so long, and had the chance to borrow a friend's high quality one to test it out. It absolutely elevated the movie experience and - depending on the viewer's preferences - could be worth it for that alone.
However, this:
> The projector, by contrast, is much less pleasant during the day
Was a significant enough drawback to me that it ruled it out as a daily driver. Although I do like the way you framed it.
That's not really an issue if you get an Ultra Short Throw laser projector and pair it with a high quality UST-optimised (like a lenticular/sawtooth) Ambient Light Rejection screen. A setup would reject something like upto 95% of ambient light, so the screen looks good even in bright rooms.
In saying that, even this setup won't be able to match the deep blacks of a modern OLED TV in bright environments, but if you haven't been spoilt by OLEDs already, then a USTLP + UST-ALR is a really good alternative.
There absolutely are "smart" projectors which come with android tv installed, but it is easy to spot them as they are advertised as devices you can use on the go
We have to block our TV from dialling home (there just aren't any privacy oriented 'smart' TVs). We chose to go down the DNS filtering route and pay for https://nextdns.io/ - it turns out it super helpful for a whole host of home network privacy jobs (ad blocks, kids safety filtering, security posture etc.). I can't stop recommending it to people.
Monitors are no longer safe. Bought a new monitor 2 years ago (Samsung) after many many years of not upgrading.
Turn it on and it wants me to make an account, agree to a new TOS update once a month, comes with the full smart TV interface junk. Had no idea that was even a thing they were doing to monitors when I bought it.
The best privacy method is to completely disconnect the TV from any wired or wireless network, and like you suggested to use it as a dummy display with the Apple TV (or whichever your favorite media player is). So in that sense you could just go to Costco (or any major electronics retailer if not in US) and pick one that you like the image & price.
I guess I am more concerned about random devices at home that need internet to work yet I have no idea what data they send where.
Not sure about the US experience, but here in Australia there are no dumb TVs for sale in our retail electronics stores. Every TV comes with some sort of "smart" OS.
It's the same way in the US. That's why they were saying to just buy any TV (which will almost certainly be a smart TV), then just treat it like a dumb TV by not connecting it to the internet.
I was able to disable a bunch of stuff on my LG so I never actually see the WebOS interface anymore.
I would disconnect the WiFi antenna as well and hope it doesn’t connect to nearby WebOS TVs via Bluetooth to pass telemetry so that the other TV uploads it to their mothership.
I got an old gigantic monstrosity of a DLP tv off facebook marketplace for free then plugged an old Intel NUC into it. It's not for everyone, but I think that it's great, partly because the facts that it was free and that it's stupidly big give me joy.
More practically, when I am not using that, I just watch tv shows and such on my desktop computer running NixOS with a nice and modern (1440p 170Hz high quality but not highest possible end IPS) monitor over displayport.
Other options include a projector, buying a very large computer monitor marketed panel, or using something that is modern enough to be fine, but not so new that it has malware in it (like a friend who was moving gave me a very heavy but also very nice plasma tv, with zero malware on it).
Basically, anything except something marketed as a consumer grade TV. The last time that I had to displeasure of dealing with that it was when my parents bought one and asked me to set it up, and the built-in Roku software refusde to even display from an HDMI or DP input unless it was logged in and connected to WiFi! Alas, I was not able to convince them to return it, but I did decline to have anything to do with it.
Panasonic is decent but the problem is their presence around the world is spotty. I think they only decide to reenter US market and Panasonic the parent company has been thinking about ditching its TV business for a long time already.
My only hesitation with Sony is that they will form a JV with TCL next year.
Otherwise I wouldn't trust LG, Samsung, HiSense, TCL or Vizio.
I've gone LG OLED 65" - C5 I think. I have never connected it to the internet. It's annoying to get prompts about needing to update - they seemed to have stopped.
An AppleTV has been my first purchase or installation for nearly the last decade with a flat screen tv.
Sadly the Samsung TV I have was the best display for the price by a mile, so I've done what i can to balance usage and protection. Its connected to the wifi to allow for AirPlay natively.
The tv has a fixed IP at the router to block all traffic in and out of the network, and as a visibility layer its DNS'd through a PiHole too.
Its unbelievably talkative over the network! In the 7 days just passed, its been 90% of the blocked requests by volume (there's no allowed domains from that IP).
I'm still not convinced it isn't sneaking out data somehow - piggybacking off a connection somewhere to the neighbors TV. Its HDMI runs through a stereo amplifier, so it can't piggy-back off the connected PC that runs it.
Maybe the PC (Mint) can run AirPlay somehow and I can disconnect it entirely from the internet?
I feel overly paranoid about this device relative to everything else in the house, I'm not sure how justified that is.
> I'm still not convinced it isn't sneaking out data somehow - piggybacking off a connection somewhere to the neighbors TV
I think we've overshot the mark a bit about TVs' connection abilities. A built-in SIM was one early conjecture. And while it hasn't been seen in the wild, it is often assumed to exist.
More to your point, we've not seen connections (assumedly ad-hoc wifi) to a neighboring device and uploading data to manufacturer, partner, etc.
We have recently seen a case of data collection, that included wifi scans. What we have not seen is a device that connects to other APs on it's own.
I saw 1 redditor claim that this occurred but it was not substantiated. Lots of folks are looking for this behavior but it hasn't been found.
This tells me that our existing methods of self-protection are effective.
Why aren't there any manufacturers that see a market opportunity and produce a TV with no spyware / invasive telemetry etc.? Are these data sharing deals so lucrative for them?
Is everyone seeing their product as a potential advertising platform?
As others have said, buy whatever you want just never connect it to the internet.
Now many people are also claiming that TVs will surreptitiously connect to an open network, but as far as I can tell, there is no evidence of this actually happening [0]. Of course it’s technically possible, but until a researcher actually observes this behavior I would not lose sleep over this.
I would go one step further and recommend a router with a customizable, Linux, firmware (OpenWRT, Tomato, DDWRT, etc).
Your TV is probably just one of the many devices that sends a scary amount of requests to a bunch of shady servers. With a firewall + DNS server that you control and a decent blocklist you should be able to block most requests and you won't be exposed if a new device connects to your network (for whatever reason).
> I would go one step further and recommend a router with a customizable, Linux, firmware (OpenWRT, Tomato, DDWRT, etc).
Yes, those are good options, but in true HN spirit, my suggestion is a plain Linux distro. The firewall/router is just a few iptables lines, which AI can now provide in a few seconds.
OpenWRT is a Linux distro. Just one optimized for embedded devices. If don't like the very utilitarian web UI can connect over ssh and use iptables or whatever else you want.
But that means custom per-device firmware builds, that in my experience with every router I tried it on means they lag months/years behind security patches. Is there some way to stay patched without building from source and reflashing every time a patch to something upstream happens? (almost daily, now, I guess that means?)
If something urgent appears, a point release will be made asap. If worry that isn't soon enough, can use the daily snapshot builds. That said, imo an essential device like a router should be as solid as possible and only upgraded if important rather for minor bug fixes.
That would be great if it were true for a larger range of devices, but they seem to drop older hardware pretty aggressively. My current wifi device hasn't had a new build published since Dec 2025, despite there being dot releases of the same version well past that.
IIRC, IPFire is more or less that. I control my Debian router/home server using SSH and have no GUI at all. It's largely set and forget, and don't recall last time I touched the firewall.
I rooted my LG C1 and honestly I can't go back to an unrooted TV. Game streaming works so much better(I can actually install the apps). I can control everything so Home Assistant automations are much better. Internet is blocked so no nagging or ads, But they are turn off via root just in case.
Now I have a weekend project in the future, assuming I can find a compatible process for my hardware. Never connected to the network, but the thing makes a few ever annoying popups I would love to disable. Or at least ensure that no "helpful" guest fills in the wifi information when I am not looking.
Nope! I can turn of personalised ads. But the homescreen is filled with recommended apps, recommended shows, popups about added subscription functionality, or straight up banner ads if it feels like it.
Samsung the frame 65" for $2000 constantly pesters about $15 monthly subscription to change the art on the display to their selection of public domain historical artworks. Otherwise you're stuck with the default slideshow, which you're now forced to see since the whole sales pitch of the display is showing art when turned off.
atleast they had the decency to not show ads as default art instead... but i wouldn't put it past them
I have to keep reminding myself that many people lack the attention span to read the context of the comment they’re replying to, so I should quote it to avoid confusion.
Go up one comment and you’ll see this was with respect to LG, not Samsung.
Except when it does. What was your point exactly? Mine was that you don’t need to root an LG TV to turn off ads. I can’t speak for other brands, yours included
Our TV died a while back and I was looking into this, but turns out we don't really need it as everyone's enjoying consuming on tablets and computers. Only thing is the PS5, but we haven't played it for a while.... But this is a useful thread for when I actually do get a TV though!
I got 2 of these, Amazon, 65inch. When I purchased (years ago) Amazon said "only 8 left". This TV is so dumb its clock is still in 1989. Three HDMI so it's got a Sworch2, Roku and a vSee box on it.
I was so/so on the purchase but after watching all the heck around 'smart" TVs I'm wondering what I'll do when these die. They were like 50% cost of the industrial display category, which seems my only option in the future.
Sadly they no longer make or restock their dumb TVs. They're desktop monitor only.
I bought one of their TVs in 2019, it's fabulous if your criteria is "turns on, displays what is connected to its inputs, and has decent video quality", and nothing more. I would recommend them heartily, if you can get access to one.
Which is interesting, since the E247BD-FSRD is a TV and one of the first ones mentioned on their web site. It does not seem to be available anywhere, though. (The Sceptre web site says Amazon and Walmart; but, neither carries it.)
The monitors lack the tuner and the cable/antenna connector; so, if you're only playing of a computer, they should work fine.
I have two Sceptre TVs and I recommend them, as well, if you can find them.
I allow my Samsung to connect to my local network, but then use openwrt and refuse to allow any outbound data from any IP using the MAC address of the television set. It cant update itself and no traffic suggests it can do anything regardless of what it might be collecting. Rooting it to prevent it from connecting to other wifi AP’s is probably the only better thing.
Don't smart TVs (of LG or others?) connect to open networks of neighbors, like Vodafone hotspots? That was told to me at least.
So only disconnecting the antenna or destroying it would work, unless you live remotely.
Ah, here:
> DiabloD3 43 minutes ago | unvote | parent | next [–]
Doesn't work, all the spyware modules connect to open Wifi of neighbors, and soon, LTE.
reply
> nvme0n1p1 37 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]
This is repeated every time this topic comes up, but so far it's just a conspiracy theory. An urban legend. An old wives' tale. Are there any documented cases of this happening?
> Don't smart TVs (of LG or others?) connect to open networks of neighbors, like Vodafone hotspots?
I can find no verified reports of this behavior. People are looking for it.
> all the spyware modules connect to open Wifi of neighbors, and soon, LTE.
I can find no verified reports of this behavior. People are looking for it. Cellular connections have been theorized since the beginning but have not been discovered.
Given the number of qualified people seeking out these behaviors, if they appear we will know it - with certainty.
I like LG OLED quality. My lg tv has never been connected to the internet and connects to a avr that handles inputs and 5.1.2 speakers Nvidia shield with hdmi-cec to turn on/off the receiver and tv. Jellyfin, android tv app for cable company, YouTube sans ads and projectivy launcher (Google one sucks). You can update firmware via usb stick. Would get an Apple TV if it died but like my Dolby vision HDR10 and atmos. Highly recommend.
Imagine you wouldn’t have this but technically the front two speakers are on a much higher end naim amplifier (connected to my audio stuff) but it has avr pass through. Sometimes an extra button to switch it to turn the front two speakers back to avr mode.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the Gamersnexus investigation show that even un-connected LG TVs will still scan for open WiFi networks to clandestinely upload their spy data?
LG makes the best panels, in my opinion, but they’re also the most customer-hostile when it comes to privacy.
The easiest solution is to never give the TV network access at all (no WiFi, no Ethernet) and only drive it over HDMI, via an Apple TV for example. The onus then shifts to how much you trust Apple, and the TV becomes mostly a dumb display. That still isn’t a 100% guarantee, though, since the TV has radios and could potentially talk to other networks or devices without your knowledge. If you want certainty, the only real option is to remove the radios entirely, which can have side effects, like the remote no longer working if it relies on BLE.
Personally, I don’t like LG’s “smart” apps, so never using them isn’t much of a loss.
But if you’re more technically inclined and want to use a product you paid for the way you want, you can do what I did with my C1:
Root it, put it on a restricted VLAN with no WAN access and no outbound privileges to any device on the LAN, and enable SSH. These displays run webOS, which is Linux-based. Yes, you can literally SSH into your TV. :)
That let me deploy my own custom app that I drive over the network. My display also never actually turns “off”. I just paint black pixels when I’m not using it, so it’s very snappy when I want something on the screen. It works as a spare data and metrics display while I’m working, and as a media player (a simplified DIY Plex) when I’m not.
So I get the “smart” part of the TV without the privacy concerns.
The crown has changed hands most years since QD-OLED came out. I appreciate the citations. I wasn’t up to date on the 2026 models, but in 2025 both flagships were very close. Many reviewers called it a draw, iirc. That’s partly why I said “in my opinion”. Mine is also based on the general design of the sets. I’ve found the port placement, bezel, and stand design more to my liking on LGs, but that’s entirely subjective. I also cannot speak to how rootable Samsung sets are, since I don't own one.
I’m glad to see the crown change hands, though. It’d be ideal if there were more contenders.
Boycotts can only work when there are viable alternatives. When there isn't a suitable replacement, and abstaining is unpopular, the needle isn't moved. Elections are often the same: people vote on huge package deals, each of them worse than the other, when looked at from a different perspective.
> Boycotts can only work when there are viable alternatives.
This just isn't true. People could stop buying new TVs altogether, we aren't talking about food or blood pressure medication. This is a luxury item. If I had to guess I'd say most people purchased their last TV because it was bigger than their old one which still worked.
Boycotting them is a completely reasonable response. Their stance on privacy is beyond ridiculous. Something right out of 1984.
The problem is that if you want a good OLED, there isn’t much of an alternative. Even if you don’t buy from LG or Samsung directly, they make essentially all the OLED TV panels on the market. A Sony or Panasonic OLED is still built on an LG or Samsung panel. So if you truly want to boycott them, your options for a quality modern display are very limited.
I bought my C1 before I was aware of how bad LG’s privacy posture was. The point of my comment is that you can still get the panel quality, and even some of the “smart” capability, without feeding them data, as long as you’re willing to treat the TV as a display and nothing else.
Projector with media server running Kodi with various plugins. Projector screen is unbreakable by kids or pets and projector itself is high enough to be outside a range of them.
Kodi is controlled by smartphones connected to home network so no need to store one physical remote controller.
Bonus: When you are outside home, you can still control remotely your projector/media server via VPN. Which is handy when you need control over what kids are watching.
Using like this over 6 years now, no complains and any reasons to change. Only disadvantage is that you need to spend one evening by configuration, but then it works as intended.
I’ve done this. My new LG C5 has no ads or anything. I have (software) disabled all spyware, though most of them were already pre-disabled.
Nothing has changed after connecting it to the internet (fuck me right), except downloading apps, which i removed. No performance/ad hits, yet.
I have a TCL QM8, which until recently I was using for its full smart-TV capabilities, and always feeling rather icky about all of the stuff it was sending. I would keep getting notifications about the microphone being turned on even when I had explicitly disabled it at every level.
I eventually got an NVIDIA Shield Pro, for which I:
1) Blew away the default launcher and installed Projectivity
2) adb disabled nearly all of the background Nvidia/Google services, following a guide
3) Removed all of the preinstalled streaming apps and added back the ones I use, opting for more privacy-respecting alternatives like Smarttube over YouTube standard.
Finally, I then factory reset my TCL TV and put its Google TV into "Basic" mode, which makes it a dumb TV for all intents and purposes. The TV itself is not allowed to connect to the internet anymore for any reason--everything goes through the set-top box.
The skeezy thing is the TV still tries very hard to get you to enable regular mode. Like if you try to launch ANY app of ANY kind, it will throw some pop-up about needing to connect to the internet to do so, and then flashing some fine print about how this will revert the TV to normal Google TV/Android TV mode. I had a guest in my house using the TV while I was in another room and suddenly asking me for my WiFi password, and when I went to see what was up, saw that they were halfway through opening the floodgates again before I stopped them.
I have a Sony Bravia Google TV, but did not want to sign in with a Google account. I also use it in ”basic mode” with Samba Interactive TV disabled. I used to sideload streaming apps with adb, but have switched to Obtainium now. After a software update the TV started to suggest signing in, but at least they did not opt me in automatically like Apple used to do with iCloud after iOS updates.
Could you provide any more details about this post or the resulting consequences someone suffered because of their guest connecting a TV to their hotspot? I tried to find the original post by looking up "guest connects the TV to their phone hotspot to watch their Netflix site:news.ycombinator.com" on Google but only found four threads where you had referenced that post before.
The whole telemetry stuff isn’t even new - I’m in the process of rooting and building custom firmware for my 2018 Panasonic OLED running Firefox OS, it doesn’t look to have as much as the newer sets, but there is still far more than I’m comfortable with.
Managed to establish root via a tv data channel, just working out the custom firmware and rollback options (it does an A/B firmware thing, just making sure there is a path back if I goof something).
I think at this point if someone charges 50% upfront of what hypothetically they could make from all the bloat people would pay for it. If a smart TV costs 500$ and each TV makes them 400$ in 10 years then charging 700$ sans smart features would sell if they advertised it that way particularly and the quality of the picture was good. And this is even profitable because getting 50c now for a dollar that may or may not come 10 years down the road is much more sensible for the finances.
Digital signage displays might be the only out of the box solution at this point. I wish there were more open source TV firmware options in the spirit of dd-wrt
If you want 55", this is the way. Otherwise just buy a computer monitor and use it as a TV. I bought a 55" digital signage display a month ago on sale for AUD$400, that's about USD$280.
I think a lot of peple don't know how you can do this the right way:
1. just don't give your TV internet and use another device on the HDMI
OR
2. Buy semi professional network infrastructure from companies like ubiquity: They support a feature called VLAN: You can put your tv into the privacy VLAN and just block internet access on your network layer, or you could filter stuff etc.
My biggest issue with this is, the rest of my family. As many times as I've put a streamer box and instructed my family to use it, they always default to the built in system.
Have given up. Not happy about it. But realistically I'm not going to spend half my waking hours locking down my digital existence from a wall of threats and still failing. The bad guys have near unlimited financial resources, incentives, and technology to breach whatever feeble defenses I erect. Nobody has any privacy anymore. Live life assuming anything and everything you say, do, search, browse is going to be in the newspaper tomorrow.
Any TV as long as you don't connect it to the internet in any way, shape or form.
Then connect either your computer directly to it or if you want something fancier, use an Apple TV.
Anything else is just too much pain - you can spend a lot of time debloating your TV, but then you either break updates (not good) or the updates will revert it and you are back on the square one. Not fun unless it is your hobby somehow.
Modern TV is just a hidden computer with quite a significant computing power. And those can be leveraged further - HackingTeam from Italy got owned by an embedded device (printer if I remember correctly).
And as a bonus, these devices are almost never monitored - you probably don't monitor it's CPU or network usage which makes it a good candidate for this sort of things.
The tv doesn’t matter much. Don’t connect it to the internet, set it to remember the hdmi port when it powers on. Then plug it in to an older laptop and you can control everything that way, play media locally, block ads. An Apple TV would be fine too
You buy a TV, NEVER connect it to the internet and set up small computer next to it. Obviously not Android based as it is spyware on its own.
Then use it. It is that simple. No special methods, software, whatever needed, tv becomes only a large monitor for your computer conveniently placed in living room.
The only solution I use is connecting the TV (LG OLED) via ethernet and set a traffic rule to drop all outbound internet packets from the TV and then have an Apple TV for viewing.
However, I bought my Apple TV in 2022-2023 when it was like £129, so excellent value for money, not so sure nowadays.
The reason why I keep it connected to the network (with a traffic rule) is I use home assistant to run automations etc so need at least LAN connectivity.
I have a Sony Bravia that I've never connected to the internet, only to an Apple TV and a Steam Deck. It makes a noise when you turn it on or off, and sometimes it makes that noise all by itself while turned off. Makes me feel like it turns itself on to try and collect audio data periodically. But! I think since the TV itself is never going to have direct internet access, I'm not that worried about it sending my data.
I got a 2025 Bravia because after some research it may not have the best panels, but it's the least likely to pull shannigans around snapshotting your viewing and forcibly connecting to a open wifi and that sort of thing. I connected it, updated the bios, immediately killed the wifi and I've been happy with an Apple TV ever since.
Unless the Apple TV decides to be evil, I feel safe.
Some good answers here already. Step 1 is always not to connect the TV to the Internet. You can go further and remove the WiFi daughterboard and/or desolder the chip.
Step 2 is to connect a TV box, but if you replace Samsumg, LG, or Google by Apple or Amazon, you have made no progress at all towards privacy.
Having researched this topic extensively, there are two main options for real user control and privacy. First, you can run an ordinary Linux distro on a mini PC, with a "launcher" such as Plasma Bigscreen. It's fine with an airmouse, but you will be mostly running upscaled desktop apps that aren't remote or controller friendly.
The best solution is actually to keep the mini PC and compile Lineage OS (Android TV 17) for a generic x86 target. This is a true degoogled Android TV distro that can, with some more hacking, run any ARM TV app from F-Droid, Aurora or other source. It is by far the best solution in that it is a true 10-foot UX and is compatible with almost all TV apk apps out there. The downside is that this not exist off-the-shelf. I spent a couple of days putting this together with Claude and it takes several hours to compile. I also found several upstream bugs in the process and will be submitting patches to the AOSP and Lineage.
There's a big gap between LG and Samsung, whose terms of service states that they sell your data to advertisers, and Apple, whose privacy policy states that they don't do that. Of course, there's an even bigger gap between Apple who can access your data if they wanted to or were told to and a home brewed Linux media box.
Unless you view privacy as all or nothing, I'd say replacing Google with Apple is progress. I think the majority of people are more upset at the idea of how their data is being sold for advertising than they are concerned about being able to act completely out of sight of any actor.
> There's a big gap between LG and Samsung, whose terms of service states that they sell your data to advertisers, and Apple, whose privacy policy states that they don't do that.
This may be true, but Apple can change that policy overnight. Apple also won't let you run programs that are not on its store, and won't even give you a Web browser. It's shocking people that people are willing to accept such restrictions. It isn't my hardware if I can't decide what runs on it.
They could change their policy, but Apple removing privacy protections would be front page news (at least where I get my news).
Is it really shocking to you that people treat their entertainment device as an appliance? Everything I control is something I'm responsible for patching and fixing and adding new features to. I don't mind faffing about with my Linux desktop, but the TV needs to just work.
The video is pretty cool. The guy flashes his tv with a custom firmware with a look/feel and elements he chose, plus a feature he created to leave handwritten notes for his girlfriend on the home screen of the TV, remotely from his laptop
I don't know how true it still is, but dumb TVs have traditionally been marketed as "commercial displays". You'll pay more and have to bring your own media, of course.
I believe those displays intended for static advertising etc are not set up for good refresh rate or cinema viewing, so they'll have very poor e.g. ghosting during action sequences, low contrast ratios, a lot like a LCD TV from the early 2000s.
Samsung and LG OLED TVs are especially great, owned them for years and they're still going great with good efficiency. I also heard that smartubenext from github might be of great resource for "adless youtube". The new Apple TV 4k is great too but would be absolutely better paired with the Homeview/Homepod (immersive voice something)
I've been on the projector train for many years. In addition to their being awesome for the home theater experience (they're not for everyone or every environment), I've yet to read about a manufacturer engaging in the bs happening on TVs.
Personally I opt for projectors; but similar problems arise with the built-in apps. They're just rubbish. My personal preference is to use no abuiltin apps, just use a laptop to access Jellyfin with a Logitech K400 (keyboard with inbuilt trackpad) sitting on my lap.
The next step for me will be setting up a Raspberry PI with Plasma Bigscreen.
I really want to like the K400, I've got one that I use for my TV PC, but I can't lie, it's an incredibly clunky experience and possibly the worst form factor I've ever seen a touchpad in.
I have a Samsung and I never connected it to WiFi or accepted their terms for “advanced features” like voice control. I don’t get any ads or any slow down. I suppose this works until they start shipping TVs with cellular modems to ping home.
Dumb question, but what happens if you never connect one of those TVs, I assume it will collect a bunch of stuff but all means nothing if it can't phone home right? Or do these things now ship with some built-in cellular data telemetry?
Get a big monitor with all the specs you want and connect it to an old laptop. You can watch whatever you want on there. You can even play video games on your Playstation or XBox if it has an HDMI port.
Not sure where you're getting those requirements. OP said 60-80 inches, 4k with at least 60hz, and they said "I don’t mind paying a premium". They also never mentioned a VESA mount or "infinite" contrast ratio.
There are lots of monitors that fit OP's description.
Can't recommend a TV as the newest one I have is from 2016, runs android tv, works offline but takes ages to start up.
But if you go for a projector, stay away from XGIMI, I helped install a horizon 20 series for a friend and while the image quality was great, it was impossible to setup without connecting it to the internet.
Are there no "dumb" TVs left? Surely you can still buy a television that has no option to connect to the internet/doesn't have built-in apps/is just simply a display? I haven't shopped for a TV in a while, I figured they're still out there though
I’m so pleased my old Panasonic plasma is still going. It used to have WiFi, but apparently that was an afterthought connected to a hidden usb port at the back.
Last time I took it off the wall I accidentally grabbed it by the WiFi card that I didn’t know was there and now it doesn’t have WiFi or a hidden usb port anymore.
This is repeated every time this topic comes up, but so far it's just a conspiracy theory. An urban legend. An old wives' tale. Are there any documented cases of this happening?
Some do this (Samsung), but the more common tactic is to throw constant nags up if the telemetry is not being sent to the manufacturer.
I did my research and bought one that does not do this (2025 TCL), but, if it turned out that it did, I'd have shamelessly returned it. I'd also have issued a chargeback if the store gave me any crap.
Even with all that, if you install firmware updates over the network, then disconnect WiFi, the TV becomes unusable until you factory reset it. (I did this because its EDID is corrupted, and I have to override it with a linux cmdline. The update did not help.)
This hasn't quite been my experience. I got a Samsung QLED TV about a year ago, and besides some frustration at the initial setup experience, I haven't had any issues with it.
The only "nags" I see is if I accidentally press one of the internet-app shortcuts on the remote (netflix, youtube, etc). If you do that, it will give you a popup saying "can't do this without wifi", which isn't entirely surprising. But I took the remote apart and removed the contacts behind those buttons, so they can't be pressed anymore, and I can't remember the last time I saw that popup.
I obviously have no way of telling if it's secretly connected to the sole low-signal open WiFi near me, but I haven't seen a single advertisement or anything that looks vaguely like it could have originated from the internet.
With TV makers having recently destroyed trust and there not being a good way for consumers to force trust it makes little difference whether they are doing it or not.
If you can't tell whether your disconnected TV is spying on you but you know that you cannot trust it, it's better to treat it as compromised.
probably, but I'll let gp answer. But I want guarantees that they don't do that, until them I'll consider the fact that if they can and it's profitable they will do it
If you want a guarantee, that's a conservative threat model and a fair position. What's not fair is GP saying "doesn't work, all the TVs do XYZ", when not a single TV in the real world has ever actually done XYZ.
Ultimately I'll need to find data to settle how paranoid I might be. I'm still leaning on not enough. But isn't it also not fair to claim not a single tv has done it? Proving an universal is not easy for gp but the inverse of forall is not a not exists.
And I know the world of middle management profit optimization.
I indeed cannot prove it. I also can't universally prove that wombats don't have telekinesis. But the preponderance of the evidence points to neither being true.
I know there are lots of advocacy groups and youtube channels that are testing TV models and would LOVE to be the first to break this story and publicly shame Samsung or whoever. But it simply hasn't happened.
Some TVs will refuse to work if you don't create an account and connect them to internet. They won't usually advertise this. You may have to repeatedly return those TVs as defective as you find them.
Got a Bravia TV for cheap back in 2014 that happened to be pre-Android TV (and pre-Google TV) so Android TV was just released and those something-else-os were "outdated".
Sony stopped releasing security patches a while back and there are no longer apps whatsoever and they all were crap - the youtube one was pure torture because of how slow it was and the web browser was just as miserable as ie6.
But besides that I can send it commands to it via its IP and control it, consume stuff via a DLNA daemon, do screen mirroring, and all the usual tv stuff. The image quality and sound are still great after 10+ years though I can't care less about oled 4k 120Hz and all that stuff. So it's no longer a "smart" tv but it's not also so "dumb" for a now dumb tv.
My in-laws have a Bravia of the same era. The image quality is amazing and it sounds great. The apps were never really any good, but now they are all outdated and doesn't work. They just hooked up a ChromeCast, and it's perfect for their use.
I have an old 55” LG that has no ”smart” anything. It is connected to cable TV network and via HDMI to M1 Mac Mini. Genelec for sound. No network, no nothing. It is ”only” 1080p, but you don’t need 4K or high refresh rate. You think you do, but you don’t (unless you are a serious gamer or a massive sports fan). You can buy similar display for about 100-150€ in these parts. They can have several years of mileage still. If you need cable TV connection, make sure that specific model has it.
You can make a cheap linux box from old NUC to work as media centre and install it behind the display or TV. There is several ways to control those with your phone, but I just use BT keyboard and mouse. Some old Intel NUC’s have IR-sensors, so you can map your remotes IR-codes to use it with a remote (never bothered to do it personally, but it is possible and we do it all the time in AV). You can of course use Apple TV, but personally I don’t find it worth it.
I worked in government/corporate AV for 8 years and interestingly mostly the enterprise grade stuff has none of the ”smart” bullshit consumer stuff has. Many customer pay to have WiFi etc. disabled on their monitor at the warehouse. Mostly in AV you just repackage same technology in more and more bullshit and resell it to the customer with bunch off added junk, such as these smart displays. I would never touch one. But it is true consumers have been royally fucked by the TV manufacturers.
Would a projector fit in your space? There are 4k laser projectors with really good quality these days. And they don't come with any apps, just HDMI port. The good quality laser ones are so bright that you can see them pretty well during the day.
There are several videos on YT regarding removing all this Ad/Spy/Bloatware from "smart" TVs using Claude and only a few prompts:
Actually, it should be very easy for most poeple here on HN to do this as Ive found some videos which seem to be done by "non techies" and they were successful.
wild to me that all the top responses are saying to buy a tv and root it to remove the spyware. Are there really no options that don't come pre-built spyware? Anything that doesn't have wifi in the first place?
Roku TVs are really easy to turn into dumb TVs. Don’t connect the WiFi, and set it to always turn onto the HMDI input your PC/device is connected to. No tracking, ads, or extra steps.
"Use some set top box and don't connect tv to internet" is a common advice, but what about ethernet through hdmi? Will the TV really not reach the internet through the box you use? If not, then what is the purpose of Hdmi HEC?
I was able to root my Samsung TV easily with Codex, disable updates and spyware, MITM everything with the eMudhra certs. The problem is no one really knows what these TVs do, they're all liars with 100 page privacy policies that will legally allow anything, and encrypted HTTPS communications that we can't even ordinarily monitor what they're sending. They can be updated at any time to start sending more or less data without your knowledge. So I feel the only realistic option is find a TV that can be rooted and do that. If you root a TV, you can fully disable network access and then use an Apple TV, or use the TV's software with MITM and deeper analysis with AI to disable snooping.
Ok I'm cheating, it's a monitor. Only it's the size of a TV and there's a remote.
But no tuner and no ARC.
But I don't care.
Zero smarts, boots in a millisecond, auto-wakes on device power-up, input switching just works, no half-baked HDMI-CEC hell. No wifi. No network. Nothing to spy on me because it's a FUCKING MONITOR and THAT'S IT.
Use any screen or projector connected to a linux box or AppleTV for streaming. Personally I use an old laptop running Kodi.
What sort of screen? Well, whatever you can tolerate. I use a very old commercial display I got through an e-waste reseller. It’s not great, but it was cheap ans has worked fine for years.
If you insist on a “TV” screen or any monitor/projector with connectivity, pick one you can root. As other users have pointed out, simply “don’t connect to the Internet” unfortunately isn’t enough to guarantee your data stays private.
An interesting question is why aren't there companies in the same vein as AMG was for Mercedes, that buy the product, modify and resell them? In this case, buy the factory LG and using expertise, lobotomize it and resell it people here? If this post shows the demand the where is the supply?
It doesn't seem that it's a DCMA limitation, yet at least. Would it fall under "right to repair"?
The Apple TV itself might be more privacy friendly or open about policies, but I have no reason to believe that any streaming app you’d install on it would provide for more privacy than the app installed directly on the TV.
I shop for elite televisions at the “reuse” center, my latest score was a 2013 Panasonic plasma which is a perfectly good dumb TV hooked up to an XBOX ONE and a home theatre. Downstairs I have a big curved Samsung 4K attached to my big PC. Someday I’ll see the high end OLED that I crave.
If you have the room and price is no object you definitely want at least 5.1 theatre, both movies and TV programs sound great in 5.1. The next step up is a second subwoofer, even for music subwoofers take a load off your other speakers and reduce distortion.
Does anyone make TVs with Opera/Vewd (rythmes with lewd) anymore? That's what mine is running, and it supports Netflix and whatnot, but doesn't show ads or spy.
Also, Android TV boxes sometimes have shenanigans installed by the manufacturer, but they are easy to customize to only run what you want, and they run fine without a Google account.
As far as I can tell, there's no way to use an Apple TV box without linking it to an Apple account and letting them spy on you.
Aside from getting a "dumb" tv, your best bet right now is to get a tv running google/androidtv and run a script like https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv against it to remove all of the tracking etc. from it.
As everyone is saying: just don't let it on the network. It's a little annoying because you can't have smart home stuff like "turn off the TV when I leave the house" working, but that's it.
My thing is, don't use an Apple TV. For the last 15 years or so I've just used a Mac Mini plugged into a big TV, and it's perfect. Get a wireless keyboard and trackpad and one of the many available trays that will hold them together. I'm literally typing this right now on this exact setup.
It should mostly work with HDMI CEC. My Android TV (Nvidia Shield) will turn my TV on and off. I only use the LG remote to adjust the volume although if you're using an AVR, it should do everything.
Personally, I used to be very privacy-conscious, but have given up on enforcing it everywhere over the years. I still care, more than most people I know in real life, but when it comes to stuff like TV's I just get whatever has the best panel for the lowest price. Last time I bought a TV, that was an LG TV running WebOS, which is not exactly the best from a privacy standpoint. Initially I used it with an Apple TV, but now I just use the native apps and try to disable the telemetry that I can in the settings panel.
Unsolicited advice, with a different approach, from personal preference / experience:
Sitting screens considered harmful.
Treat them as a liability and "trash"-adjacent, no matter the actual display technology or whether you can remove the spyware.
That goes double for TVs, so don't buy one.
Re-invest the time and attention you save in a good projector and a generally "invisible" screen / room setup.
I'm a happy owner of a $1000 DLP LED projector and a similarly priced motorized 150" screen. Do look into laser projection, which has been getting steadily more affordable for a while now.
Disclaimer: I've never subscribed to the "maximum screen size" formulas. As long as my own nose isn't in the way when I look to either end, it's fine, and inching towards that range is exactly what I'm deliberately going for. So yes, I'm one of those people who sits in the front rows at the movies.
I keep filler-free shows (TNG, anyone? :') movies and game time strictly out of band. So to me that's even more enjoyable in an immersive and optimally shareable setup whenever I do purposefully take the time.
More reading, as well as a nudge towards doing stuff, is probably the main side effect I'm after here, as you can tell.
Best setup is buying whatever tv, never connecting it to internet, and connecting to an external device running whatever os flavor you prefer. I have setup using bazzite with a steam controller and an old laptop, and added non-steam games for YouTube and jellyfin, works great for my needs and I play a few small steam games on the tv aswell
Few years back, I bought two TVs: 65" LG latest at the time TV ($2k) and a 55" Sceptre tv from Walmart for $200. The TV from Walmart is a dumb TV with terrible speakers. So, in addition to tv I got a $150 soundbar and an Apple TV. I almost don't watch the LG one and daily watch the Walmart tv. It’s good enough in this setup.
fwiw I've disabled ACR on my Sony Bravia, not the cleanest way but it's something useful perhaps if you already have one. https://github.com/joelio/bravia-guard
No TV at all, for series and movies get at projector and some sound system, to keep update with the news, read or listen to newspaper in the morning and that is it.
Disconnect the TV from internet and use a solution like Apple TV for apps you would like in TV. Even better is a Mini PC connected to the TV if you are savvy enough.
Any AndroidTV and then run CleanYourTV [1] on it, gets completely rid of all Google ads and additional bloatware by the manufacturer. Maybe run Claude against the repo first to check for malware but going by the number of stars it seems to be solid.
Samsung is the worst by far. Samsung (TizenOS) does not respect even privacy opt outs. It seems like LG, Google TV OS (Sony) and Fire TV OS (Amazon) and VidaaOS at least do that.
Out of curiosity, do these “smart” TV features even matter if you’re just switching to one of the HDMI inputs? I’ve used an external device to drive my TV for years, and I honestly have no idea what is installed on the TV itself.
They don’t. My Hisense doesn’t nag me at all. I just use my Apple TV and 4k player and PS5 without issue. It’s not nearly as hard as all the comments here have made it out to be.
Similarly, my Hisense TV never gets a chance to show the VIDAA interface. It just displays the HDMI input and I switch that between Kodi running on a Raspberry Pi and a VirginMedia TV box.
I bought a Hisense TV three years ago. I do not connect it to the Internet. I use an Apple TV for streaming. I went with Hisense because it was well reviewed.
I think you'll be fine with whatever TV you buy as long as you follow this strategy.
The consensus thus far appears to be that all modern TVs wipe their ass with user privacy.
Given what happened with games very recently, perhaps the question should be rephrased to: "Which modern TVs support flashing unsigned/self-signed firmware?"
I get that they’re not equivalent, price wise, but have you tried searching for “55 inch computer monitor”? They sell large ones for use in video conferencing rooms for example.
Anybody has experience with TCL and Spectre? I'm seeing them a lot, even saw one really big TCL TV in a local shop and loved the colors and the FPS, but no idea how good are they really, are they longer-lasting, are they annoying if you don't give them network access etc.
I have a TCL that I'm happy with. I followed 'some instructions somewhere' to use adb to disable the default launcher and replace it with the ProjectIvy launcher, which is nice and clean and has no ads or promotions (ads by any other name).
Mine _is_ connected to my network, but I have DNS blocking via self-hosted Adguard along with specific SmartTV block lists and regular expressions, plus a firewall for the 'entertainment' VLAN that's fairly tight. I'm also monitoring (and recording to a database) all outgoing traffic on the entertainment VLAN so I can add further firewall restrictions - once I have the time to analyse the logs, maybe after I've retired...
From your message I gather it's a Google's Android TV software, then? Can you send me a shortened / anonymised link to the "some instructions somewhere", please?
I use AGH as well but haven't gotten around to an untrusted VLAN yet; once I get a TV I'm definitely adding one though...
Sceptre. They have okay 4K panels at ludicrously cheap prices at Walmart that don’t have WiFi or a network port or any smarts at all. HDMI goes in, rendered images come out, end of story.
Then hook up some other sort of computer or streaming box or whatever. I have no further recommendations because I went with an Apple TV and have never looked back. It just works.
It's not hard to find options if you stop looking in stupid places with bad search terms. "TV" on Amazon is literally the innermost circle of consumer hell.
I used to work in VFX, and for our big bright displays in the office we used digital signage displays.
I started using them at home in about 2018, after my nice medium budget sony TV died in a way that I couldn't repair.
I currently have an old HD NEC 48" display attached to an apple TV, and a freeview recorder for broadcast (although 98% of TV is done via apple TV)
Pros:
the screen is bright and adjustable. You can, if you wish fiddle with the colours and brightness
The screen is designed for 24/7 duty cycle, so is built like a fucking tank
It has all the HDMI you would ever need, plus displayport compute module ports (if that floats your boat) you can also get an ethernet remote control module (never tried it so it might be shit)
Second hand, they are dirt cheap. on ebay there are a couple of them in various sizes for <£400
If you don't have a compute module, the screen isn't going to spy on you.
Cons:
they are just screens. you will need speakers
They are built like tanks, so are heavy and thick (they are not the 15mm thick OLED jobbies)
Second hand, they generally don't come with stands or remotes
On ebay at least, they are generally pickup only.
In terms of driving it, Apple TV >> anything else I have used, apart from maybe a humax. Amazon firestick is frustratingly slow/unreliable. They also break after a year or so. Yes the apple TV is probably 5x the price, but the time to playing a show is about 7 seconds, from first pressing the remote to wake everything, to navigating to the show I want.
everything else I have used is horribly slow in comparison.
A solid late 80s RCA Colortrak 2000 with down-converter is a solid choice and excellent conversation piece. Hardwood finish, or go for the full console experience. Best part is it can't call anything.
I was browsing through the comments and thinking how insane it is that the answer basically appears to be “there isn’t any”. Most common advice seems to be either “buy an evil product and work against it” or “buy a close-enough something-else not-(yet)-affected”. Another instance of “enough bad choices make better choices no longer an available option”? Smh…
I recently was stressed about the same & ended up buying an LG C6, sticking it on an isolated VLAN, rooting it, then just letting it hit my NAS for jellyfin.
It's probably pretty easy to explain it to somebody from the 80s.
"Remember that discussion we had about phones? Yeah, so TVs are kinda like that except they're really big so we stick them in a room instead of taking them with us".
One of my best scores at Radio Shack in the late 1980s was an LCD TV. The screen was about 2.5", black and white. It was powered by 4xAA or AAA batteries. It featured a single-knob tuner, an FM-like telescoping mast antenna, a speaker, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The screen would snap down for carrying, and it was reflected for viewing in a mirror, so it required a strong light from above to shine through the LCD panel. There was an accessory backlight with its own batteries to snap on top.
It had a pocket-size form factor, and I carried it around to Disneyland so we could watch TV while we waited in line, and it could receive any OTA TV channel in VHF or UHF.
Finding and watching some Youtube repair to figure out where the parts are and learning to do it is cheaper than buying anything that isn't spying on you. It's just depressing this is what we have to put up with.
I think Sony/Apple/Huawei/whoevergotballs needs to make a full TV with screen, really expensive, not a set-top box, and for the love of god make it zero ads, zero profiling, and zero camera/mic on by default, allow it to install apps and make it fully customizable. There is plenty of people with money that would pay big bucks for a TV like that
We are all fed up of all this invasive, privacy breaching, ad targeting scheme, and the first one to crack that nut will reap it dearly
I was going to write buy Apple TV and never ever connect the actual TV to the internet, but:
- I am unsure whether modern TVs utilize ethernet over HDMI to connect to internet through Apple TV (I have no idea why Apple TV should allow this, but I don't trust Apple to not accidentally enable this)?
- I can only imagine nefarious five eyes reasons for why Apple released Apple TV that plays 4k60 exactly like the previous models, but now has 8 GB RAM, powerful machine learning CPU, and built-in microphones that are impossible to disable
So, apart from getting used prev gen Apple TV (and still having to trust company whose leader has to accept Trumps's lunch invite), I have no good advice.
The one with the best looking picture at the store. Don't connect it to Internet and use your own streaming box (that you trust).
Really I think in store is the way to go. Some "low" and "mid" tvs look identical to me. Some "high end" are meh. Some other "low end" look great. I think it's a bit of a crapshoot. Not sure currently but Samsung QLED used to be rated well but I always thought LG OLED looked worlds better. I've always liked LG OLED although I've heard their firmware has gotten pretty predatorial...
W końcu padło to stwierdzenie "use your own streaming box (that you trust)". Ale które urządzenia są warte zaufania? Apple TV zapewne, ale jest bardzo drogi. Ja mam set top box Xiaomi 4K Box gen.2 i nie wiem czy mogę mu ufać...
I'm unsure on current models, but historically the best bet (and what I did last in 2023) was to purchase a TV from Costco, as Costco used to (and probably still does) mandate that SKUs they sell must be able to be operated in a non-connected state. I bought a 70" Sony 4K TV in 2023 and /only/ the Costco version provided this option, but on first power on you could select "Basic Display" or "Connected Experience", and after that unless you explicitly changed it that was set. It's never asked to connect to a network or done anything I can detect as nefarious since, and is used only via an HDMI connected appliance I use for streaming.
Agreed, some LG TVs even hardcode the DNS these days. A simple cron job that resolves the hostnames and blocks the IP on a firewall level is very hard to bypass though ;)
Buy a TV from 2016. Mine's a Samsung from 2016. It showed me a EULA on first boot. I declined it. It's been a dumb TV ever since. One input is a LibeELEC NUC, the other an Apple TV, because Netflix requires a botnet to stream >480p.
4K is unironically a meme. You don't need it. A set of decent floor standing speakers (and room treatment) will elevate your movie experience far more than more pixels ever will.
buy projector, laser one are good, some of them are quite dumb in a good way. mostly US owned, or Japanese. Any chinese one are full of "android tv with their own flavors of spyware"
9 years ago I got a hisense 65h8c for around $800, at the time it seemed like the dumbest tv I could get (all new tvs, that now-old one included, are advertised as 'smart') that still hit other criteria. It has only ever connected over HDMI to a PC or an AV receiver. Still works great, used mostly for gaming, occasionally movie or show watching. It has weaker blacks and some edge bleeding, but meh; I'll never buy an OLED TV since at some point I'd play a game on it and soon enough after get burn-in from static UI elements.
Well, I have CRTs in most of the rooms in my home. That's because of an unrelated condition for which I refuse to be treated, but they are great for privacy!
Plasmas are great, and I have one - and our main screen in the living room is just a bog standard Sony...I just love CRTs, but I'm a retro gaming nerd.
Another slightly pricier option is buy a digital signage display. These are screens intended for use in like retail floors or even outdoors. They tend to be extra durable, resistant to burn-in, very bright and devoid of most fluffy end user features.
I second this. Both my TVs at home are previous signage from my work. Samsung panels and the one that does have smart features is from the far flung past.
Rather than trying to get a TV which doesn't have blatant spyware (when in all likelyhood, they all do, or will get one in a software update), I would suggest solving the problem the other way around - get a TV you know you can disable that functionality in. Trusting the manufacturer is a recipe for disaster.
I stripped out the bluetooth+wifi module from my TV and keep it disconnected from ethernet. Now it doesn't matter what it tries to collect, it can't send it anywhere.
OP, I have been a user of the AppleTV family of products for years. I have no complaints. So far I trust Apple more than Roku or Amazon, and I find the devices work far more smoothly and easily than other players in this space.
Consequently, I have no interest in hooking ANY TV directly to the network. It seems pointless.
I'm 100% not interested in any discussions that begin with "buy model XXX and then install different software..."
I'm not going to hack my TV. I have no interest in sysadmining my television. Success for me would be finding a TV that would work fine for its working life without ever being attached to a wifi network, and that will not try to do so on its own (ie, by joining known-open networks like those provided by Comcast and ATT).
(Assuming you've already bought one and have been using it for a while)
Have you tried using the built-in speakers or have you been using external speakers the entire time you owned it?
I'm curious if the (specs say 10watt) built-in speakers are in any way usable -- my criteria would be, can you easily hear dialog at the normal viewing distance; I wouldn't hope for hi-fi sound suitable for music.
You can literally just buy any Sony and turn it onto dumb TV mode and not connect it to a network.
That's it, that's all you need to do, and the level of crazy over engineering and spend by some people below achieves literally nothing more at great difficulty.
One of the supermarket chains here have their own line of TVs. They are dirt cheap, absolutely fine quality. Some of them do run Android, or GoogleTV, so you'll get whatever tracking that may yield, but they certainly don't have the resource or infrastructure to run their own separate tracking and spying on those units.
The Russian user manuals for LG OLED TVs list the exact part numbers for the WiFi and Bluetooth modules. Search the PDF for IEEE and it will be listed. The English manuals omit this information!
I think desoldering the WiFi antennas and leaving the Bluetooth antenna connected is also a viable option. Although I think a 50 Ohm dummy load is needed if doing that(?).
Don’t connect it to the internet, only to your lan (on a separate vlan) connecting to your jelly and *arr setup, or, you can get a tv box, flash it with vanilla android, have kodi and addon pointing to your jelly server, and from that tv box is an hdmi to your TV, same is also doable with a rpi.
It won’t be plug and play but it’s a weekend project, because there are no tv manufacturers who cares about privacy, or get a dumb tv and connect an hdmi to your pc but you will lose new features.
Only the one you gut with LLM first. Even when you disconnect it from the internet these devices often connect to unsecured WiFi's around you and snitch about you. There could be more tricks they do.
A lot of the advice here seens to be "disable wifi, don't plug in ethernet, use a computer or similar to provide content".
This is good advice. But I'd consider it the absolute baseline. I'd be much more interested in hearing about TVs that'll still try to get to the internet (neighbor's badly secured IoT network, bluetooth, 5G) or ones that cripple themselves when you tamper with wifi.
I recently picked one up at Sam's Club. Since my use was only to display an external HDMI source, I never even configured Wifi. Unfortunately, they're now wise to this. If it detects its been offline for ten or so start-ups, the TV will 'helpfully' force you into the Wifi config workflow on the next start. It seems to keep an internal counter in flash memory which nothing but a factory reset will clear. In my tests, it seemed like it can be kept offline forever but at the cost of manually dismissing the Wifi config workflow with three clicks on the remote every ~10 power-ons.
The TV also will not turn on and just display an external HDMI source even though it has a "Remember Last Source" feature. That feature does work as expected with any internal streaming source but external sources must first be manually selected with the remote after each power on (also undocumented in the manual).
I figured this out because I bought this small TV to be a wall-mounted screen in the dedicated bathroom of our home theater room. It's only job is to turn on while someone is in the little bathroom and display a copy what's on the main 150" projector screen in the next room, then turn off when they leave. The on/off is handled by a motion sensor and standard Home Assistant automation but after power on it correctly shows the Last Selected external HDMI source for 1 second, then blanks the screen. The source is already selected and working but being blacked out until you manually re-select the same source with the remote (only if it's external). This is clearly an undocumented anti-pattern added specifically to prevent the TV being used unattended as a display screen, picture frame, digital sign etc. Why? Because Vizio (now owned by WalMart) doesn't get rev share if it's: 1) Not online, and 2) Only displaying external sources. That's why it demands manual "proof-of-life" before it'll grudgingly deliver the basic functionality it claims on the box.
This made me angry - and the TV was otherwise the perfect size and feature set for my use case. So I programmed an ESP32 with an IR emitter so that every time the TV powers on it sends the remote presses to manually clear the "Please Connect Internet" message and re-select the already-selected external HDMI. Very annoying to be forced to figure this out but now it works fine and no one even sees the annoying messages as they're already gone before by the time we enter and see the screen. So, fuck Vizio :-). Although, I'm pretty sure almost all current consumer TVs now sell all your data exactly the same. The only differences may be the depth of dark patterns they deploy to resist offline usage.
To be fair, aside from all the super evil dark patterns, it's a shockingly good quality small TV (24-inch) for $88. Although it's obviously not a high-end display (no native HDR or 24fps), the chipset does do a decent job tone mapping external HDR (and HDR10) sources to SDR and it does proper 3:2 pull-down to display 24 frame external sources at 60fps - which very few TVs in this size do well (or at all). This is why I kept it and spent the time 'fixing' it. Of course, this is only because the TV is subsidized by the $35-$60 avg yearly revenue TV manufacturers reportedly can collect from advertising, app install payments, rev shares and selling all your viewing data. For $88 at local retail, it's probably being sold at a small loss. What's sad is I would have paid double that for the same TV without the dark patterns (in fact, I did buy and return two 24" TVs before this one for $160 and $200 but they couldn't even display external HDR or 24fps sources at all - which was a requirement since this secondary display has to display sources configured for the main projector).
lol, I Ctrl+F'ed for this brand after having pointed my agent at it. There's some pretty bad stuff on there, some of which I've already reported to Vizio.
If you wanted to give your coding agent a crack at the internet connection thing and patching that out, there's some sort of pairing you can do over LAN to allow access to launch web content, this can be chained with old Chromium RCEs to gain root access.
I'm not sure they'll care about any of the issues I had since they were clearly put there on purpose. Kinda like complaining to the concentration camp guards about the poor service and lumpy bedding... :-)
> If you wanted to give your coding agent a crack at the internet connection thing
Good to know but I've got the IR commands and timing working to nullify the dark patterns and I'm not going to touch it. To Vizio we're not the customer, we're the product. I wish the community godspeed in pwning Vizio TVs as they've certainly 'earned' the attention through bad behavior. :-)
Frankly, I've never used any apps in a smart TV nor have I ever allowed a TV internet access. I always feed my displays via external HDMI because our main viewing room is a custom-built, fully sound-proof, tri-level screen room with elevated stage and motorized curtains. All walls & ceiling are 100% fabric over acoustic padding (no windows), separate snack bar and dedicated restroom. Seats 17 in matching, reclining theater loungers. The sources are mounted inside three in-wall sliding racks and include UHD disc, PS5 Pro, 3 older consoles, media server, satellite, cable, vintage LaserDisc and cloud streaming multiplexed through dual AVRs with separate amps driving 9.2.4 sound (B&W THX speakers + subs the size of 55 gal oil drums backstage).
I just needed to make that little 24-inch Vizio work because that's how big the in-wall display cutout in the restroom is (the screen cutout is integrated into the interior design). Finding a secondary display that small able to at least display via conversion every format all those sources can throw was challenging. :-)
Just get any old TV and use the HDMI input and don’t connect it to the internet. The fears of it phoning home anyway even when you don’t configure wifi are overblown (almost no TVs can do this), as are the privacy implications. Nobody cares that you watch Severance and MCU movies. It’s sort of like people who tape over their laptop camera but leave the mic alone, as if 86400 photos of your face are somehow private and sensitive but all of the conversations in the room are not.
When it comes to TVs you can buy in a big box store today, I'm not sure there are any TVs that fulfil your requirements. Everything's more or less on a scale of privacy to quality, where on one side you have the panels of 10 years ago with dumb electronics from brands you've never heard of, and on the other side are the LG panels, but with LG non-privacy. The other notable brands you've probably heard of fall closer to LG than to the no-name brands.
You can probably scrounge up a decent modern-ish panel on the used market that's old enough to not have been shipped with malware, but then you're betting on it not having been updated to receive the malware, or relegating yourself to rooting it the instant you get it home.
My unspoken assumption is that you don't want to give money to evil companies. If you yourself are fine with giving your money to evil people, then you can Just™ buy an LG panel and root it.
I have not checked the details recently, but it should still be possible to get an aftermarket "dumb TV" generic controller board to fit the panel, as LCD panels have a somewhat standardised controller-panel interface.
- Buy an LG OLED TV. They're as gorgeous as they are notorious. I just got a 77" LG C6 and it is crazy good.
- Root it [0].
- Install Glasshouse [1] and disable all telemetry. YOU now own the glass. Now you can chromecast to the TV, use Adfree YouTube, access IP TV, etc etc etc. No point crippling your TV by pulling the wireless module and voiding your warranty.
- Install a bunch of cool apps to your TV [2] (there are many more out there besides those listed here)
- Restore to Factory Defaults if you ever want / need to unroot and get back to stock e.g. a warranty claim
The only issue is that LG recently closed the vulnerability that made rooting possible so you don't want any firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84. Hopefully a new exploit is found that makes rooting possible once again.
BTW, you might have heard of Dev Mode on these TVs but they don't allow anywhere near the functionality that rooting provides.
[0] https://tv.slada.sk/guides/rooting-guide
[1] https://github.com/rorygallagher2024/glasshouse
[2] https://www.webosbrew.org/
This seems excessive. Easier to disconnect it from the internet completely, and have it boot to HDMI1, hook up an external HDMI-CEC switch, and never think about it again.
With "Hotel Mode" you can make this effectively permanent and never see LG's UI again unless you want it.
Then just connect whatever HDMI-based box you want (Roku, Apple TV, Plex, Android, whatever) and use that for the content.
i personally wouldn't trust these not to spy on you even disconnected. They can still scan for networks and bluetooth devices around you
It won't be long until they have their own cellular modem so they don't need your network at all of the spying parts.
I used to work for an IoT connectivity provider (think SIM cards, eUICC etc); I know that some of the manufacturers of various devices have been investigating adding cellular and soldered eUICC (ostensibly for diagnostics, warranty etc).
So it's not even that it won't be long; I'm sure they already have designs and are just waiting for eUICC support to catch up.
Vehicles already have them, you don't need a lot of bandwidth just enough data to identify the members household which can be done with a wifi access point map and bluetooth MACs.
Then they'll quickly discover how bad cell coverage is in vast swathes of the USA and they'll have to be a lot more tolerant of bad customer sat scores and high return rates than they typically want to be.
The Qualcomm license probably makes it too expensive
Unless they include armored cellular antennas, it's just another thing to get defeated
where would they send that info without internet?
- neighbor's open wifi - open hotspot - public city wifi close by
I haven't seen an open WiFi network near any apartment I've lived in for more than a decade.
There has never been a shred of evidence for any TV model actually doing this despite how often it's speculated about in comment sections.
It's kinda weird how the most sensible, straightforward mitigation for the TV spying people claim to be concerned always gets this evidence-free FUD thrown out to claim it's pointless.
Some people here say they have seen their TVs connecting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275753
I have seen open wifi reachable from places i've lived on. Spotty and intermittent connection but there. Apartment buildings with businesses on the 1st floor are also common now, those businesses may have open wifi, etc.
That's it, turning my apartment into a faraday cage
yay for rural new mexico ...
well air gapped
Don't you then have to secure whatever you just plugged into the tv so it doesn't do the exact same thing???
Yes, but you can choose your adventure here. Better than having to replace the entire TV if you find one that doesn't do what you want.
Not to mention that technology moves forward and you can replace these if new models come out that have better features or are more aligned with your privacy preferences.
You kind of leave all the compute that the TV has built-in basically unused
Nobody wants compute in their TV.
Its job is to do an exact reproduction of the HDMI digital incoming signal with no interpretation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it; but, if you're buying a "smart" TV, you might as well use the processor present in it. Rooting it and what not.
I guess I should have specified this.
Its a display
Isn't that the point? You have no control over said compute.
> have it boot to HDMI1, hook up an external HDMI-CEC switch
That's not actually how HDMI-CEC works. HDMI-CEC switches aren't KVM switches that only do HDMI.
An HDMI-CEC switcher box (or devices with that functionality built into them, like many soundbars) doesn't act as its own isolated sub-HDMI-CEC bus, where the switch presents to its downstreams as the root HDMI-CEC device, catching (without bubbling) <Active Source> messages from said downstreams, selecting one downstream to be active in an internal sense, and then presenting itself to its upstream connected TV or what-have-you as if it's one leaf-node source whose video+audio signals just-so-happen to be those of the currently-selected downstream.
Rather, at an HDMI-CEC level, an HDMI switch is a lot more like a USB switch: it passes through all the CEC message broadcasts from all of its downstream source devices through to its upstream receiver device (and vice-versa), sometimes also interpreting them in turn for effect; and the root host device can actually see the whole tree topology, including any switches.
(Fun fact: HDMI-CEC devices have four-step hierarchical addresses, that look like IP addresses, describing at each step the physical socket-number offset on the upstream device that connects said upstream to the given downstream. The TV is always 0.0.0.0. Whatever's plugged into the TV's first HDMI socket is 1.0.0.0. If that thing is an HDMI switcher box, then whatever's plugged into its first downstream HDMI socket is 1.1.0.0. And so on. All of these devices can see and talk to one another using these addresses, at all times. It's a network!)
Importantly, this means that if a TV is plugged into an HDMI switcher box, which in turn has several source devices plugged into it, then the TV will still be aware of, and can still hear and speak to, all the inactive sources downstream of the switcher box, not just the active one.
Which in turn means that if your TV is really stupid in the way it handles HDMI-CEC (e.g. trying to "argue" with sources about who's supposed to be active on wake, with the TV trying to force the last-active source and the source that woke the TV trying to force itself as the active source), then putting an HDMI-CEC switcher box in between will by no means improve things. They'll still be arguing, now "through" the switcher box; and the switcher box will itself be doing additional things in response to seeing these messages. Where previously you had O(N) HDMI-CEC problems, now you'll have O(N log N) HDMI-CEC problems.
But hey, at least your leaf-node sources in this tree all show up in the TV's input switcher menu! That was definitely worth making all this mess, HDMI Forum! :P
I've never really dug into it but this does explain a lot of the strange and flakey behavior that I've seen with switches purporting to offer HDMI-CEC support. All I really want is auto-input switching and being able to control the volume through the device.
It doesn't seem like it should be so hard, but it has broken and fixed itself so many times that I really don't know what I should be looking for.
Nope. The TV stores all the data it harvests and scans WiFi in search of an open network. Whenever it finds one (and LG could make commercial agreements with Telco operating open WiFi’s to use them) it will connect and exfiltrate whatever it found.
It’s malicious.
This has been mentioned in so many comments and there isn't a shred of evidence about it
It seems to be misconstruing the fact that TVs will scan nearby networks for fingerprinting, but they don't _connect_ to those networks. It would be very very easy for someone to reproduce if they did
Agreed that the fact that the capability exists is bad.
That said, open networks have become a bit of a rarity; the only ones I can see are captive portal networks, and none of those from my home.
Wasn't there some issues with TVs in the past that filled up their drives with this data and would then crash or otherwise not work?
I have a recent 60ish inch LG OLED that's not been connected to the internet AFAICT for over a year. It's not connected to a LAN and it's not configured for any WiFi network. I have never connected it to the internet at all. It's working like a champ. No crashes or other issues. I treat it as a dumb monitor. HDMI in, optical out for audio to my stereo.
Yeah, right. Just ignore what LG did and continue giving them your money.
That's real, but:
> The only issue is that LG recently closed the vulnerability that made rooting possible so you don't want any firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84. Hopefully a new exploit is found that makes rooting possible once again.
That's a good excuse to find a used one.
It's a good point, but maybe they get less money if they are getting less telemetry.
I mean if you think about it, you're "stealing" from them. They (probably) calculate the value of selling user data and use it to offset the cost of the TV.
If you take away the user data, you are "coming out ahead". I'm guessing the days of selling hardware at a loss are mostly over, but the margins are probably pretty tight.
once the TV is in my hands, its up to me what i do with it.
if they made a bad business decision thats up to them
Why people subject themselves to TV operating systems (or chromecasts, apple TV, etc)? I just have a mini-ITX PC connected to my TV and a flymouse. You can even use pre-made mini-PC if you don't care about gaming. Using anything without ad-block is impossible these days.
Being able to pull out a full wireless keyboard+mouse when doing productivity work is great. Me and my wife regularly use the TV to plans trips, online shop and do spreasheet stuff.
Some of us rode the home-theater-pc wave back in 2003 and are sick of the jankiness of having to have a keyboard in your living room for the daily “occasional” thing you can’t do with the remote.
Yeah I agree no need for a janky setup like that these days. If you want control of your media, but don't want the dated HTPC setup, get something like a Ugoos am6b+ run Plex/Kodi/Jellyfin/Emby on a PC anywhere on your network and that can play all of your media using a remote and nice interface.
Because I have to go through it to get to my android TV and Linux machine, until glasshouse it was driving me nuts how poorly designed the LG home app was. I just want to click a button and get the input selector!
The LG G5 stock remote doesn't even have a input button... Or a mute button, But it does have, six apps I never want to use, a AI microphone button that isn't useful, an accessibility button (which wouldn't actually be useful if I needed those features, you have to hold it to get a useful menu, which I am sure is easy for people who have trouble with remotes.
I rebound the accessibility button (located top right, where you expect the input button to be) to trigger home assistant to send an IR signal to open the input menu, disabled the random apps (though I did consider assigning those to inputs) and made the ai microphone button a mute button.
Its a bit silky I need a WebKit vuln and a vibe coded homepage to get the TV to the same UX of 10 years ago, but I got there in the end.
All I want is to select my computer or streaming box and turn it off and on :/
I bought a Windows PC to run my TV before Android TV was a thing. It came with a remote, Bluray software, and a TV tuner.
The whole thing just felt half-assed. I'm not going back. MS really missed an opportunity, because if it wasn't for quality issues, it would have been halfway decent.
Prior to that I used a mac mini with a TV tuner. The TV tuner software was horrible; the UI for programming the DVR was like writing SQL queries. I have a degree in computer science so I could understand it, but there was no way I'd try to explain that to someone who wasn't interested in databases.
I’m going to give an earnest answer. first, most people don’t care they’re being spied on, don’t know they’re being spied on, or lack the knowledge to do anything about it or find alternatives. Some people just want to watch TV. Another big reason is that it’s nearly impossible to stream anything higher than 1080p from the major content providers unless you’re using DRM ready systems. The solution to that is torrenting media and running a plex/jellyfin server, which once again most people don’t want to do
None of the streaming services send full data to PC. Netflix, Disney+, etc - you don't get 1080p in some cases, you basically never get 5.1 sound.
I don't think HTPCs support Dolby Vision or HDR10+, especially not on streaming services.
You can run custom launchers on Android boxes and modded YouTube to remove most of the ads. Airplay works to mirror my laptop to my TV.
On Windows, you do get 4K HDR/DV on Netflix and Apple TV. Those services are the exception though.
Because Apple TV is fine, just works, and I’ve been scared by Windows Media Centre. Oh and it never quite works cleanly, whatever the OS / HTPC interface.
It's a scale of convenience/shittyness.
TV manufacturer OS < Apple/Google OS < user OS
Most people don't really care for their TV being a computer display even if you do.
Why do people subject themselves to spreadsheets and productivity following them around an entertainment device?
cost savings and you already have the tv remote that it comes with is the main reason i would like to use it
Because a nuc doesn't pass the wife test. Ask me how I know.
A shield does, at least.
VESA mounted with a generic VESA plate "doubler" solved the aesthetics for me. Out of sight and all. Though I now need to replace its fan with the new one sitting in a drawer.
most of the world has no clue what you are talking about, or they are too old to understand or they don't care. I'm not criticizing you I'm just saying they aren't even aware this is an issue
Because it's another point of failure and another device that uses energy.
Agree … but the part that needs to be remembered
make sure it’s a model where the latest firmware is rootable and never connect it to your WiFi until you have root
Everything you need to do to get root can be done with an Ethernet connected directly to the TV and your laptop. There may be modifications needed to the root toolkits but with good prompting, agentic Llm can figure it out.
If you bought one without root… you may have a chance never connecting it.
If it’s one on your WiFi that doesn’t have a root exploit the only safe thing to do is change your WiFi password.
If you don’t own your TV assume it’s pwnd.
> make sure it’s a model where the latest firmware is rootable and never connect it to your WiFi until you have root
Why does the TV ever needs to be connected to any WiFi? I'd say yank all the modems and antennas off it just to be safe.
What does this get over just leaving the glass itself disconnected from wifi and use an external brain for the tv?
Exactly: If you're super paranoid, the best approach is to pick a quality TV, never hook it up to the internet, and use an external device that you trust.
This worked great for me for years until a dog sitter stayed over and hooked up the TV to the Wi-Fi.
Now the TVs MAC address is banned from the router, so this particular edge case can't happen again.
Make sure your TV and device enable CEC. (Allows your device to turn the TV on and off, select the input, and control the volume.) I know the NVidea Shield can do this, and the Chromecast can do this.
Then hide the remote from your TV and only use the remote from your device.
It's a little slow, but for me, it's nice that I can turn on my Switch from the controller and it turns the TV on; or that I can put a disk in my Bluray player and it turns the TV on.
Out of interest, did anything obviously adverse happen?
LG and Samsung TVs are known to record and transmit audio of everything said in their vicinity as well as scan your network and upload the scans.
Even if I never connected my TV to WiFi , Windows and my iPhone can find it somehow and connect, so there's other protocols that are exposed and probably vulnerable without updates.
If I understand well the rooting process basically asks me to tell a website my ip and exploitable tv version... Is that not basically inviting them to make me part of a botnet?
It ships with the manufacturer botnet.
I mean LG spies on me but I suppose it doesn't use my connection to ddos people, crawl for AI, or infect other devices on my network.
My question is basically how I can have reasonable certainty that the guys running the root site are not going to abuse it. Or is there also a way to do it offline?
Forget the calculus of the rooting site... Just leave it offline IMO... One's spying, sneaking LG TV is a genie in a bottle so long as it's never connected.
This works great if you live alone or otherwise are the only one controlling the device.
This may not work so well if you have other people around that may connect the device to the internet, such as kids or family members during a holiday.
"It will tempt you with visions of built-in Netflix and Google Home–"
"Avert thy gaze - never grant it its freedom!"
They do ddos people and crawl for AI. Look at bright data and other "ethically sourced" residential proxy providers.
It comes with a botnet. You're not going to make it worse.
I'd still recommend not building one in the first place.
If you really have root access, you can check for yourself.
Check what exactly? Run wireshark 24/7 and inspect every network packet for the malicious bits?
Firewall for http traffic while blocking everything else can easily check for weird connections. If you use your TV for browsing, better buy a PC.
"Easily", you would use this word for such activity, really? And what's the criteria for "weirdness"? Are you inspecting payload for every packet of legit apps for weirdness? How do you know they are not exploited? And for how low do you propose doing this "easy check", 24/7 forever? I'm utterly baffled by people suggesting things like that with a straight face.
If you are not sure what to look for, an LLM might help you set everything up including alarms when something atypical happens between the TV and its content sources.
ITT: we learn how firewalls work
Rude. You could try explaining instead
I am unfamiliar with LG TV software but I would imagine that you can reinstall it after rooting and use custom software that you trust.
You’d need proper hardware support and I’m not sure a vanilla Linux kernel can do that, but WebOS has its own Linux kernel and LG MUST publish the source (we all love the GPL, don’t we?)
I didn’t go though every level, but do you mean when it asks for the local LAN IP address?
The route seemed to vary depending on the is version, starting from using the built in browser to a few other options. But basically I worry can I trust the guys more than LG? Like is there a business model behind the service?
Had to come and say thanks! Hadn't heard of Glasshouse, and it's exactly what I wanted. Just installed it on 2 LG TVs on my lunch break and it's perfect.
I was blocking the telemetry in DNS previously, and my TVs were already rooted but weren't doing much with it. Now I've got a nice clean home replacement and all of the telemetry gone.
Does this guide eliminate google play services? If not, then you still don't really control it. For reference, on my Pixel 6 Pro, GrapheneOS gets 2x the advertised battery life until you add Google Play Services back into a sandbox. At that point, it gets advertised battery life.
I assume the TVs Google backdoors are even worse (video scraping, etc, etc) since they are not power constrained.
LG Web OS is not android based, so that should be no concern
Good for them!
If you'd never heard of WebOS (which sounds a bit like "eggs" in spanish), the story of how it was developed by Palm, then killed by HP and re-released as a TV OS after being acquired by LG is fascinating. It could do real multitasking on a tablet in 2010, years before either iPads or Android tablets could.
WebOS and Android are broadly the same thing: custom user-mode applications and layers on top of a Linux kernel.
Gosh I miss my Zire 72.
The battery drain issue looks like more of an issue with suboptimal power management in Graphene OS than Play Services. Or the sandbox interacts with them in a weird way, resulting in some kind of loop or bug that keeps the CPU alive.
Just install microG or Mind the Gapps
I had no idea google play services uses that must power. Another good reason to get rid of it.
With these things I always wonder if there is not a hidden extra layer of root below it.
You joke, but the IoT project I used to work on had a bootloader system that kept 2 firmware versions of our software in memory. If the "main" one entered a restart/crash-loop it would auto-revert to the old firmware.
If you don't flash the bootloader too you don't "own the glass".
Yeah I don't think there's that level of thought and planning and skill going into each of these devices.
I suppose they could be putting some of their pervware within the ARM TrustZone, but that seems excessive.
Something like virtualization? SMM? IPMI? Who knows.
this is so cool ! TYSM. I just did it :)
Thanks for that first link, was finally able to root my B4, took less than 10 minutes.
One would think that TV manufacturers would provide the means the root TVs so consumer would still buy them. Our TV is kept offline and a fanless low power PC facilitates all content. We would have liked to buy a new TV, but being the real owner would be a hard requirement for that. And a new one would just need to be able to do what the PC today already does.
Some TV already fail at just being a larger monitor and I think most products just suck.
They sell the TV hardware at a loss or barely break even. The real profit is selling your usage data.
The people running companies aren't interested in selling things with the intent for you to own them. Not when it is perfectly legal to essentially lease access to the metadata of your usage patterns.
I love this. Do simple procedures like this exist for every smart TV? For every smart device?
And how well does it work in practice? My experience with setting up my own media box suggests that online community solutions, no matter how well integrated, will always still have some rough edges that you don't see in commercial products (subtitle sync in my case).
I do think this kind of thing needs to become more commonplace, but it's clearly still going to be a steep barrier for most people.
https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv
This works on most Android devices. Just ran it on a shitty TCL TV yesterday.
1: turn on debugging 2: run the included prompt in Claude on a laptop on the same network.
It’s fully automated and undoable.
'Simple' is subjective, but it's just like phones in many ways.
Thanks for the concise guide, it was easy and painless. I've been keeping my LG C2 offline the last couple of years, it's time to own it ;)
I was literally about to remove the wifi/bluetooth module today on my C5 48 after reading about that in an HN comment a couple of weeks ago. I'll definitely be looking at this before I do that.
(It has never connected to wifi nor done any firmware updates, just my AppleTV and MacBook via HDMI. So I don't actually need to root it but I like the idea anyway.)
FYI, OP is wrong about "pulling the wireless module and voiding your warranty."
In the U.S., merely doing something like that will not void your warranty due to the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Companies will lie and claim that, but in my experience, they immediately backpedal when you ask for that in writing (or if it was already in writing, thanking them for admitting to breaking the law).
buying expensive equipment to deliberately take advantage of a now-exploit is such a bad idea, and it's bit me more than once in the past few decades.
and ethically, what's the point in giving hostile corporate groups any money ? I get that you're breaking out of their mega subsidized and profit-locked walled garden, but 'sold units' is still a metric they'll use to positively enforce their strategies going forward, and as with all goods the vulnerabilities will get more and more exotic until totally pushed out of public availability much like the newest console gens.
The manufacturer will price in the value of ads and the such. So if you never connect it to WiFi, you get a good deal on the hardware. The same is true if you buy a tv and connect it to a traditional antenna (all tv’s in America are required by law to support this). You can always take it back if the firmware is not the right version to root.
> So if you never connect it to WiFi, you get a good deal on the hardware.
Until it becomes harder, or even impossible, to root the hardware, as even the guide states:
> DO NOT UPDATE TO WebOS 26 firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84 (see the firmware list). Public root method got patched and this firmware currently cannot be rooted. If you will connect your TV to the internet to root it, first turn off autoupdate.
* https://tv.slada.sk/guides/rooting-guide
So if people continue to buy 'subsidized' TVs, companies will continue to produce them.
There needs to be an unsubsidized-by-ads option and people need to purchase it to show The Market™ that there exists demand for such a product. But the problem seems to be that all the current offerings are ads-based.
Vote with your wallet though. If the price is not an issue (like the OP seems to be saying "I don’t mind paying a premium"), then there's no point in encouraging these kind of practices, even if they're pretty common for these kind of device.
Unfortunately though I think you are right and the best thing to do is just get one that has the specs you want never connect it to the internet and just get a companion device for the connected stuff like a Shield Pro (aging device but I did not catch up to what was the cool new things for those)
> Vote with your wallet
The favoured platitude of people with giant wallets.
Oh I absolutely don't have that kind of money, that's why I had no choice but to buy a crappy JVC TV that's definetly a spying tool rather than an actual device. But as I said, it does not seem to be the case for the person asking it in the first place as they are OK to pay extra for this...
This is kind of an annoying platitude until you provide some vote that's worth casting. Who do you think we can buy from for a high quality, modern, privacy-oriented TV if you're so confident that it's just a matter of voting with your wallet rather than buying the device that lets you do what you want to with a bit of finagling?
The manufacturer will look at sales metrics and say "this is what consumers want more of".
> sold units' is still a metric they'll use to positively enforce their strategies
Exactly, if we want change the sales numbers have to go down. That means don't by LG, Samsung and who have you, it also means telling friends and family to go buy something else... but what?
voting with your wallet isn't going to change the world unless you're a billionaire looking to open up thousands of tv lounges.
Can't we make a very similar point about voting at the ballot box?
If you organize a national boycott with participation levels similar to elections then maybe this is a reasonable comparison
Organizing a national boycott would be a reasonable comparison to running for office.
In a capitalist system, most people primarily influence the expenditure of their dollars. In a democratic system, most people have their vote. In general the average person exerts an average-person-sized influence over the world.
Participating in a national boycott is similar to voting in an election, but someone has to set it up in the first place.
Individual boycotts are like writing in a candidate for president
no, because that's free. Anyone can show up. In America, one party specifically works to prevent people from voting.
A lot of people didn't know and already own this stuff. We can always buy second hand.
It could be a loss leader where they make all their money with ads and spyware. I don't know if that's the case, but if it is, they'd lose money from the purchase and never make it back.
The one unit you buy is an insignificant drop in the bucket for them, and getting their actually good underlying hardware and display firmware is much more valuable for you in comparison.
Yeah, step 1, buy a TV with this firmware version... As if they told you in the store before you purchase it.
Mostly had success by buying it second hand and checking the firmware version
If you're worried about giving money to these corporations, why don't you buy second-hand? It's not like a 9 month old TV model suddenly is obsolete. An excellent TV from 3 or 4 or 5 years ago is still excellent today. Resist turbo-consumerism and just buy second-hand!
Is it permanently rooted? Or does it revert you if the TV decides to upgrade itself? Intentionally never upgraded my firmware, but it did it automatically once despite me not approving it.
Updates will revert it from my understanding. The homebrew app has a setting to block updates, but according to the rooting guide linked above apparently it's not reliable and it's recommended to block it with your router to be sure. https://tv.slada.sk/guides/blocking-updates
I've worked out the router blocking already. It also blocks app updates and downloads, which is a pain.
Comments like this are why I still come to HN :) thx op
Maybe not buy the effectively most notoriously brand and push their sales
I wonder if it’s possible to hack my LG remote to use local voice models like Parakeet hosted within the LAN…? To trigger home assistant light settings, adjust blinds, switch on and off AV devices etc
Is it possible to root a Samsung?
Yes, but the ecosystem is far less mature. I managed to dump the contents of my S90F using this repository: https://github.com/chris-ritsen/samsung-tv-root/releases
The root is transient, and Samsung TVs also have Knox security which I presume you really don’t want to trip. Some parts of the file system are protected by SMACK which even root can’t access.
I’m working on reverse engineering the applications that run in that SMACK context to see if there’s any way to gain access.
Doesn’t rooting it void the warranty anyway though!?
Not automatically, at least in the US.
The Magnusson Moss Warranty Act protects against that kind of thing.
If you modify function A, and then make a claim for warranty service for a defect in unrelated function C and they don't want to cover that because of the modification, then: The onus is on the warranty provider to prove that your modification of A caused the defect in C before denying the claim.
And they know this. The first layer grunt on the phone or in the chat box may think it is some other way but the larger organization definitely knows what their responsibilities are.
Why would it?
To the best of my knowledge, changing software does not cause damage to the TV that could result in warranty being voided.
If the new software burned pixels or did something like that, which I am unsure is even possible from software, then I believe that would cause the warranty to be voided as a result.
But the reason would be pixels being burnt by using the hardware wrongly (i.e. through a bad software). Not merely by installing the software.
Of course this is a thing. My LG CX is way out of warranty and on older FW. Will give this a go later! Thank you.
thank you! i can't upvote you enough
How does the "chromecast" work as you described? Is it just DLNA/DIAL?
This is so cool! My next TV is definitely going to be a rootable one.
This is the way.
Thanks for this rooting guide
Buy any tv with CEC support (almost all of them) and never connect it to the internet. Never. Never start any app on the tv. Hook a Kodi box to the hdmi port and use that, and only that.
For the Kodi box get series-7 Intel NUC with Kabylake-era processors, gen 7. They don't run Windows 11, so come very cheap second hand, but decode h264 and hevc in hardware and drive a 4K screen like charm. You can install a modern Wifi card in the NUC and a PCIe SSD.
Then buy one of these: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/154/intel-nuc-hdmi-cec-adapter and put it in your NUC, so you can use the TV remote to control Kodi.
That's it.
Bonus, you can take your TV with you when travelling.
This is what I do already but aside from the "neighbors open wifi" problem I'm more concerned about:
-In-laws or other visitors "finishing setup" to use their netflix while I'm at work or something.
-Future TVs including 5G modems.
-TVs demanding internet access to work at all or worse working but with a hidden time out that waits until after the return period to activate and disable the TV until I give in and let it on the internet.
Most TVs seem to have removable wifi modules, or at least they did. But throwing away the warranty removing it on day one doesn't sit great with me. And that doesn't protect me from point 3b.
Those hypotheticals sure would suck, if they ever happen. Until then you can easily avoid worrying about 2 and 3, and for 1, simply leave the PC's remote out, and put the TV's remote somewhere inaccessible.
Also for extra confidence on 1, you can often disable the TV's wireless/bluetooth scanning (so other devices can't access it), at the "cost" of the TV's own remote no longer working. At least my Samsung (QN90B) offers that.
I find the most important point just to be "and never connect it to the internet".
No matter which smart-tv you use, this is the one and only thing you have to do - just don't give it any way to exfiltrate any data. Use as suggested HDMI and your good to go. Extremely simple and safe. Can it still sniff and log data locally? Sure - but it will never leave your home.
Are there zero unlocked wifi networks in your area?
I don't know if they're communicating over a cellular modem but if I was them and could get a low-priced deal I would.
Keep in mind some smart TVs will attempt to connect to open networks automatically so if your neighbor’s WiFi is open, you might end up connected anyway. I had a Vizio TV that connected to my neighbor’s fridge open WiFi (but not connected to the internet) and my TV operations became very laggy. I would buy a TV without smart features and without Wireless connectivity from a reputable brand (more a digital display than a TV) if privacy is your concern…
I wonder how likely it is though? The consumer access points don't come without passwords by default. Where I am, having an open access point without identifying the users is illegal, so it's unlikely a regular person would do that, and if some cafe does - it'd just have a captive portal asking for a phone number. And even if the business owner doesn't want to bother with that identification - there would 100% be a password on such a hotspot.
Fully anonymous open WiFi remains legal and common in many countries, including the US.
Even many guest or public WiFi captive portals in the US only seek to enforce agreement to a terms of service and/or privacy policy, not necessarily gathering identifying info and not locking behind a password. (Yes, there are also those which do require a password or identifying info, but that’s not due to a legal requirement.)
It’s relatively rare nowadays that I see a guest or public WiFi network with neither a captive portal nor a password, but again, those do still sometimes occur and are fully legal in the US. Organizations (and their insurers) do tend to like the protections of legalese and/or identifying users, but US law doesn’t generally force them into it in this context.
Did your TV connect to the fridge, or did your neighbor connect their fridge to your TV? Without some evidence I would be far more inclined to believe that a neighbor did something dumb (I've seen multiple of my neighbors try to connect to my offline TV via bluetooth) than that TVs connecting to fridges are slipping under the radar of tech journalists in the era when scrutiny has led to negative press for LG. Either way it's dumb that that network connection is possible, and concerning it could be possible without your consent, but it's also not nearly as bad.
They don't "connect" per se, they scan, report, and sell the data as they map your home.
But before they can report that data, they need to be connected to the internet.
Which will happen at the first opportunity.
But did it happen specifically in the situation described in the comment I initially replied to?
LG wants my data. Well Craftsman wants my data too. Current evidence suggests that the TV without network access is going to have as much luck reporting my data to corporate headquarters as the tools I used to mount it on the wall.
Faith in opsec against a determined and capitalized adversary—zero. One slip up and you're done. You will slip up eventually (they help with the banana peels) and probably already have.
Can you cite even one reliable source for your claim?
Yes, this is technically possible but to claim that there are TVs that actually do this is something else.
We know cable providers sell access to networks through their customers. Wireless companies do directly as well.
If it is technically possible, encouraged, and worth money, you can bet someone is doing it in the 2020s. No need to wait for journalistic confirmation, a dying industry. Internet surveillance capitalism is quite mature these days.
At best we can say no one has gotten around to it, but that is just one update away from being false.
What a future. Now not only any fridge has wifi, no, my chinese tv will run an local agent swarm that will try to break into any wifi available to download ads. Maybe it's better if we hand sama all our DRAM and accept our fate.
At this point we need faraday cages. Shit.
Indeed, and just use Apple TV or so. Or Chromecast. Or whatever you do trust. I have never plugged in my TV network connection.
These would be my preference unless I setup the Kodi box myself. Theres repeated, almost monthly, uncovering of supply chain compromise of cheap Kodi/android TV boxes.
This is what I'm doing, but we also have to admit that kodi kinda sucks.
It's really unstable, I can't find a browser, can be janky, unstable and don't forget unstable.
I can't even identify if it is some plugin that is causing the instability or not. Which should not be an excuse, because poor architecture is still the project's problem.
Is anyone working on alternatives? I would accept vibecoded stuff at this point.
> I would accept vibecoded stuff at this point.
You might as well start you own project. Buy a $200 subscription from one of the major AI providers. And guide it towards your goal.
It is likely that within a week you will have something that suits your needs, is fast and reliable.
An example of a prompt that you might use to start:
> Please build a home TV frontend similar to Kodi or Apple TV. But nicer, faster, more modern and with cooler features. Use modern software engineering practices. Keep the code well-organized, performant and readable.
If you have a spare android phone, you can buy a usb-c hub and plug the phone into hdmi.
Vibecoding android apps is easy. The Android SDK has built in components for web views and media players, so you can get it set it up with netflix, disney, whatever.
I've got mine set up with that, a weather display widget, and some vibecoded edutainment games for my kids.
The only tricky bit is keeping the android ui off the tv, so tell the AI to use Android's "Presentation API".
I'm not sure if it fits your usecase but I'm using Jellyfin and it works really well.
I have mine connected to wifi, isolated network, no cross client communication, and no internet access. That way I can still control it from Home Assistant, and the TV doesn't need any connectivity as all streaming happens from an AppleTV.
Depending on your usage that may not be an option, as appliances eg a gaming console (xbox/PlayStation) can require you to update their firmware through their DRM. So unless you keep updating the TV it only shows a black screen
I could have sworn NUCs come with CEC built in?
I'm sure I've seen it in the BIOS menus of either my 8th gen or 12th gen.
Raspberry Pi definitely comes with it, and a Pi 4 does 1080p x264 and x265.
Vero V is IMO the best Kodi box you can get.
This is the way.
Treat the thing as a giant peripheral. Dumb monitor.
NEC is great but their affordable panels are largely only seen on facebook marketplace. Great construction, panel quality and I/O, just a little bit heavy
Recently I've had to deal with this same problem - get a new TV for living room. Personally, I do not watch TV at all, but kids want to see cartoons when having their breakfast. I spent a week reading forums and came to conclusion that best solution would be to buy a "dumb TV" and connect it to a PC I trust, but it appears there are no dump TVs in my rage of 55" and larger. So, I bought "Google TV" based TCL.
When I brought it home, I never connected it to Ethernet or WiFi. Instead, I connected it to my laptop over USB, then using adb I uninstalled almost every application from it. It took me quite some time to figure out what app is possible to remove and what should be kept to let TV functionality to work. I even had to factory-default it a couple of times because some random apps I removed were crucial for Android to work. :) I think it took me 5-6 hours to clean it. Now it has only basic TV functionality like any dump TV does, I can watch air and cable TV channels, watch movies and play music from USB storage. If there's a need to watch something online, I connect it over HDMI to my small mini-PC that runs FreeBSD. I think I'm satisfied with the result. :-)
PS: Yesterday I opened the case and disconnected WiFi antenna. Just in case.
> PS: Yesterday I opened the case and disconnected WiFi antenna. Just in case.
While this couldn't hurt, it also won't stop the TV from being able to connect to wifi. I ran my desktop without an antenna attached for months. The speed noticeably improved when I attached an antenna but it was fine for browsing the web and downloading software updates without one.
Better to replace the wifi antenna with a dummy load.
OP means that some WiFi antennae are soldered to the motherboard and cannot be easily removed.
When building my PC, I got a PCI WiFi card but it turns out there was also a direct WiFi network interface built into the motherboard somehow
They would be traces with pretty obvious patterns and easy to cut.
But I don't the GP comment was talking about that; I have also used WiFi without an antenna (PCB or otherwise), and it was also slow for me.
A dummy load is probably the best idea: an impedance mismatch would obliterate any chance of anything working (including Bluetooth fwiw).
The point of a dummy load is to match the impedance so that all the radiative energy gets turned into heat and the transmitter is none the wiser.
Also so that any electronics don't get fried. Wi-fi board borking itself would be good, but I'd be worried about it affecting something else down the line.
Exactly. That's part of what I meant by "none the wiser." The other being that the xmitter could in theory detect a missing antenna from the impedance mismatch and try to increase its power (assuming it knows how to do so without frying itself).
"(assuming it knows how to do so without frying itself)."
Unlikely, as Wi-Fi is flea power (not high enough to do damage). Moreover, Wi-Fi chips have an inbuilt power limit so as to comply with spectrum management regulations.
Anyway, why wouldn't you want to fry the Wi-Fi chip if possible, that'd solve everything? If I had that problem I'd simply stuff the chip or short out its RF output (bridge solder across its antenna pins).
There are multiple ways of fucking the chip, likely the easiest is shorting B+ to the high side of its antenna pins (that'll likely do the trick). Another method is to hold the tip of a hot soldiering iron on the center of the chip until it fails.
Of course, you shouldn't do this unless you know what you are doing. The Wi-Fi chip may also control Bluetooth so if you still want that risky comms pathway then consult the chip's datasheet first.
> why wouldn't you want to fry the Wi-Fi chip if possible
The TV might throw an conniption over loss of this critical functionality.
Wouldn't reflections be worse (genuinely asking)?
No. Reflections happen with unmatched impedance.
RF wireless always needs an antenna somewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333679
If you know what you are doing and have explicitly disconnected/cut all antennas including entire MIMO arrays (many people miss one or more antennas) in the motherboard then the only remaining explanation is "accidental antennas".
This is only possible if the WiFi-chip has dangling metal pins/traces/joints whose length is comparable to that of its wavelength, in which case these will act as makeshift antennas. These will pickup ambient WiFi RF, but for this to work at all you need lots of RF power i.e. a very strong signal strength which means you have to be very close to the WiFi router.
The whole thing works because of Physics and not Engineering (the "accidental" part) and hence very iffy (may not work at all) and should not be relied upon.
Just wrap it in tinfoil like the cool kids
You didn’t explain your point. How does a tv connect to WiFi without a WiFI antena
You don't need an antenna. You can think of an antenna as simply being a signal booster.
That being said, without an antenna it is highly improbable that it could still find an open WiFi AP to connect to (especially if you don't have one in your house).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333679
I would imagine the antenna just strengthens the incoming signal. You could still get reception/communication if the gateway/router/modem was near enough and not a lot of electrical shit attached (I would imagine that would generate more noise that could interfere)?
As an example - if you have a motherboard on your computer that supports wifi and comes with a port/plug for an antenna, you could remove that antenna and still receive a signal (IDK about sending) but it would suffer more signal loss due to the lack of antenna.
All that is just a guess of course. People more knowledgeable than me could explain/clarify.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333679
Valid question.
I am not the person you asked the question of, but here is the answer;
Smart TVs have a built-in "WiFi-Chip" on the motherboard and its antenna hidden in the TV frame itself, exactly like the antennas in a Smartphone. The different radios on a Smart TV viz. OTA, WiFi, Bluetooth, Satellite, Zigbee etc. all operate at different frequency ranges and hence need their own antennas. Many of these antennas are either a) etched on the motherboard b) hidden within the plastic back frame or c) directly taped to it.
Axiom of RF Wireless - There can be no transmission/reception without an antenna either external or internal.
PS: Since RF Wireless is everywhere today and most people do not have much of an idea of this technology, i very highly recommend the book The Essential Guide to RF and Wireless by Carl Weisman for study. Expressly written for a non-technical audience, it explains everything simply and beautifully. It really gave me the invaluable overview and the grounding i needed to understand this important science/technology.
>How does a tv connect to WiFi without a WiFI antena
Exactly the same way their PC did; re-read what they said.
This is not even a viable option these days: secondary processors, the potential for a backchannel to some installed app on a device in the home (this has not made headlines, but it’s possible), tying an account to the device proactively.. The TV industry really ran to collect “their” data
Don't give them ideas
To put a finer point on it: these are ideas they had long ago and already ran with…
Though he didn't connect any network.
There is a rumor that some connect to any open wifi, although I'm unsure how true that actually ist.
Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275350
Some IoT providers' h/w products use globally viable sim cards that can connect to supporting networks. It doesn't have to be "open wifi" since a lot of IoT is for movable objects that are shipped around.
And I think there’s Ethernet over HDMI to consider too.
That was never implemented in any devices and is now a vestigal limb of the HDMI spec.
Ah, the obligatory “but ETH over HDMI!” It doesn’t need to be “considered” because it doesn’t exist outside a spec.
And it’s clearly less convenient for exfiltration vs most other options. Even closed implementation of HDMI eth to a soundbar of the same brand: then where to
Yes, that’s my second argument: even if it were implemented, you think Apple’s going to let just any ol’ POS IoT junk use an Apple TV’s connection? “Pass through using my IP address doing $DEITY-knows-what? Sure, random device, have at it!”
> I even had to factory-default it a couple of times because some random apps I removed were crucial for Android to work. :)
I had this same experience with my Samsung tablet - but for a TV that isn't connected to the internet, I couldn't really be bothered to adb uninstall apps - it's not like they're going to be doing anything anyway.
I think you can look for a "digital signage display" or "large format display"
The last TV I bought was a Kogan, and at first power up, or after a factory reset, it let you select where you wanted it to be a dumb screen with inputs only, or run the Google TV OS.
Did the TCL not have this option?
This'll be something only relevant to Australians, but it's amusing to see you reply to Ruslan to tell him about your Kogan!
> Kogan TVs are produced by Kogan.com, an Australian company founded by Ruslan Kogan in 2006.
That's not me for sure. :) But what I'm sure about it that their TVs are made either by Haier or TCL.
Hah! The odds of that feel extraordinarily small. This Australian is amused, at least.
This is somewhat an option. I have this TV too and when you set it up, you can choose to have it be a dumb tv, and even avoid Google TV if you want. In the US.
Mine did not have that option. There was some "demo" mode though, but it was useless.
Our TCL has this option, but there are multiple buttons on the remote that open youtube or ask zuck to club baby seal to death or whatever, and if you press those (i.e., sit on the remote), it goes into a labyrinth of google bullshit that complains about how you are missing important notifications and need to debug your wifi.
F--- Google, but at least the kids know those menus are bullshit, and do not have the wifi password at any rate.
Also, we're probably already to the point where I could just put it on a firewalled network, and have a [chinese open weight] LLM pop the factory android, get root, and reprogram the remote buttons to no-ops.
Or, I could open the remote up, physically cut out the spam buttons, then 3d print an alternative top-half of the shell without holes for them.
So many options, so much enshitification.
Can disable those annoying buttons (or even make them do something useful for you) with Button Mapper.
IIRC if I do this on my Bravia I also lose the image enhancements.
You mean you turn off slopping up your image? The kind of person who wants a dumb TV probably wants any "enhancements" off too.
At least on our TCL (which has an array of thousands of back lights) some of the unhance options actually need to be turned on.
We bought it because it has crazy high brightness (it is in a bright room with direct sunlight hitting the panel while we are watching it), and while it can beat back the sun, it cannot do so by just turning all the zones on 100% because it would melt or something.
So, if all the image slopping were turned off, the contrast ratio would drop 100x, and the TV wouldn't really be fit for purpose.
(For when the sun is not actively trying to kill the panel, I have a de-slop shortcut setup. That also has the backlight enhance stuff turned on -- as low as possible -- to get true black on the LCD. It works OK. OLED is not quite there yet for this corner case.)
This kind of trade-off is often a dark pattern used when forced to offer a feature by regulators or by competitors offering it. The evil trick is complying with the regs or being able to advertise the feature but making it so unattractive users won't activate it, enabling the manufacturer to still earn that sweet $35-$60 / yr from advertising, app install payments, rev share and selling your viewing data.
> the image enhancements.
Having spent a couple decades working in and around digital video production tooling and engineering, as well as being a filmmaker and home theater enthusiast, it's worth mentioning that today almost all television image enhancement features are net negative, even if they make the image subjectively 'pop' or motion appear smoother on typical scenes, they'll introduce artifacts or trade-offs in other kinds of scenes.
In my experience doing a lot of testing over the years with objective signal analysis tools at work as well as subjectively across 7 generations of upgrades in my own home theater, the trade-offs aren't worth it. There are a few context and content specific exceptions but they're quite rare and usually involve slightly improving significantly degraded signals which no longer exist in most home theaters (eg noise reduction in analog sources like laserdisc, DCT macro-block smoothing in highly compressed old MPEG 1/2 sources or dynamic range expansion on legacy SD sources).
With today's 4K and HD digital sources encoded at high bit rates in modern codecs, the director, colorist and mastering engineer can finally deliver their precise intent all the way to your eyeballs. The ~$20 chip calculating synthetic frames and pixels in your TV introduces surface curb appeal at the cost of artifacts and a poorly integrated image. If it actually made the image look better, the director and colorist have more and better tools than that $20 chip that they're already applying to the source. You're just turning a $20 chip loose on 'full auto' to guess at (and often undo or muddy) intentional enhancements manually applied frame by frame over days by experts.
Do whatever you like but I encourage you to critically audition each of those enhancements across a range of source types (4K, HD, HDR, HDR10, SDR, 24, 30, and 60 frame) and diverse scenes (low-light, quick panning, smooth dollies, and synthetic test signals, etc). Once you compare the before/after across that breadth back-to-back you'll see what I mean. I run my calibrated, high-end 3-laser projector (150" screen) as close to neutral, native settings as I can get and it looks sensational. And to be clear I'm not being a purist, if 'enhancements' really improved some scenes meaningfully without degrading other scenes, I'd be "Fuck the director's intent, it's just better." But for every scene an enhancement improves, I can queue up a scene from another film it makes noticeably worse. Fortunately, on most high-end Sony TVs you can get an un-hyped, accurate image in the standard UX without going to the calibrator or factory menus.
> Having spent a couple decades working in and around digital video production tooling and engineering, as well as being a filmmaker and home theater enthusiast, it's worth mentioning that today almost all television image enhancement features are net negative
Yep, generally you don't want anything the TV manufacturer markets as "enhancements." They basically all add things to the signal that were not part of the director's or video editor's vision. Any cinephile will remind you that there is one correct setting for "brightness," "contrast," "color," and "tint". "Sharpness" should almost always be zero, and any other setting that claims to "enhance" the picture should be turned off for correct output.
The worst ones now are the "motion smoothing" modes that take your normal FPS movie and try to interpolate them up to 60FPS, 120FPS or even 240FPS, giving them that cheap, crappy "soap opera" effect. Turn it off as soon as you turn on your TV for the first time.
While this is generally true, there are some notorious cases where the director's intent was terrible, and the image definitely needs more contrast and brightness to see what's going on.
Mostly agreed. However, I find the motion smoothing works nice on my 30fps video games.
>motion smoothing works nice on my 30fps video games.
Of course a modern console only managing 30fps is the actual 'bug' :-). But I agree that's one of the narrow exception cases where an 'enhancement' might be a net benefit. Although if you're going to use synthetic frames, doing it in the console can be better because intra-frame motion hinting might be available and, even if it's not, the console's frame gen is trained on game content where a TV's chip is cross-function and far less capable (both in look-ahead and motion vector count). But I know some consoles don't have frame gen, so in that case it's a win.
You will get much more input lag doing this which really hurts the game playing experience.
1) Would you consider publishing which apps you removed? (A wiki on making smart devices dumb - cars, TVs, refrigerators, tractors ... - would be useful, though I'm not suggesting you make and manage it yourself.)
2) Why bother removing the apps if it has no network connection? Defense in depth is sensible to me, but maybe there's something else I'm missing ...
3) Why not buy a large desktop computer monitor, or are those no longer 'dumb' either?
3) Two features of a TV vs monitor:
- built-in audio output - remote control (signals are transmitted on HDMI link, so a PC can listen to them)
Not the person you are responding to but:
1) All the google data gathering crap, and all the "give permission to garbage preload to turn on the microphone" bullshit (and look for a physical mic switch; ours has that. Also, turn off notifications, because, do you want notifications telling you the wifi does not work? If you have an android phone, do this on your phone first.
2) Less crap = less backlog of surveillance data if you ever accidentally need to put it online. Also, see (1).
3) You can't get a nice 55"-100" desktop monitor for < $2K.
> Yesterday I opened the case and disconnected WiFi antenna. Just in case.
I'm sure it won't be long before these bastards embed a cell phone modem deeply into the device :(
Yeah, at this point we need probably open hardware TVs or privacy laws with company breaking fines. Ideally both.
Who's gonna fine a manufacturer for a modem when governments mandate they are fitted to cars? And now mandate driver facing cameras? They want to know what you're watching.
Stop with this "they". I'm sure most people on HN live in democracies. We are at fault for not raising our voices. We've become lazy participants in the democratic process. Blaming "the government" is only gonna cause disillusionment and further the causes of evil.
What a crazy world we live in.
Ppl worry so much about privacy, but are fine having kids watch TV when they eat breakfast.
What do you mean? Obviously consuming too much media, or consuming anything too much of it is not good, but how does that negate concerns about inadvertently inviting for-profit corporations to your breakfast and every intimate conversation at home?
Those are completely unrelated concerns.
I fully share your sentiment, someone buying a tv specifically so the kids don't let their brains rest during a 15 min breakfast seems insane to me. That said I guess better they watch without spyware than with..
Yeah, most people own a TV but would be better off without it.
First of all, open the TV and disconnect the wireless radio from the main board, on mine (Samsung) it was just unplugging one cable (AI or Google it). I dislike doing stuff like that, but it was easy in my case, maybe you'll be lucky, too.
Second, never use the "apps" built into the TV.
Next, don't plug Ethernet into the TV. Plug HDMI cables into the TV.
Use a box of your choice on the other end of the HDMI cables. This is now the box that you trust. (Roku? Shield? Blu-ray? MacBook? PC? Linux? Playstation? XBox? Whatever you want.)
The Smart TV itself is now fine. Choose the devices you plug into it to play content. The TV just shows it.
The thing I'd be worried about when doing this is spending $1000+ on a TV, then realizing it has some sort of pre-downloaded ads that it shows on the main screen ("sign up for your free six months of HBO Max!") or otherwise has a nag prompt that appears to tell you to connect to WiFi. I think that would be basically intolerable.
Been a few years since I had to get a new one, but I booted mine up, switched to the HDMI input for my AppleTV, and never looked back. Just boots straight into the AppleTV input when you use the AppleTV remote to wake it up.
We have to use the actual TV remote to debug some audio issues or disable the motion blur stuff again every once in awhile, but otherwise it might as well just be a display for the AppleTV. I’ve only seen the actual home screen of the TV a handful of times.
I guess it’s probably still spying on us somehow, and it seems like different models make using the AppleTV remote and booting right into the AppleTV harder than others, so your mileage may vary.
You have to be careful with this path. Some manufacturers embed LED's into the bezel and blink them at you (part of the IR sensor for the remote, to prevent you from taping over with electrical tape) if they do not have network.
Others just overlay banners on top of the video.
Caveat emptor.
If its an Android TV, you can use an alternate launcher to avoid home screen ads.
That hasn't been my experience so far.
Oh the horror!
> First of all, open the TV and disconnect the wireless radio from the main board
This. Never trust software switches. See my other reply for what I suggest instead of "streaming boxes" that aren't any better than the TV firmware.
Yeah and if it was using LoRa or something similar, ot could reach hundreds of meters through buildings or many kilometers in open space, with a very small antenna. If they built in a big antenna into the TV chassis itself, it cpuld get quite and insane reach but it would be more expensive.
What it would connect to ? To other TVs (comfortably connected to mains power) forming a mesh network. A bunch of Internet connected gateways planted by the manufacturers would capture the data from the network.
MeshCore and MeshTastic have demonstrated community networks like this, so I would not put it past TV manufacturers to try missuse the same idea.
So you think that if the TV doesn't have your Wi-Fi password, it surreptititously turns on Wi-Fi and runs cracking software to obtain it anyway?
My xfinity modem helpfully defaults to providing an open network that others can connect to. If I didn't know to disable this, it would be the first network it could find.
I think the more logical concern would be that it would wait until it could find any potential unsecured wifi to use. I live in an apartment building and there a few wifi access points that I can reach from my apartment with no security. Though one of them appears to be an air conditioner??
Say the TV finds such an access point and uses it. It phones home and so now the manufacturer now knows that such and such serial # TV is located in that neighborhood.
They still need to tie it to you. If you've not given it a shred of personal information, it has to be fingerprinting via surreptitious audio/video recording, or else by obtaining the purchase info from the retailer (like the name and billing address from your credit card) and matching that by serial number (which would have to be recorded during purchase).
I wouldn't be surprised if they did audio fingerprinting. But even if they don't, the third parties who are buying the data can easily re-identify the users by doing data fusion with other sources (smartphone location data from other vendors)
Not that I have any evidence it's happening, but it'd be more likely for TV manufacturers to partner with ISPs that offer public WiFi using the access points they rent to their customers.
No but things like Amazon sidewalk exist
The low bandwidth always on kindle modems could also be feasibly built into TVs for telemetry, and may be cheaper than the money they could get from selling the data.
Thank you. This is exactly what I was thinking reading people who think you need to do more than simply never connect it to your wifi.
it's not just your wifi you have to worry about. neighbour can have insecure wifi. or deliberately open ones like coffee shops, free municipal hotspots, etc.
This is trivial to test yet not a single person claiming TVs will connect to open networks all on their own has ever provided a shred of evidence of it actually happening.
That sounds like a TV manufacturer is going to be having one hell of a lawsuit if they're breaking into other peoples wifi networks.
Wasn't this exactly what happened in the LG exposé that just came out? It connects to any WiFi network it can, your will be damned.
No, no it wasn't.
There are available IoT networks it could use, though I don't think all of them run over Wifi.
Honest question. Do projectors also suffer?
The one we have is even worse. It won't really work well outside of things like airplay or chromecast, and those require wifi. It was extremely cheap though.
(It has an HDMI port, but it's clearly a second class citizen in the menus, etc. Default to HDMI on power up is intentionally broken. It's also intentionally designed to turn into a brick if we ever lose the remote. At boot, it puts a screen up saying to press a button on the remote if you want it to display anything else, and that screen never times out. If you plug in an HDMI input, it says "HDMI input detected; press OK.". There's no "OK" button on the projector itself. You have to press the OK button on the remote.)
Not from privacy issues, but all the typical ones from projectors never went anywhere: low brightness, high heat, low maximum operating lifetime, fan noise, and hard to set up (impossible in some places).
I don't think this apply to most UST projector nowadays. I mean, operating lifetime is probably still an issue, fan noise while higher than a TV (which doesn't have it) is not an issue anymore, heat.. well, come close to my (old, ok) OLED LG TV and you can still warm your hands (although not like the previous plasma one I had, that's true). For the setup I don't know exactly but there are online shops that gives you the 1st setup for free (at the cost of doing the unboxing for you). Also probably nowadays with an LLM almost anybody that care enough to research and buy a projector can do it, I guess.
Yes, I want to buy a projector this Black Friday (Hisense PX3-Pro).
Faar less. A larger fraction of projectors remain dumb HDMI to light converters. Tis been my own plan if i settle on wanting a tv.
If it has any kind of in-built smart TV style OS - then yes.
HDMI has an Ethernet channel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HEC
Any chance the TV can phone home via that? One would have to make sure the HDMI cable physically doesn't have the Ethernet pairs, or set the trusted box to filter the traffic.
The HDMI standard defines an Ethernet channel as an optional feature. Approximately zero consumer products have ever implemented it. There's no need to worry about an unsuspecting consumer having supporting devices at both ends of the cable.
And the channel they allocated for it was reallocated with different encoding for eARC.
I don’t know of any consumer laptops or tv boxes like shield/Apple TV that implement that so that. It’s basically a non-issue unless it’s implemented on the HDMI devices.
If you use something you can control, like a Linux box, this isn't an issue. Even if the device did get added, and then udev or network manager auto configured, a firewall script should protect you.
> disconnect the wireless radio from the main board
Can you explain why you can't just not give the TV your Wi-Fi password?
Or are we worried about the case when the TV did have Wi-Fi (due to it being mandatory for some initial setup, say), but we don't trust that "Forget Network" and "Wi-Fi off" are actually honored?
Suppose the device surreptitiously reconnects to Wi-Fi in spite of being told to forget it. You may be able to block it in your router and failing that, change the access point password.
No?
People believing even without proof that TVs connect to open WiFi. This would be trivial to prove if true, yet there is no evidence. In addition, it doesn’t make any sense for any of them to bother. 99% of consumers willingly connect their TV to WiFi because they want to use it with the built-in streaming apps. It wouldn’t make any sense for them to waste time capturing the 1% of users most likely to be evade them anyway just to cause a PR and/or legal fiasco.
Xfinity runs an open WiFi for its customers. If you instead their gateway and don’t change anything (which is 99% of users) any Xfinity customer can get online. Several of my neighbors have them, and you can’t walk around in my commercial district without seeing the “Xfinity WiFi” SSID. It would be smart for TV mfrs to do a deal with Xfinity and their equivalents world wide in order to sell viewer data to advertisers and receive “fresh” ads, even if the TVs are excluded from the residential network.
This is actually so very doable in US, cutting deal with those like XFinity.
But if the TV manufacturer is smart in their spying game, they could also be probing for any public SSIDs to connect to when no local internet access is setup.
Why make it so complicated? Just include an IoT cell modem with an esim.
If the collected data are worth it, sure. But the BOM of these things is stripped down as low as they can get it. A buck would be a big deal.
They don't have to cut direct with the operator. They can go up a little higher in the chain to a global "wifi offload" operator like Wefi.
https://www.wefi.com/wifi-offload
Then they can just get Passpoint access through a shitton of various endpoints.
So your TV just connects to random wifi networks? That sounds a bit insane.
That example isn't a random wifi network, it's the Xfinity network.
But also, you think tv manufacturers are sane? They have proven that they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, in my opinion.
It doesn't sound insane, actually. Keeping in mind, Windows XP did exactly that for a while until everyone realized, "hey, that's a security issue". I would swear MacOS too, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
>It would be smart for TV mfrs to do a deal with Xfinity and their equivalents world wide in order to sell viewer data to advertisers and receive “fresh” ads, even if the TVs are excluded from the residential network.
Doesn't exactly sound like a thing to be that concerned about if you never plug in your TV. If you buy a TV right now and never plug it in, how would it know about any future deal with Xfinity to connect to its open networks? And if it had a feature to connect to random open Wi-Fi networks right now, that wouldn't be hard to prove. My LG has never shown up in my Wi-Fi client list despite my open guest Wi-Fi. You can even test it by naming your guest network "Xfinity WiFi".
Taking apart your TV and pulling out the wireless radio sounds like absolute overkill to me. Feel free to do it if it makes you feel better. It will definitely not allow it to send data (over Wi-Fi) under any circumstance. I'm just not convinced that the alternative is that much riskier.
Our Samsung fridge will mesh network with any Samsung TV specifically to exfiltrate marketing info, at least according to the manual. (The fridge even has marketing surveillance cameras in it).
I assume at some point, appliance manufacturers will start "partnering" with things that actually need WiFi for exfiltration purposes. Phones would be a good place to start.
That way, we'd need to either Faraday cage our friends' phones, not invite them over, or send marketing pervs video feed of our moldy pickles.
To prevent RF transmission.
RF transmission is harmless. It's data privacy we're concerned about.
Seriously, unless you watch with your face a cm from the screen, RF energy is totally insignificant.
It might connect to a neighbor's WiFi if it has no password.
We're worried about it connecting to a neighbor's unsecured network or some sort of unpublished mesh capability for exfiltrating your data and downloading ads.
Setup an unprotected network that is isolated and you fully control, see if it connects at all.
That’s what is so insane about this conspiracy theory. It would be trivial to prove yet somehow no one has ever gotten around to it.
Because you can't possibly prove it won't happen in the future...
Easiest rule in security is to just disable unnecessary services. If you are never using the WiFi, you might as well disable the hardware completely
It may be trivial to prove again and again, but it is even more trivial to just disconnect it
So, I have an Nvidia Shield TV Pro. I dislike how Google had to put ads on the homescreen (ads which are not suitable for my children), and I just checked: it has Android patch level Jan 2026. It is, as of today, Nov 2026. 10 months without patches. So no patch for eMudhra, no patch for Brotli, and you name it.
Other than that, I agree regarding TV, with one caveat: you might want to update the firmware right away, or at some point. The device might need to phone home for that. In order to achieve that, you can put up a temp WLAN AP with your smartphone.
With regards to my STB: I am considering cancelling all my subscription services and simply downloading everything to my NAS. This already runs Jellyfin. Then all I need is a Jellyfin client and HDMI. Perhaps a RPi 4 or RPi 5 would be suffice there.
I use ProjectTV as an alternative launcher. No ads.
Do you mean Projectivy Launcher? Google is giving me no clues about "ProjectTV launcher".
Yes, I use that on my Shield(s) and my Xiaomi android TV boxes (4 in total). It can completely take over the home screen and you can strip everything out of it so it is just a list of exactly what you want to have available.
same
While practical advice its just odd to me there's no major legislation or movement or activism or boycotts about this. We just accept our TV might be silently recording everything we say in our home and the fix is to not plug it into the internet.
Remember this when you vote. A progressive swing is coming, and if we will ever regain privacy rights, it'll be when the next swing hits.
> disconnect the wireless radio from the main board
Why?
So your idiot brother doesn't connect your spy TV to the WiFi when he comes to visit, instead of using the goddamn Chromecast that is already plugged into it. >:(
Dogsitter in my case.
This. I've had this happen with relatives who come to visit. It's unkind to tell them "Don't fuck with the TV" or "Ignore the TV if it tells you it wants to connect to something."
They want to be "helpful" and show me they can "work tech" by doing stuff like this. They don't understand that the TV is manipulating them. I don't want to have to explain to them that I'm basically a neurosurgeon and they just tried to impress me by drilling a hole in somebody's head. Because the TV told them to.
Disconnecting the wifi avoids the need for unpleasant conversations.
Happened to elderly relatives. I had it set up so nicely and someone 'helped', and then it seems rude to disconnect what they did.
This seems very specific.............you wanna talk about it? /hug-offer
Yours too? Dang.
Even if you never connect the TV to your WiFi network it will constantly scan for public networks and also scan for any devices that will respond. “Off” doesn’t actually mean off anymore. :(
Do you have any specific examples of devices where this has been implemented? Because I've heard this idea thrown around a lot as a hypothetical, but never any concrete evidence that it's been done.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-ad...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/apr/25/goog...
https://theweek.com/tech/wifi-signals-now-tracking-users-at-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlbjUvkoyBA
https://wigle.net/
And here's the opt-out steps to get Google to stop scanning your Wifi: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632#how_opt_out&z...
None of those links involve smart TVs at all, let alone smart TVs which connect to open wireless networks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9uefFYe6bM
Hypothetical is beside the point. The hardware is there, the software is closed and you can't verify what is really happening, so the potential threat exists.
Connecting to open wireless networks is exactly the sort of behavior that would be trivial to confirm the presence of, if it were actually present. You wouldn't even need any unusual tools - just set up an open access point and see if the TV connects to it.
Why would I care that some device to which I never gave a shred of my personal information of any kind (e.g. not logging it into any online account) found an open public network that I don't use and that has no connection to me?
Sure, I would be disturbed that it's doing that sort of thing in spite of Wi-Fi being explicitly turned off.
What is the threat to me though?
Because it's acting with your IP address, so attempts to prevent whatever shady botnet things it gets up to may also interfere with legitimate use by humans on your network.
Samsung TVs were literally recording people with microphones and doing voice recognition. Unless you don’t speak in your home, it will have you identified quite quickly.
If we want privacy, should we be buying a TV which has these peripherals? I don't think a TV should have such things, so I would sooner rip out or damage the microphone and camera if I had to get such a TV. The ability to connect to a network could be useful; I'd not mess with it.
Is that even legal? It shouldn't be.
That hasn't mattered since at least 2016. Legality is a suggestion if you are A) a corporation, or B) pedophile fascist.
They have your location, and can detect your interests from what you watch, and fingerprint you. Things like this are pieces of a larger, comprehensive picture of your life.
Also, how do you pay for streaming channels, etc., if you don't give it any information?
The assumption here is that we don't give the TV any personal information; it's just used as a monitor. The content comes from some other device connected to an input (e.g. HDMI1). (That device may raise privacy issues, but we are concerned with the TV).
Without either doing the fingerprinting from surreptitious audio recording in the room that other commenters mention, or else matching the unit serial number to the purchaser (requiring the retailer to leak personal info to the manufacturer), they can't match the unit's location to our identity.
I see. Roku, for example, takes screenshots of the TV N times per second (and sends them home).
Remember that it doesn't take much to identify someone: Gender, birthdate, and (zip code?) uniquely identify ~80% of Americans. From viewing habits, it should be easy to fingerprint someone - Chicago Bears fan; strong technology interest; on your city block; likes AI porn with Lara Croft; home during day Sa, Su, Tu, Th; watches YouTube videos about ...
ACR
It can record audio, sometimes video, and fingerprint what you watch on it. Proximity can be enough to identify you.
Because the TV is recording your voice, what you watch and possibly taking pictures, depending on the brand, and it needs a connection to send that information to whoever will pay for it.
I’ve heard the TV’s will try to connect to any passwordless, public access point it can reach even without your approval.
While I've certainly heard plenty of theorizing about the possibility of this happening, I have yet to see any conclusive evidence that it has ever been done.
EDIT: What I am referring to here is the specific allegation that smart TVs will connect to open wireless networks without being commanded to do so. It's not a catch-all for any nefarious thing involving TVs or wireless networks.
It's been confirmed in the recent LG scandal.
The denied ones that have yet to be proven?
LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true' (635 points, 2 months ago, 494 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645480
And that isn't even the same thing either! (This seems to be a recurring theme.) If it were true that LG TVs "spy" on ambient audio, that would certainly be bad, but it wouldn't also establish that the TVs were connecting to open wireless networks to exfiltrate that data.
No it hasn't.
LG scans the list of nearby networks. It does not automatically connect to any.
Many people have "heard" this and repeat it as fact. Not a single one has ever provided a single shred of, trivially testable, evidence.
You still run the risk of a software update doing a tv to tv mesh network. You gotta own the software or remove the radio.
How many open WiFi networks are there within range of your TV?
Comcast runs a separate "Xfinity WiFi" on all their routers, any Comcast user can connect to it with their credentials. Would they strike a deal with TV manufacturers to let them use it? It would not surprise me.
Pretty sure this is a known offering from Comcast, you just have to talk to the right sales rep... I haven't yet seen any evidence of a TV using it (yet), but hve been told they will sell a company IoT or fleet device access to their wifi endpoints for enough money. I'm not sure it would be cost effective for mass market device surveillance, though.
Also Amazon does this same model with their Sidewalk service, which can run over bluetooth or lora, instead of wifi... and is specifically priced to be usable for large numbers of devices.
It would however surprise many.
I guess for people living in cities where different neighbours move in and out and have open WiFis.
If the devices still scan all the time...
Living on the countryside there is no such problem.
Even ISP routers come with a default password now. I can't remember the last time I found an actual open WiFi.
All the TV manufacturers have to do is make a deal with Xfinity to jump on their AP, and you're toast. I don't know why anybody would defend them or give them any bit of slack on this. Once they figure this out, they will do it.
> Use a box of your choice on the other end of the HDMI cables. This is now the box that you trust. (Roku? Shield? Blu-ray? MacBook? PC? Linux? Playstation? XBox? Whatever you want.)
If they choose a Firestick or Roku what's the difference? XD
unfortunately ethernet capable hdmi exists
No, it doesn’t in any real sense. Nothing ever implemented it and the channel was reallocated to eARC with different encoding so they couldn’t even co exist.
$1050:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1828914-REG/samsung_q...3 HDMI ports. Any downsides using as a TV?
Yours is the first comment in the hundred I've read that links a concrete product. I can't vouch for it, but kudos to you.
Looked a bit more closely, says it has an embedded signage player running on tizen, wonder the privacy implications. :-/
Unless you connect it to a network, you should be fine. The 3 HDMI ports give me the impression you’d be using it as a dumb monitor.
But what if you do want to watch Netflix and Nebula? Then you're going to need a network anyway. I'd like a TV that does that without even trying to spy on me.
Then you connect it to an Apple TV, or a game console, or a computer.
VA panels aren't great (they're fine, just not great). 350 nits also isn't great. Most people are probably looking for more. It's also pretty overpriced, but I guess that's the price of privacy?
It’s built to run 16 hours a day, the specs probably derive from that.
Yes, it doesn't have a TV tuner
This is something I haven’t used in more than ten years. Are you sure you need it?
I do and I used mine yesterday, but I bridge that gap with an HDHomeRun instead of using my TV's native tuner. There are a lot of good, high def channels available in major metros beyond the required broadcast channel. It is useful to have access to local news now and then with the national feed right after. Likewise, most sports are still available on local broadcast (with some exceptions, like Amazon taking Thursday Night Football). Your experiences aren't everyone's.
yes that's our primary/only use case other than using it as a recepticle for casting from the eye prayer
I went and researched this, and found that basically none of the TV brands were anything but creepy on privacy.
What I’ve ended up doing was I got an LG and never hooked it up to Wifi/internet, and then use an Apple TV to watch things on.
It’s a bit annoying if I want to switch to a game console as Apple TV can’t control the TV’s input channel, but otherwise works very well.
Make sure the TV supports HDMI CEC.
>I went and researched this, and found that basically none of the TV brands were anything but creepy on privacy.
Yeah they do. Go to your shopping center or airport and you'll see LG and Samsung displays everywhere. And that's the key word, 'displays' not 'TVs'.
Both sell large displays meant for 100% user ownership with no spyware or mandatory internet connection, you just have to buy those and not their TVs.
The catch? They come at steep prices compared to consumer TVs, unless you can land a deal on the used market. But that's the cost of turning a profit on screens with no spyware and ads.
The other catch is that those displays are built for heavy duty use, not for picture quality, and as such aren’t going to look as good as even a budget consumer OLED TV.
Disagree. They look more than fine, much better than the budget TV with their fake saturation turned to 11 out of the box. If you think that looks good you might have gotten used to it.
Post specs, in my research these types of displays universally prioritise brightness over all other specs.
https://solutions.lg.com/us/hospitality-tvs/lg-55am960h0ud
Hotel TVs, same panels as consumer models with different supporting hardware and stock calibrations. These are actually dimmer than the consumer models to increase panel longevity.
They tend to lack gaming features like high/variable refresh rate but they're more functional as normal TVs than digital signage displays.
They have similar OSes as the consumer models and can run the same apps but don't have ads unless the operator wants them to and can be centrally managed, support internal IPTV networks, etc.
And I buy them from where?
If you put the model number in to your search engine of choice it should return a number of sellers focusing on the hospitality and B2B markets offering these products. Some are "call for quote" bullshit but others have a price listed and an "add to cart" button. I haven't actually tried to buy one, I have a CX that lives on an allowlist-only VLAN and I'm fine with that.
The ones the serve menus and the ones that serve eye-level video ads are definitely also built for picture quality. Still IPS for the most part, but uniformity and colour calibration can be movie-worthy
We used them all the time for work.
If you get the crap ones, they will look crap.
However any of the midrange ones will be brighter than the equivalent consumer (they have to operate in full sun 24/7)
You will not find an oled though, because they have yet to be full duty cycle (well I've not looked, but if they do exist, they will be many monies.)
Get yourself a nice NEC 4k, you'll be happy. unless you want 8k (good luck finding a source for the 8k) or you really like the motion smoothing of poorly setup consumer TVs.
Not a problem, coming from a 1080p unit haha
Are you sure those displays have everything needed for a smooth TV experience? Do they have eARC to connect a sound bar, and stuff like that? Modern TVs are also quite good at upscaling 1080/720p content, screens often aren't.
(I don't care about integrated speakers though)
1080 (even 720 really) is absolutely fine at normal viewing distances for most streaming content.
If you're a videophile you might care. Most people would not notice.
The pattern of "is feature X supported?" being responded to by "don't worry you don't need it" is so common in tech/OSS forums, and so awful.
It doesn't look good on a 4K display, without some smoothing or upsclaing. It looks fine on a native 1080p screen though.
it's funny, I used to think and care about this (or thought I did) back when 1080 was the common thing and 4k was new and exotic, but now I really don't care.
I think what changed was the realisation that even with 4k hardware in theory, what you're actually seeing is so variable based on bandwidth and different services' support for different shows you basically don't know anyway and thus it doesn't really make much sense to care about it.
Besides which, you realise that things that are made to be more enjoyable on 4k, like where that would actually make a difference to how good it is, are probably not that much worth watching anyway outside of demos. Certainly it's not, for example, a factor on which you want to be choosing what series to watch.
Exactly, streaming video is so compressed that 4k will just let you see all the compression artifacts more clearly.
Or jailbreak/defang the consumer TVs to have privacy anyway, and teach others how, and screw over the entire profit model of the surveillance-subsidized TVs to force things to be sold at a real cost.
>Or jailbreak/defang the consumer TVs to have privacy anyway
And how will my 50 year old mom and 70 year old grandpa know how to do that? "Hey Claude scan the wifi for a LG TV, hack it, root it and give me the keys to install what I want, then lock out LG from access it?"
As always, the sane fix is in government legislation and enforcement of privacy regulations. But this isn't happening since knowledge of smart device spyware across politicians and the voting population is small and governments want to use that data dragnet that smart devices enable for their own means.
> As always, the sane fix is in government legislation and enforcement of privacy regulations.
While I do not disagree, we all know that may not happen in grandma and grandpas remaining lifetime, so lets help out the older generation where we can, and shame lazy hackers that participate in these systems.
"Hey Claude...."
Well, why not?
"your account has been terminated for violations of our T&Cs"
And that is why I gave my family access to GPUs I racked up. We do what we want. Cheaper than the subscriptions over time too and we never get rate limited!
I have bad news for you. Those commercial TV-s also phone home if connected to the internet. For software updates, analytics regarding digital signage usage etc.
For a long time they haven't been just dumb displays. They also run Tizen or WebOS for digital signage applications.
> that's the cost of turning a profit on screens with no spyware and ads.
I don't think that the cost of TVs has gone down when they added spyware and ads.
You could say that that's the cost of turning less profits, rather, and I suspect that TV manufacturers keep the costs of normal displays high just to discourage their purchase by normal people.
With Amazon Sidewalk I don't think not hooking it up to the internet is an option anymore, unless you live out in the boonies
> Amazon Sidewalk[0] is a low-bandwidth long-range wireless communication protocol developed by Amazon. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for short distance communication, and 900 MHz LoRa and other frequencies for longer distances.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Sidewalk
>With Amazon Sidewalk I don't think not hooking it up to the internet is an option anymore
"Anymore"? So far there's no evidence any TVs are using it, so you're safe for now.
There was no evidence about all the spying until 200,000,000 LG displays were sold.
it's harder to disguise 900mhz radios in devices because it'll be in the FCC listing.
There was definitely evidence, just the mainstream was never loud with it. I'm on the privacy train for more than a decade now, and smart TVs were always considered abysmal in this regard - bad defaults, low configurability, and no alternative firmware.
"for now"
New business idea: fitted faraday cages for smart tvs
Some people still want to receive content on their TVs in the old fashion way, using radio waves, even in their more modern form, DVB. Unfortunately a Faraday cage blocks both input and output.
In reality that'll never work because the front of the tV needs to be exposed. At best you can make your whole room/house a faraday cage, but that'd be insanely expensive to do correctly. You might think a microwave is a faraday cage, but a phone can still get calls even if you put it inside.
Some well placed copper tape on the back of the tv will likely get the job done in many cases.
Or just rm the nic
Great idea, assuming that doesn't disable the entire system
Desolder the wifi antenna. No way for software to distinguish that from legitimately not being near any other wifi devices.
Boonies? No. Literally EVERYONE has a damn Alexa and it's on the network. The coverage map is staggering. https://coverage.sidewalk.amazon/
Wifi can be effective up to about 300'/100m outside, but houses in the boonies are seldom that close together. If your neighbor has a smart farmhouse fully Alexa-fied, a mere tenth of a mile away, your devices won't see it.
Better hope that no guest connects the TV to their phone hotspot to watch their Netflix like one user in a previous post reported happened to them.
> It’s a bit annoying if I want to switch to a game console
Yes because you have to fetch a shitty TV remote with buttons inspired by a Boeing 747 cockpit, which must be aimed directly at the TV because it uses shitty infra-red.
Am I close? :)
For those of us that are pickier about UX, even a basic A/V receiver solves this problem.
Our TV remote can actually control our Apple TV. It's definitely good enough, and through some witchcraft, it works when the TV is not connected to WiFi.
TV manufacturers are not just creepy on privacy. They are outright stalkers.
The whole TV medium was fully and expertly enshittified by advertising decades ago.
The next level is today: Now you buy a giant plastic browser that includes a fully enshittified surveillance OS.
There is even a spec (as yet unused...) for Ethernet over HDMI (HEC , HDMI 1.4). Silicon Image (founder of HDMI) and Broadcom demonstrated the capability to TV manufacturers behind closed doors (says $searchEngine).
Whatever screen you use to watch movies, you will inevitably find your captain's log will contain more joy for the crew by discovering Jellyfin and sailing into deeper waters.
You avoided hooking your TV to a surveillance capitalism company that trains on your data to manipulate you. Great!
Then you hooked it to an external device of a surveillance capitalism company that trains on your data to manipulate you. Why?
Or plug in a cheap mini PC running a TV friendly Linux distro and give your data to no one.
Completely wrong. Apple goes to extraordinary lengths, to the point of harming the usability of their products, to protect user privacy and avoid collecting user data.
Apple could easily make tens of billions dollars extra if they spied more on their users.
Not completely, not anymore. Apple's gotten a taste of advertising dollars via the App store. Search for product A and product B will pay money to come first. Apple TV advertises for the shows they've made in the Apple TV app instead of going to your library. Same for Books.app.
The biggest indightment of Apple in my mind is the copy and pasting of links into iMessage. iMessages "helpfully" renders a preview so a dumb consumer doesn't have to see an ugly long text of a url. But in doing so, it also happens to hides the utm code that is used for tracking by marketers.
They've got their eye on that tens of billion dollars extra.
While I dislike Apple’s move to ads, I’m at a loss how accepting money to degrade search results is a privacy issue rather than just a UX quality issue. What information is Apple sharing with advertisers?
Where do they get the data to target the ads?
Please tell me it’s the search query.
It is.
Apple collects your data into a walled garden in proprietary protocols and ecosystems, uses that data to optimize how they manipulate people into buying their products, then charges you for access to your own data and backups. Sounds like surveillance capitalism to me.
Does Apple sell data on what I’m watching to third parties?
Linux is not a viable option for TV for the vast majority of users. There are no sit back, remote driven apps for the services they use.
I drive literally everything on my Linux TVs with a only a remote. I do not even attach a regular keyboard or mouse. All my guests use it fine too.
KDE Plasma Bigscreen?
JellyFin or Plex. Personally i just use a Linux Mint desktop connected to the TV instead. Web browser for streaming and VLC for downloaded videos.
But JellyFin and Plex exist for people who don’t want that.
What the parent is saying is that the desktop versions of those programs are not remote friendly and the interface is not ideally scaled for 10-foot use. What you want are the Android TV versions, running on Waydroid or an x86 build of Android TV. See my other reply.
I just run stock ubuntu with an airmouse, freetube, a browser, and kodi. Works just fine on my projectors and tvs around my house for me and even non technical guests.
Yes, and I have done the same for a long time. It works, and the browser is key when you don't have native apps. But I recently spent some tokens on an Android x86_64 TV build with ARM support and it is far better than a Linux DE with the scaling cranked up. It's all scaled correctly, the UI can be navigated with the D-Pad alone, and all the apps are also designed that way. It's a massive improvement over a UI primarily designed for keyboards and mice.
Jellyfin and Plex cannot stream from major streaming providers. Yes, I know the answer is pirating content but that’s a complete paradigm shift compared to what most people are used to. It’s an absolutely enormous extra requirement when you’re suggesting someone switch their TV to Linux.
Kind of simpler in a way wouldn't it be? One provider vs 8 different streaming providers.
No one seems to have a problem dealing with multiple streaming providers. They’re essentially just different submenus on the TV app.
Compare that to setting up a home server with a ton of storage, setting up torrenting/newsgroups, software to check for new releases and automatically download them, probably a VPN too… it’s a whole different world.
When you tell people they can save a couple thousand dollars a year and never be tracked or watch an ad again on their tv if they learn how to setup a VPN and a seed box, a lot of people are quite happy to learn.
Apple is not a “surveillance capitalism company that trains on your data to manipulate you”. The exact opposite, actually.
Source: I work at Apple. The privacy story isn’t just marketing, it’s very real and part of every discussion.
How is that working out in China where Apple caved and gave the CCP control of the HSMs? Apple can and will cave to government pressures for enough money, and will not give technical consumers source code to verify if the privacy claims from yesterday are true today.
Every Apple device is one software update away from giving a full backdoor to anyone that asks Tim Cook nicely with an secret executive order, or simply as a favor for political points given he paid a million dollars just to be seen sitting next to a far right President on TV.
It is not ever okay to recommend people to submit themselves to power dynamics like that.
The only device someone can trust is one with community created and audited software. Software with accountability to the users.
> How is that working out in China where Apple caved and gave the CCP control of the HSMs?
Do you have a reference to this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-pr...
You know why. Nobody wants to sysadmin their “friendly Linux distro” just to watch shows. Kodi is amateur hour compared to tvOS. Nowhere do people care more that it “just works” than the thing their TV remote talks to.
I literally bought a mini PC, installed Arch with KDE via archinstall, installed chromium, and haven't done any "sysadmin" since.
Yes, it "just works". Why wouldn't it?
You don’t have HDR and can’t pair and then send audio to bluetooth speakers via only the remote in 100 seconds. These basic things are table stakes. It does not “just work”.
Oh no! It might take more than a minute to connect to my brain rot!
The standard that the comment you're responding to is that the whole solution must be effortless even for someone with an IQ of 75. Don't try to stoop to their level, no amount of freedom or control justifies any level of effort to people like that. They'd rather have a system that forces them to view and verbally respond to ads every 10 minutes than one that requires them to learn anything more complex than what a toddler can figure out.
Even smart people have limited time and limited capacity for effort. Failure to Just Work is sand in their gears. Hand-rolled Linux TVs are a nonstarter.
My non engineer wife setup Ubuntu on a mini PC in the living room herself. Took an hour. All point and click.
I cannot help but laugh at anyone on a hacker forum that thinks this is hard.
Apple marketing has made people too lazy to put an OS on a flash drive, plug it in, and hit next a few times.
Say "McDonalds" to end commercial.
(Don't worry, it just works)
The fact that Linux is a huge inconvenient waste of time to use for normal tasks has nothing to do with brainrot. You’re moving the goalposts.
You must realize there are things like 3blue1brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile on YouTube, right?
> You must realize there are things like 3blue1brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile on YouTube, right?
And my family and I watch those on Freetube without tracking, ads, sponsored content or even a Google account all from a remote control.
Can your Apple TV do that?
In the amount of time most people spend watching ads they could have taken an hour of that time to plug a mini pc into their tv and hit next a few times on a Linux installer to never watch an ad again.
This is really not that hard.
I think the problem here is that a bunch of people in these threads are pursuing different goals (those who want a non-spying TV for themselves, those who want it for their relatives, those who want the entire spying TV ecosystem destroyed), and each of them treats the other groups as if they were misplacing the goalposts from their own preferred location.
> You must realize there are things like 3blue1brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile on YouTube, right?
There are things like "Left: the Bible in Chinese, Right: Mozart's 40th symphony" on YouTube too, but I wouldn't take that as evidence of the existence of a significant contingent of polyglot religious split-brain multitaskers. Conversely, I do in fact know several people who run explainer videos in the background simply because they like the feeling of a reassuring voice making intellectual noises at them.
My non-engineer wife literally installed ubuntu on a mini PC in our living room. HDR was two clicks and 7.2 surround sound worked out of the box. Took maybe an hour.
There are just no excuses for a technical person being too lazy to do that.
And we have a real big screen web browser with ad blockers etc, a terminal, and Kodi with every movie and TV show we could ever want to watch, and zero internet required to watch any of it and no company gets metrics on what we watch. No ads, etc.
Nobody in the general public wants to do that, but I'd think some in the HN audience might feel differently (I mean, setting this up is part of the fun).
Personally, I use an RPi4 with libreelec, and it works great - including responding to my remote via HDMI-CEC. (There's also no need for any sysadmin with libreelec, which is designed to work out of the box.)
i've had absolutely worst experience, regarding drivers and customization and libreelec on my raspberry pis. had a much more headache free experience just with running raw raspbian autobooting into kodi directly
Just configure your game console to turn on the TV/set the input.
Buy any TV you want, ignore all instructions to connect it to the internet, then look for an HDMI port on the back. Plug an HDMI cable into one end, and in the other end plug in a cheap Linux computer like a used Intel NUC from ebay. Then use a nice air-mouse remote like the Pepper Jobs W10.
I watch any movie or TV show I want in 4k via Kodi, but then can alt tab to a Terminal or a real web browser.
Privacy, and dramatically more functionality than any TV would ship with anyway.
Using this setup to type this message right now on pc hooked to a projector in my garage from my couch.
It turns out we never needed Smart TVs in the first place. Just treat it as a screen for a desktop computer.
Samsung TVs (and probably others) will connect to other Samsung TVs in range and exfiltrate data via that route… merely not connecting the TV doesn’t present data harvesting
Iirc, Amazon uses a tool they call “sidewalk” for this purpose
They don’t do that. Do you have a source?
There’s something called Wi-Fi Direct but it requires explicit pairing. And Sidewalk isn’t on TVs. There’s no evidence of Samsung TVs trying to use each other as relays.
>Samsung TVs (and probably others) will connect to other Samsung TVs in range and exfiltrate data via that route
Do you have a source for this? Because the implication is that my Samsung TV will connect to my neighbours Samsung TV, and send my PII through their network without my consent, which would be a huge deal in Europe.
In that case, jailbreak it, or open it and unsolder the wifi antenna, or put some well placed copper tape until you no longer see any wifi traffic from the TV from other wifi capable devices running a wifi packet inspector.
The TV belongs to you and it will obey you with modest effort.
Alternatively, don't give your money to e-waste vendors.
Sure when the choice exists, but we should encourage de-fanging the hardware that is already purchased.
Basically don’t buy Samsung or LG if you really care.
But that's the OP's question isn't it? What brand can you buy that isn't outright evil?
Especially considering some models now refuse to work without seeing an internet connection during the setup procedure
Sony has treated me well and I don’t have it internet connected. It’s the one brand I haven’t seen nag when you have the internet disconnected. Was also easy to just opt right out of connecting it. Pretty standard google tv too.
I want to know how to disable their external communication via wifi, I'd like to see how they are exfiltrating info. If I don't connect them to my wifi, apparently they connect to Xfinity wifi at your neighbors house.
[citation needed]
Yes. Or you can do the same thing with a regular monitor that has no wifi capabilities at all. Some are quite large, good quality and good price.
LG’s monitors were caught installing adware on Windows computers recently…
Through an HDMI connection?
Through Windows automatic driver downloads.
The problem here is Microsoft as much as LG. The same monitor on Linux wouldn't download anything. This would require root anyway.
Many 75"+ monitors you can recommend?
Did this for years when I was single living in a tiny room. Nothing wrong with this either!
Better hope that no guest connects the TV to their phone hotspot to watch their Netflix like one user in a previous post reported happened to them.
There is no way any guest in my home would not know my views on such things. I would respond to this in the same way as finding out a guest hid a microphone in my living room.
Or use something Kodi as the OS and just have a TV like interface. You can also run a Jellyfin client on linux or with Kodi and have that as a reasonable interface for the TV too.
Sceptre, in southern California, has a line of dumb displays.[1] HDMI/HDCP in, and that's about it. Walmart sells them, and of course they're on Amazon.
[1] https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV/U650CV-UMS-65-4K-UHD-TV...
Don't bother with all of the hassle of buying a smart TV and then trying to make it what you want it to be. Just go buy a good, dumb TV.
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...
Unfortunately those are also a step behind cutting edge.
I’d rather buy a smart TV, never connect it to the internet than trade down on specs
Congrats on being part of the problem instead of the solution.
Congrats on your inferior TV viewing experience. Hopefully the viewing angle still works despite the high horse perspective...
Not a thing, Mr. Defeatism.
If you are open to projectors they still make “home cinema” projectors that don’t have any smart features or connect to the internet.
I have a BenQ (710tki iirc) that is like this and I believe it meets all your stated requirements (size, resolution, etc). I’ve been very happy with it.
We use a secondhand university projector and a pull-down projection screen.
It's not great for daytime viewing and there's some friction setting it up, but we appreciate that. It's a dedicated movie-night appliance, not something we have on in the background all the time.
How well do modern projectors which cost comparable to consumer TVs do when the room may get indirect sun through windows? This is my one fear that would hold me back from serious projector consideration.
With my 3200 lumen projector it is good at all times of day in my living room projecting on a wall that doesn't get direct sunlight shining onto it. It just can't make anything darker than the wall itself, so blacks are gray, which is not really an issue for me, although it might be if I were watching more movies during the day.
Previously, I had a portable project that only advertised 1000 lumens, and it was difficult to use during the day.
I would say that with a powerful enough projector it isn't really an issue unless you care a lot about black levels during the day.
It's honestly fine, but it does depend on your tolerance for washed out blacks. I have a 1300 lumen projector, stretched to just about its max size (120") and for me it's alright watching in the day. Then it gets even better as it grows darker. As I said, the main issue is that the dark colors are a bit more washed out
This is what I landed on as well - projector connected to an Apple TV. It cost a bit more, and there’s some extra setup, but the results are excellent.
The main issue switching to a projector is figuring out where you are going to position it (different projectors have different throw distances).
More money and more setup, but very worthwhile in the end IMO.
...and when you drill the holes in the wall, remember the lens is often to one side, and NOT dead centre to the projector.
Not that I would forget that tiny detail when I mounted mine. Of course not.
Just get a computer monitor and speakers. Here's something the enthusiasts won't tell you: a smaller screen looks fine if you're just not so far away from the TV. Huge screens are necessary for movie theaters since they seat so many, but the huge 70+ inch screens people are buying these days are totally unnecessary.
What are you talking about? Are you going to buy a chair and sit close to the monitor?
People have TVs in their living rooms and like to seat on their couches which are a few meters away from the TV, that's why you need to buy a larger screen.
I don't think I've ever read a comment as dumb as yours.
This may shock you, but living rooms with TVs existed before people had enormous TVs. My understanding is when guests came to visit your home, the polite thing to do would be to hand out one of those old-timey monocles so people could watch the TV. I believe those old-timey monocles only went out of fashion around 2012 and later when TV sizes approached modern standards.
maybe checkout https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html before making more comments.
Buy any TV, just don’t connect it to the internet at all, ever.
Plug in an Apple TV or any other streaming device if you want digital content. If your want terrestrial content ensure the TV has the relevant input connections on the back.
This is what I'll do for my next TV...
I'll purchase a LG / Samsung Digital Signage Display. Basically a stripped down panel with no features, and then just run something like apple tv, or something else on it. For broadcast television (yeah I still occasionally watch that), I have a hdhomerun plugged into the network, and I use VLC/Infuse to stream the channels available.
I'm completely done with the malware that is modern televisions
Example product:-
https://www.i-tech.com.au/lh65qbcnbgcxxy-65in-qbc-n-professi...
I recommend a projector. When we moved into our current place, I considered a TV and went with the projector instead. Because:
- A TV has a backlight. It doesn't feel as 'natural' to the eye when watching because you are staring directly at an LED.
- A TV is smaller than a projector.
- A TV, when it is off, imposes itself on the room. It's a large plastic/glass object which is obviously electronic. It invades the space.
- Most TV's are full of surveillanceware.
- A TV can be watched even during the day, when it's bright outside. The projector, by contrast, is much less pleasant during the day; I consider this a feature - I should be doing something else when the sun is out. (The only time this kinda sucks is sports. We make do with closing the curtains).
- Movies were made for the silver screen, imho. This might be a hipster opinion but in my view, the medium really does make a difference in this regard; the moviegoing experience is better.
To specifically answer your question - most projectors are just a dumb HDMI cable. Computer, media center PC, apple TV, etc. None (unless I'm not aware of newer models) have an app store, tracking, or other garbage.
I've wanted a projector for so long, and had the chance to borrow a friend's high quality one to test it out. It absolutely elevated the movie experience and - depending on the viewer's preferences - could be worth it for that alone.
However, this:
> The projector, by contrast, is much less pleasant during the day
Was a significant enough drawback to me that it ruled it out as a daily driver. Although I do like the way you framed it.
That's not really an issue if you get an Ultra Short Throw laser projector and pair it with a high quality UST-optimised (like a lenticular/sawtooth) Ambient Light Rejection screen. A setup would reject something like upto 95% of ambient light, so the screen looks good even in bright rooms.
In saying that, even this setup won't be able to match the deep blacks of a modern OLED TV in bright environments, but if you haven't been spoilt by OLEDs already, then a USTLP + UST-ALR is a really good alternative.
There absolutely are "smart" projectors which come with android tv installed, but it is easy to spot them as they are advertised as devices you can use on the go
We have to block our TV from dialling home (there just aren't any privacy oriented 'smart' TVs). We chose to go down the DNS filtering route and pay for https://nextdns.io/ - it turns out it super helpful for a whole host of home network privacy jobs (ad blocks, kids safety filtering, security posture etc.). I can't stop recommending it to people.
Don't buy a TV. Buy a monitor.
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/samsung-65-inch-commercial-4...
Even monitors are not automatically safe nowadays:
https://windows.gadgethacks.com/news/lg-monitors-installing-...
Well if you expressly install malware on your PC (not referring to the LG driver), then you really shouldn't care about the TV breaking privacy.
Monitors are no longer safe. Bought a new monitor 2 years ago (Samsung) after many many years of not upgrading.
Turn it on and it wants me to make an account, agree to a new TOS update once a month, comes with the full smart TV interface junk. Had no idea that was even a thing they were doing to monitors when I bought it.
Which model exactly is that?
One thing I know for sure, is never Samsung.
I have a few year old LG oled and keep it offline.
The best privacy method is to completely disconnect the TV from any wired or wireless network, and like you suggested to use it as a dummy display with the Apple TV (or whichever your favorite media player is). So in that sense you could just go to Costco (or any major electronics retailer if not in US) and pick one that you like the image & price.
I guess I am more concerned about random devices at home that need internet to work yet I have no idea what data they send where.
Not sure about the US experience, but here in Australia there are no dumb TVs for sale in our retail electronics stores. Every TV comes with some sort of "smart" OS.
It's the same way in the US. That's why they were saying to just buy any TV (which will almost certainly be a smart TV), then just treat it like a dumb TV by not connecting it to the internet.
I was able to disable a bunch of stuff on my LG so I never actually see the WebOS interface anymore.
I would disconnect the WiFi antenna as well and hope it doesn’t connect to nearby WebOS TVs via Bluetooth to pass telemetry so that the other TV uploads it to their mothership.
I assume that, in Europe, they’d need to be GDPR compliant, so that is a layer of protection the manufacturer can’t skip.
I got an old gigantic monstrosity of a DLP tv off facebook marketplace for free then plugged an old Intel NUC into it. It's not for everyone, but I think that it's great, partly because the facts that it was free and that it's stupidly big give me joy.
More practically, when I am not using that, I just watch tv shows and such on my desktop computer running NixOS with a nice and modern (1440p 170Hz high quality but not highest possible end IPS) monitor over displayport.
Other options include a projector, buying a very large computer monitor marketed panel, or using something that is modern enough to be fine, but not so new that it has malware in it (like a friend who was moving gave me a very heavy but also very nice plasma tv, with zero malware on it).
Basically, anything except something marketed as a consumer grade TV. The last time that I had to displeasure of dealing with that it was when my parents bought one and asked me to set it up, and the built-in Roku software refusde to even display from an HDMI or DP input unless it was logged in and connected to WiFi! Alas, I was not able to convince them to return it, but I did decline to have anything to do with it.
Sony Bravia TV and Panasonic.
Panasonic is decent but the problem is their presence around the world is spotty. I think they only decide to reenter US market and Panasonic the parent company has been thinking about ditching its TV business for a long time already.
My only hesitation with Sony is that they will form a JV with TCL next year.
Otherwise I wouldn't trust LG, Samsung, HiSense, TCL or Vizio.
I've gone LG OLED 65" - C5 I think. I have never connected it to the internet. It's annoying to get prompts about needing to update - they seemed to have stopped.
An AppleTV has been my first purchase or installation for nearly the last decade with a flat screen tv.
Sadly the Samsung TV I have was the best display for the price by a mile, so I've done what i can to balance usage and protection. Its connected to the wifi to allow for AirPlay natively. The tv has a fixed IP at the router to block all traffic in and out of the network, and as a visibility layer its DNS'd through a PiHole too.
Its unbelievably talkative over the network! In the 7 days just passed, its been 90% of the blocked requests by volume (there's no allowed domains from that IP).
I'm still not convinced it isn't sneaking out data somehow - piggybacking off a connection somewhere to the neighbors TV. Its HDMI runs through a stereo amplifier, so it can't piggy-back off the connected PC that runs it.
Maybe the PC (Mint) can run AirPlay somehow and I can disconnect it entirely from the internet?
I feel overly paranoid about this device relative to everything else in the house, I'm not sure how justified that is.
> I'm still not convinced it isn't sneaking out data somehow - piggybacking off a connection somewhere to the neighbors TV
I think we've overshot the mark a bit about TVs' connection abilities. A built-in SIM was one early conjecture. And while it hasn't been seen in the wild, it is often assumed to exist.
More to your point, we've not seen connections (assumedly ad-hoc wifi) to a neighboring device and uploading data to manufacturer, partner, etc.
We have recently seen a case of data collection, that included wifi scans. What we have not seen is a device that connects to other APs on it's own.
I saw 1 redditor claim that this occurred but it was not substantiated. Lots of folks are looking for this behavior but it hasn't been found.
This tells me that our existing methods of self-protection are effective.
Why aren't there any manufacturers that see a market opportunity and produce a TV with no spyware / invasive telemetry etc.? Are these data sharing deals so lucrative for them?
Is everyone seeing their product as a potential advertising platform?
Per one of the comments above I just learned that Sceptre produces dumb TVs. I will be going this route.
Also your question is your answer.
Yeah maybe as long as everyone's doing it. But as soon as one sheep leaves the flock the walls will come tumbling down.
As others have said, buy whatever you want just never connect it to the internet.
Now many people are also claiming that TVs will surreptitiously connect to an open network, but as far as I can tell, there is no evidence of this actually happening [0]. Of course it’s technically possible, but until a researcher actually observes this behavior I would not lose sleep over this.
[0]: https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/how-to-use-smart-tv-offline
I would go one step further and recommend a router with a customizable, Linux, firmware (OpenWRT, Tomato, DDWRT, etc).
Your TV is probably just one of the many devices that sends a scary amount of requests to a bunch of shady servers. With a firewall + DNS server that you control and a decent blocklist you should be able to block most requests and you won't be exposed if a new device connects to your network (for whatever reason).
> I would go one step further and recommend a router with a customizable, Linux, firmware (OpenWRT, Tomato, DDWRT, etc).
Yes, those are good options, but in true HN spirit, my suggestion is a plain Linux distro. The firewall/router is just a few iptables lines, which AI can now provide in a few seconds.
OpenWRT is a Linux distro. Just one optimized for embedded devices. If don't like the very utilitarian web UI can connect over ssh and use iptables or whatever else you want.
But that means custom per-device firmware builds, that in my experience with every router I tried it on means they lag months/years behind security patches. Is there some way to stay patched without building from source and reflashing every time a patch to something upstream happens? (almost daily, now, I guess that means?)
If something urgent appears, a point release will be made asap. If worry that isn't soon enough, can use the daily snapshot builds. That said, imo an essential device like a router should be as solid as possible and only upgraded if important rather for minor bug fixes.
That would be great if it were true for a larger range of devices, but they seem to drop older hardware pretty aggressively. My current wifi device hasn't had a new build published since Dec 2025, despite there being dot releases of the same version well past that.
Is there any good GUI for a vanilla Linux networking stack, to your knowledge?
IIRC, IPFire is more or less that. I control my Debian router/home server using SSH and have no GUI at all. It's largely set and forget, and don't recall last time I touched the firewall.
I rooted my LG C1 and honestly I can't go back to an unrooted TV. Game streaming works so much better(I can actually install the apps). I can control everything so Home Assistant automations are much better. Internet is blocked so no nagging or ads, But they are turn off via root just in case.
Now I have a weekend project in the future, assuming I can find a compatible process for my hardware. Never connected to the network, but the thing makes a few ever annoying popups I would love to disable. Or at least ensure that no "helpful" guest fills in the wifi information when I am not looking.
You could also just turn ads off in settings
Nope! I can turn of personalised ads. But the homescreen is filled with recommended apps, recommended shows, popups about added subscription functionality, or straight up banner ads if it feels like it.
Samsung the frame 65" for $2000 constantly pesters about $15 monthly subscription to change the art on the display to their selection of public domain historical artworks. Otherwise you're stuck with the default slideshow, which you're now forced to see since the whole sales pitch of the display is showing art when turned off.
atleast they had the decency to not show ads as default art instead... but i wouldn't put it past them
I have to keep reminding myself that many people lack the attention span to read the context of the comment they’re replying to, so I should quote it to avoid confusion.
Go up one comment and you’ll see this was with respect to LG, not Samsung.
You could, but it won't do the job.
Except when it does. What was your point exactly? Mine was that you don’t need to root an LG TV to turn off ads. I can’t speak for other brands, yours included
Our TV died a while back and I was looking into this, but turns out we don't really need it as everyone's enjoying consuming on tablets and computers. Only thing is the PS5, but we haven't played it for a while.... But this is a useful thread for when I actually do get a TV though!
https://www.sceptre.com/ seems to be pretty much the only remaining brand of non-smart TVs left. However, I have no experience of them.
I got 2 of these, Amazon, 65inch. When I purchased (years ago) Amazon said "only 8 left". This TV is so dumb its clock is still in 1989. Three HDMI so it's got a Sworch2, Roku and a vSee box on it.
I was so/so on the purchase but after watching all the heck around 'smart" TVs I'm wondering what I'll do when these die. They were like 50% cost of the industrial display category, which seems my only option in the future.
Hoping these LLMs get us to jailbroken TVs soon.
There's something so reassuring about seeing that "12:00AM Jan-06-1980 (Sun)" on mine whenever I power it on.
It's just a big HDMI display device (and audio pass-through) and that's all I want or need of it.
Sadly they no longer make or restock their dumb TVs. They're desktop monitor only.
I bought one of their TVs in 2019, it's fabulous if your criteria is "turns on, displays what is connected to its inputs, and has decent video quality", and nothing more. I would recommend them heartily, if you can get access to one.
Which is interesting, since the E247BD-FSRD is a TV and one of the first ones mentioned on their web site. It does not seem to be available anywhere, though. (The Sceptre web site says Amazon and Walmart; but, neither carries it.)
The monitors lack the tuner and the cable/antenna connector; so, if you're only playing of a computer, they should work fine.
I have two Sceptre TVs and I recommend them, as well, if you can find them.
I have a 27 inch monitor and a 50 inch TV from Sceptre, and they are great. No apps, no OS, and no connectivity other than common A/V cables.
I allow my Samsung to connect to my local network, but then use openwrt and refuse to allow any outbound data from any IP using the MAC address of the television set. It cant update itself and no traffic suggests it can do anything regardless of what it might be collecting. Rooting it to prevent it from connecting to other wifi AP’s is probably the only better thing.
Don't smart TVs (of LG or others?) connect to open networks of neighbors, like Vodafone hotspots? That was told to me at least.
So only disconnecting the antenna or destroying it would work, unless you live remotely.
Ah, here:
> DiabloD3 43 minutes ago | unvote | parent | next [–]
Doesn't work, all the spyware modules connect to open Wifi of neighbors, and soon, LTE.
reply
> nvme0n1p1 37 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]
This is repeated every time this topic comes up, but so far it's just a conspiracy theory. An urban legend. An old wives' tale. Are there any documented cases of this happening?
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> Don't smart TVs (of LG or others?) connect to open networks of neighbors, like Vodafone hotspots?
I can find no verified reports of this behavior. People are looking for it.
> all the spyware modules connect to open Wifi of neighbors, and soon, LTE.
I can find no verified reports of this behavior. People are looking for it. Cellular connections have been theorized since the beginning but have not been discovered.
Given the number of qualified people seeking out these behaviors, if they appear we will know it - with certainty.
Call your representative and talk about privacy and right to repair.
Vote for politicians who fight for privacy and right to repair.
Move to Europe ;-)
To be completely honest, I'm considering an old TV that has DVD and VHS inserts and going back to physical media.
I like LG OLED quality. My lg tv has never been connected to the internet and connects to a avr that handles inputs and 5.1.2 speakers Nvidia shield with hdmi-cec to turn on/off the receiver and tv. Jellyfin, android tv app for cable company, YouTube sans ads and projectivy launcher (Google one sucks). You can update firmware via usb stick. Would get an Apple TV if it died but like my Dolby vision HDR10 and atmos. Highly recommend.
Imagine you wouldn’t have this but technically the front two speakers are on a much higher end naim amplifier (connected to my audio stuff) but it has avr pass through. Sometimes an extra button to switch it to turn the front two speakers back to avr mode.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the Gamersnexus investigation show that even un-connected LG TVs will still scan for open WiFi networks to clandestinely upload their spy data?
From what I remember, they only mentioned that was technically possible and never actually tested or proved it.
I’ll look into it. Thanks!
LG makes the best panels, in my opinion, but they’re also the most customer-hostile when it comes to privacy.
The easiest solution is to never give the TV network access at all (no WiFi, no Ethernet) and only drive it over HDMI, via an Apple TV for example. The onus then shifts to how much you trust Apple, and the TV becomes mostly a dumb display. That still isn’t a 100% guarantee, though, since the TV has radios and could potentially talk to other networks or devices without your knowledge. If you want certainty, the only real option is to remove the radios entirely, which can have side effects, like the remote no longer working if it relies on BLE.
Personally, I don’t like LG’s “smart” apps, so never using them isn’t much of a loss.
But if you’re more technically inclined and want to use a product you paid for the way you want, you can do what I did with my C1:
Root it, put it on a restricted VLAN with no WAN access and no outbound privileges to any device on the LAN, and enable SSH. These displays run webOS, which is Linux-based. Yes, you can literally SSH into your TV. :)
That let me deploy my own custom app that I drive over the network. My display also never actually turns “off”. I just paint black pixels when I’m not using it, so it’s very snappy when I want something on the screen. It works as a spare data and metrics display while I’m working, and as a media player (a simplified DIY Plex) when I’m not.
So I get the “smart” part of the TV without the privacy concerns.
I think you'll find most experts now agree that Samsung's QD-OLED panels have surpassed LG's WOLED panels.
https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
https://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/samsung-s-s99-h-qd-oled-tv-w...
The crown has changed hands most years since QD-OLED came out. I appreciate the citations. I wasn’t up to date on the 2026 models, but in 2025 both flagships were very close. Many reviewers called it a draw, iirc. That’s partly why I said “in my opinion”. Mine is also based on the general design of the sets. I’ve found the port placement, bezel, and stand design more to my liking on LGs, but that’s entirely subjective. I also cannot speak to how rootable Samsung sets are, since I don't own one.
I’m glad to see the crown change hands, though. It’d be ideal if there were more contenders.
Samsung still doesn't support Dolby Vision, though, as far as I know. LG does.
Don't give LG your money. Jesus people stop it.
Boycotts can only work when there are viable alternatives. When there isn't a suitable replacement, and abstaining is unpopular, the needle isn't moved. Elections are often the same: people vote on huge package deals, each of them worse than the other, when looked at from a different perspective.
> Boycotts can only work when there are viable alternatives.
This just isn't true. People could stop buying new TVs altogether, we aren't talking about food or blood pressure medication. This is a luxury item. If I had to guess I'd say most people purchased their last TV because it was bigger than their old one which still worked.
A real shame, BTW. WebOS is a very nice OS and their TVs could be perfect if they were more open.
Think of running emulators directory on the TV, or turning it into a VNC/RDP/X terminal.
Boycotting them is a completely reasonable response. Their stance on privacy is beyond ridiculous. Something right out of 1984.
The problem is that if you want a good OLED, there isn’t much of an alternative. Even if you don’t buy from LG or Samsung directly, they make essentially all the OLED TV panels on the market. A Sony or Panasonic OLED is still built on an LG or Samsung panel. So if you truly want to boycott them, your options for a quality modern display are very limited.
I bought my C1 before I was aware of how bad LG’s privacy posture was. The point of my comment is that you can still get the panel quality, and even some of the “smart” capability, without feeding them data, as long as you’re willing to treat the TV as a display and nothing else.
Projector with media server running Kodi with various plugins. Projector screen is unbreakable by kids or pets and projector itself is high enough to be outside a range of them.
Kodi is controlled by smartphones connected to home network so no need to store one physical remote controller.
Bonus: When you are outside home, you can still control remotely your projector/media server via VPN. Which is handy when you need control over what kids are watching.
Using like this over 6 years now, no complains and any reasons to change. Only disadvantage is that you need to spend one evening by configuration, but then it works as intended.
Someone mentioned that Kodi takes screenshots and phones home? Not sure what's true, but better check before installing.
Simple answer that no one seems to suggest:
--> Buy a TV in Europe.
Regulation blah blah slowing down innovation also does that: it protects your privacy.
So, get the TV of your choice but European version.
I’ve done this. My new LG C5 has no ads or anything. I have (software) disabled all spyware, though most of them were already pre-disabled. Nothing has changed after connecting it to the internet (fuck me right), except downloading apps, which i removed. No performance/ad hits, yet.
We have bastards trying to sell us stuff and steal our info over here, too. And political bastards that let them.
I have a TCL QM8, which until recently I was using for its full smart-TV capabilities, and always feeling rather icky about all of the stuff it was sending. I would keep getting notifications about the microphone being turned on even when I had explicitly disabled it at every level.
I eventually got an NVIDIA Shield Pro, for which I:
1) Blew away the default launcher and installed Projectivity
2) adb disabled nearly all of the background Nvidia/Google services, following a guide
3) Removed all of the preinstalled streaming apps and added back the ones I use, opting for more privacy-respecting alternatives like Smarttube over YouTube standard.
Finally, I then factory reset my TCL TV and put its Google TV into "Basic" mode, which makes it a dumb TV for all intents and purposes. The TV itself is not allowed to connect to the internet anymore for any reason--everything goes through the set-top box.
The skeezy thing is the TV still tries very hard to get you to enable regular mode. Like if you try to launch ANY app of ANY kind, it will throw some pop-up about needing to connect to the internet to do so, and then flashing some fine print about how this will revert the TV to normal Google TV/Android TV mode. I had a guest in my house using the TV while I was in another room and suddenly asking me for my WiFi password, and when I went to see what was up, saw that they were halfway through opening the floodgates again before I stopped them.
I have a Sony Bravia Google TV, but did not want to sign in with a Google account. I also use it in ”basic mode” with Samba Interactive TV disabled. I used to sideload streaming apps with adb, but have switched to Obtainium now. After a software update the TV started to suggest signing in, but at least they did not opt me in automatically like Apple used to do with iCloud after iOS updates.
Metz Classic from Germany. Pricey, but privacy friendly. https://metz-ce.de/en/
Never heard of this brand. I guess I must be poor :D (German in Germany)
Keep the glass disconnected from the network forever and it will solve the vast majority of your concerns.
Jellyfin is the answer if you are looking to spend a premium on a privacy-focused media experience.
Better hope that no guest connects the TV to their phone hotspot to watch their Netflix like one user in a previous post reported happened to them.
Could you provide any more details about this post or the resulting consequences someone suffered because of their guest connecting a TV to their hotspot? I tried to find the original post by looking up "guest connects the TV to their phone hotspot to watch their Netflix site:news.ycombinator.com" on Google but only found four threads where you had referenced that post before.
Buy whatever TV you think is best, don't connect it to network, and then use an AppleTV box to run it which is connected to network.
The whole telemetry stuff isn’t even new - I’m in the process of rooting and building custom firmware for my 2018 Panasonic OLED running Firefox OS, it doesn’t look to have as much as the newer sets, but there is still far more than I’m comfortable with.
Managed to establish root via a tv data channel, just working out the custom firmware and rollback options (it does an A/B firmware thing, just making sure there is a path back if I goof something).
I think at this point if someone charges 50% upfront of what hypothetically they could make from all the bloat people would pay for it. If a smart TV costs 500$ and each TV makes them 400$ in 10 years then charging 700$ sans smart features would sell if they advertised it that way particularly and the quality of the picture was good. And this is even profitable because getting 50c now for a dollar that may or may not come 10 years down the road is much more sensible for the finances.
Digital signage displays might be the only out of the box solution at this point. I wish there were more open source TV firmware options in the spirit of dd-wrt
If you want 55", this is the way. Otherwise just buy a computer monitor and use it as a TV. I bought a 55" digital signage display a month ago on sale for AUD$400, that's about USD$280.
I think a lot of peple don't know how you can do this the right way:
1. just don't give your TV internet and use another device on the HDMI
OR
2. Buy semi professional network infrastructure from companies like ubiquity: They support a feature called VLAN: You can put your tv into the privacy VLAN and just block internet access on your network layer, or you could filter stuff etc.
My biggest issue with this is, the rest of my family. As many times as I've put a streamer box and instructed my family to use it, they always default to the built in system.
Idk why (apparently) no one has mentioned it yet.
Forget consumer TVs.
Get a commercial "display".
That's it. That's the solution.
Pros: dumb display. Longer warranty.
Cons: more expensive.
Have given up. Not happy about it. But realistically I'm not going to spend half my waking hours locking down my digital existence from a wall of threats and still failing. The bad guys have near unlimited financial resources, incentives, and technology to breach whatever feeble defenses I erect. Nobody has any privacy anymore. Live life assuming anything and everything you say, do, search, browse is going to be in the newspaper tomorrow.
Any TV as long as you don't connect it to the internet in any way, shape or form.
Then connect either your computer directly to it or if you want something fancier, use an Apple TV.
Anything else is just too much pain - you can spend a lot of time debloating your TV, but then you either break updates (not good) or the updates will revert it and you are back on the square one. Not fun unless it is your hobby somehow.
What's wrong with breaking updates if you never access the open internet from the TV? Genuine question
Modern TV is just a hidden computer with quite a significant computing power. And those can be leveraged further - HackingTeam from Italy got owned by an embedded device (printer if I remember correctly).
And as a bonus, these devices are almost never monitored - you probably don't monitor it's CPU or network usage which makes it a good candidate for this sort of things.
The tv doesn’t matter much. Don’t connect it to the internet, set it to remember the hdmi port when it powers on. Then plug it in to an older laptop and you can control everything that way, play media locally, block ads. An Apple TV would be fine too
The simple answer is: any
Smart TVs are just a normie alternative for what tech enthusiasts were doing for 30ish years: put a computer next to the tv and use it.
Alternative, get yourself something capable of running Moonlight (https://moonlight-stream.org/) and run Sunshine (https://app.lizardbyte.dev/Sunshine/) on your workstation, I am even playing games this way. RPI 5 works great, also libreelec (https://libreelec.tv/) is excellent and has Moonshine plugin.
You buy a TV, NEVER connect it to the internet and set up small computer next to it. Obviously not Android based as it is spyware on its own.
Then use it. It is that simple. No special methods, software, whatever needed, tv becomes only a large monitor for your computer conveniently placed in living room.
> NEVER connect it to the internet
Weren’t there reports of smart TVs that connected to nearby unsecured TVs of the same manufacturer so they could download firmware and send telemetry?
I love the comments around rooting the TV. Tickles the hacker in my.
My setup is a CRT a neighbor was giving away. Add an HDMI to RCA adaptor.
What I like is that it is self-regulating. It sucks compared to modern televisions, so I don't sit there for hours.
Fun tip: watching archival new footage feels authentic.
The only solution I use is connecting the TV (LG OLED) via ethernet and set a traffic rule to drop all outbound internet packets from the TV and then have an Apple TV for viewing.
However, I bought my Apple TV in 2022-2023 when it was like £129, so excellent value for money, not so sure nowadays.
The reason why I keep it connected to the network (with a traffic rule) is I use home assistant to run automations etc so need at least LAN connectivity.
I have a Sony Bravia that I've never connected to the internet, only to an Apple TV and a Steam Deck. It makes a noise when you turn it on or off, and sometimes it makes that noise all by itself while turned off. Makes me feel like it turns itself on to try and collect audio data periodically. But! I think since the TV itself is never going to have direct internet access, I'm not that worried about it sending my data.
I was thinking about buying this ViewSonic CDE65G3:
https://www.cdw.com/product/viewsonic-cde65g3-65-inch-4k-uhd...
It's damn near impossible to find an OS-free TV that is actually for sale like this.
I got a 2025 Bravia because after some research it may not have the best panels, but it's the least likely to pull shannigans around snapshotting your viewing and forcibly connecting to a open wifi and that sort of thing. I connected it, updated the bios, immediately killed the wifi and I've been happy with an Apple TV ever since.
Unless the Apple TV decides to be evil, I feel safe.
I’m sticking with my 2010 Toshiba REGZA until it dies. 1080p is fine for me.
Some good answers here already. Step 1 is always not to connect the TV to the Internet. You can go further and remove the WiFi daughterboard and/or desolder the chip.
Step 2 is to connect a TV box, but if you replace Samsumg, LG, or Google by Apple or Amazon, you have made no progress at all towards privacy.
Having researched this topic extensively, there are two main options for real user control and privacy. First, you can run an ordinary Linux distro on a mini PC, with a "launcher" such as Plasma Bigscreen. It's fine with an airmouse, but you will be mostly running upscaled desktop apps that aren't remote or controller friendly.
The best solution is actually to keep the mini PC and compile Lineage OS (Android TV 17) for a generic x86 target. This is a true degoogled Android TV distro that can, with some more hacking, run any ARM TV app from F-Droid, Aurora or other source. It is by far the best solution in that it is a true 10-foot UX and is compatible with almost all TV apk apps out there. The downside is that this not exist off-the-shelf. I spent a couple of days putting this together with Claude and it takes several hours to compile. I also found several upstream bugs in the process and will be submitting patches to the AOSP and Lineage.
There's a big gap between LG and Samsung, whose terms of service states that they sell your data to advertisers, and Apple, whose privacy policy states that they don't do that. Of course, there's an even bigger gap between Apple who can access your data if they wanted to or were told to and a home brewed Linux media box.
Unless you view privacy as all or nothing, I'd say replacing Google with Apple is progress. I think the majority of people are more upset at the idea of how their data is being sold for advertising than they are concerned about being able to act completely out of sight of any actor.
> There's a big gap between LG and Samsung, whose terms of service states that they sell your data to advertisers, and Apple, whose privacy policy states that they don't do that.
This may be true, but Apple can change that policy overnight. Apple also won't let you run programs that are not on its store, and won't even give you a Web browser. It's shocking people that people are willing to accept such restrictions. It isn't my hardware if I can't decide what runs on it.
They could change their policy, but Apple removing privacy protections would be front page news (at least where I get my news).
Is it really shocking to you that people treat their entertainment device as an appliance? Everything I control is something I'm responsible for patching and fixing and adding new features to. I don't mind faffing about with my Linux desktop, but the TV needs to just work.
The other day I saw this project to flash your TV with custom software: https://www.tiktok.com/@itstundealao/video/77013919041931215...
Here are the repos mentioned: https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv
https://github.com/simbasjungles/free-my-tv
The video is pretty cool. The guy flashes his tv with a custom firmware with a look/feel and elements he chose, plus a feature he created to leave handwritten notes for his girlfriend on the home screen of the TV, remotely from his laptop
I don't know how true it still is, but dumb TVs have traditionally been marketed as "commercial displays". You'll pay more and have to bring your own media, of course.
> commercial displays
These are generally meant to display (static) advertisement media, you'll have a false experience watching movies or playing games on them.
What is "a false experience"?
I believe those displays intended for static advertising etc are not set up for good refresh rate or cinema viewing, so they'll have very poor e.g. ghosting during action sequences, low contrast ratios, a lot like a LCD TV from the early 2000s.
Ah, I see. I saw some do that in front of fashion shops or jewelries, yep.
Samsung and LG OLED TVs are especially great, owned them for years and they're still going great with good efficiency. I also heard that smartubenext from github might be of great resource for "adless youtube". The new Apple TV 4k is great too but would be absolutely better paired with the Homeview/Homepod (immersive voice something)
Paul Graham in his keynote speech at PyCon[1] bolted an iMac to the wall as TV.
I use a Mac Mini M4 and a huge 300 euro 4K screen as my TV. much better than an Apple TV and no spying or ads at all.
Best TV in my life, a user friendly computer.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI
I've been on the projector train for many years. In addition to their being awesome for the home theater experience (they're not for everyone or every environment), I've yet to read about a manufacturer engaging in the bs happening on TVs.
Personally I opt for projectors; but similar problems arise with the built-in apps. They're just rubbish. My personal preference is to use no abuiltin apps, just use a laptop to access Jellyfin with a Logitech K400 (keyboard with inbuilt trackpad) sitting on my lap.
The next step for me will be setting up a Raspberry PI with Plasma Bigscreen.
I really want to like the K400, I've got one that I use for my TV PC, but I can't lie, it's an incredibly clunky experience and possibly the worst form factor I've ever seen a touchpad in.
I have a Samsung and I never connected it to WiFi or accepted their terms for “advanced features” like voice control. I don’t get any ads or any slow down. I suppose this works until they start shipping TVs with cellular modems to ping home.
Dumb question, but what happens if you never connect one of those TVs, I assume it will collect a bunch of stuff but all means nothing if it can't phone home right? Or do these things now ship with some built-in cellular data telemetry?
The fact that we even need to have this conversation is messed up...
Thanks everyone for more practical comments, definitively bookmaking this post.
Get a big monitor with all the specs you want and connect it to an old laptop. You can watch whatever you want on there. You can even play video games on your Playstation or XBox if it has an HDMI port.
Show me an example of this monitor. Table stakes to compete with a midrange TV:
- >= 85"
- VESA mount
- 4K @ 120Hz (or better)
- < $2K
- "infinite" contrast ratio
Not sure where you're getting those requirements. OP said 60-80 inches, 4k with at least 60hz, and they said "I don’t mind paying a premium". They also never mentioned a VESA mount or "infinite" contrast ratio.
There are lots of monitors that fit OP's description.
There are a dozen TVs at any decent big box store that meet those specs, and roughly zero monitors, even if you look online.
Seriously: Name one counterexample.
Here's a 75" monitor after 1 single search: https://www.dell.com/en-gb/shop/monitors/apd/dell-pro-p-75-4...
Yes, it's only 60Hz, but again, 1 search.
LG 65EP5Q
> I haven’t owned a TV in years
… But you feel the desire to go back to it? Why?
Huge fan of "never give it wifi, hook it up to a little linux box, remote control it via input leap" myself
Not input-leap, nowadays you'd use lan-mouse (wayland!) or, i was as much surprised as anybody, kde connect
I mean I'm still on cinnamon and thus X11 and thus input-leap, but good to know what the wayland stack is like
Can't recommend a TV as the newest one I have is from 2016, runs android tv, works offline but takes ages to start up.
But if you go for a projector, stay away from XGIMI, I helped install a horizon 20 series for a friend and while the image quality was great, it was impossible to setup without connecting it to the internet.
Are there no "dumb" TVs left? Surely you can still buy a television that has no option to connect to the internet/doesn't have built-in apps/is just simply a display? I haven't shopped for a TV in a while, I figured they're still out there though
I’m so pleased my old Panasonic plasma is still going. It used to have WiFi, but apparently that was an afterthought connected to a hidden usb port at the back.
Last time I took it off the wall I accidentally grabbed it by the WiFi card that I didn’t know was there and now it doesn’t have WiFi or a hidden usb port anymore.
I just dont connect mine to the internet, hook up an Apple TV to it.
- Buy any TV you want
- Don't connect it to the network
Doesn't work, all the spyware modules connect to open Wifi of neighbors, and soon, LTE.
This is repeated every time this topic comes up, but so far it's just a conspiracy theory. An urban legend. An old wives' tale. Are there any documented cases of this happening?
Some do this (Samsung), but the more common tactic is to throw constant nags up if the telemetry is not being sent to the manufacturer.
I did my research and bought one that does not do this (2025 TCL), but, if it turned out that it did, I'd have shamelessly returned it. I'd also have issued a chargeback if the store gave me any crap.
Even with all that, if you install firmware updates over the network, then disconnect WiFi, the TV becomes unusable until you factory reset it. (I did this because its EDID is corrupted, and I have to override it with a linux cmdline. The update did not help.)
This hasn't quite been my experience. I got a Samsung QLED TV about a year ago, and besides some frustration at the initial setup experience, I haven't had any issues with it.
The only "nags" I see is if I accidentally press one of the internet-app shortcuts on the remote (netflix, youtube, etc). If you do that, it will give you a popup saying "can't do this without wifi", which isn't entirely surprising. But I took the remote apart and removed the contacts behind those buttons, so they can't be pressed anymore, and I can't remember the last time I saw that popup.
I obviously have no way of telling if it's secretly connected to the sole low-signal open WiFi near me, but I haven't seen a single advertisement or anything that looks vaguely like it could have originated from the internet.
Agree that it should be observed before assumed. Would a software-defined radio and a packet capturing mechanism be sufficient?
With TV makers having recently destroyed trust and there not being a good way for consumers to force trust it makes little difference whether they are doing it or not.
If you can't tell whether your disconnected TV is spying on you but you know that you cannot trust it, it's better to treat it as compromised.
Amazon Sidewalk is a real life product that offers this over bluetooth
Just because something exists as a product, doesn't mean it exists inside your TV.
probably, but I'll let gp answer. But I want guarantees that they don't do that, until them I'll consider the fact that if they can and it's profitable they will do it
If you want a guarantee, that's a conservative threat model and a fair position. What's not fair is GP saying "doesn't work, all the TVs do XYZ", when not a single TV in the real world has ever actually done XYZ.
Ultimately I'll need to find data to settle how paranoid I might be. I'm still leaning on not enough. But isn't it also not fair to claim not a single tv has done it? Proving an universal is not easy for gp but the inverse of forall is not a not exists. And I know the world of middle management profit optimization.
I indeed cannot prove it. I also can't universally prove that wombats don't have telekinesis. But the preponderance of the evidence points to neither being true.
I know there are lots of advocacy groups and youtube channels that are testing TV models and would LOVE to be the first to break this story and publicly shame Samsung or whoever. But it simply hasn't happened.
Some TVs will refuse to work if you don't create an account and connect them to internet. They won't usually advertise this. You may have to repeatedly return those TVs as defective as you find them.
Until we learn they Bluetooth beacon and do mesh to find some Internet connected LG fridge.
Better hope that no guest connects the TV to their phone hotspot to watch their Netflix like one user in a previous post reported happened to them.
Got a Bravia TV for cheap back in 2014 that happened to be pre-Android TV (and pre-Google TV) so Android TV was just released and those something-else-os were "outdated".
Sony stopped releasing security patches a while back and there are no longer apps whatsoever and they all were crap - the youtube one was pure torture because of how slow it was and the web browser was just as miserable as ie6.
But besides that I can send it commands to it via its IP and control it, consume stuff via a DLNA daemon, do screen mirroring, and all the usual tv stuff. The image quality and sound are still great after 10+ years though I can't care less about oled 4k 120Hz and all that stuff. So it's no longer a "smart" tv but it's not also so "dumb" for a now dumb tv.
My in-laws have a Bravia of the same era. The image quality is amazing and it sounds great. The apps were never really any good, but now they are all outdated and doesn't work. They just hooked up a ChromeCast, and it's perfect for their use.
I had my old Bravia TV, but the screen has issues like half turning into black or random colors through it. I'll try to fix it and use it again!
Xiaomi 3rd gen box. Or Onn 4k pro for $60 if you don’t need truehd.
Root and bootloader unlock allowed.
Run cleanyour.tv on it. Remove all services. Plug in to a smart tv or dumb tv that is never on WiFi itself.
I have an old 55” LG that has no ”smart” anything. It is connected to cable TV network and via HDMI to M1 Mac Mini. Genelec for sound. No network, no nothing. It is ”only” 1080p, but you don’t need 4K or high refresh rate. You think you do, but you don’t (unless you are a serious gamer or a massive sports fan). You can buy similar display for about 100-150€ in these parts. They can have several years of mileage still. If you need cable TV connection, make sure that specific model has it.
You can make a cheap linux box from old NUC to work as media centre and install it behind the display or TV. There is several ways to control those with your phone, but I just use BT keyboard and mouse. Some old Intel NUC’s have IR-sensors, so you can map your remotes IR-codes to use it with a remote (never bothered to do it personally, but it is possible and we do it all the time in AV). You can of course use Apple TV, but personally I don’t find it worth it.
I worked in government/corporate AV for 8 years and interestingly mostly the enterprise grade stuff has none of the ”smart” bullshit consumer stuff has. Many customer pay to have WiFi etc. disabled on their monitor at the warehouse. Mostly in AV you just repackage same technology in more and more bullshit and resell it to the customer with bunch off added junk, such as these smart displays. I would never touch one. But it is true consumers have been royally fucked by the TV manufacturers.
Would a projector fit in your space? There are 4k laser projectors with really good quality these days. And they don't come with any apps, just HDMI port. The good quality laser ones are so bright that you can see them pretty well during the day.
OT:
There are several videos on YT regarding removing all this Ad/Spy/Bloatware from "smart" TVs using Claude and only a few prompts: Actually, it should be very easy for most poeple here on HN to do this as Ive found some videos which seem to be done by "non techies" and they were successful.
wild to me that all the top responses are saying to buy a tv and root it to remove the spyware. Are there really no options that don't come pre-built spyware? Anything that doesn't have wifi in the first place?
Roku TVs are really easy to turn into dumb TVs. Don’t connect the WiFi, and set it to always turn onto the HMDI input your PC/device is connected to. No tracking, ads, or extra steps.
"Use some set top box and don't connect tv to internet" is a common advice, but what about ethernet through hdmi? Will the TV really not reach the internet through the box you use? If not, then what is the purpose of Hdmi HEC?
2026 TCL I just bought seems to work fine without internet
I was able to root my Samsung TV easily with Codex, disable updates and spyware, MITM everything with the eMudhra certs. The problem is no one really knows what these TVs do, they're all liars with 100 page privacy policies that will legally allow anything, and encrypted HTTPS communications that we can't even ordinarily monitor what they're sending. They can be updated at any time to start sending more or less data without your knowledge. So I feel the only realistic option is find a TV that can be rooted and do that. If you root a TV, you can fully disable network access and then use an Apple TV, or use the TV's software with MITM and deeper analysis with AI to disable snooping.
LG Ultragear 48GQ900-B
Ok I'm cheating, it's a monitor. Only it's the size of a TV and there's a remote.
But no tuner and no ARC.
But I don't care.
Zero smarts, boots in a millisecond, auto-wakes on device power-up, input switching just works, no half-baked HDMI-CEC hell. No wifi. No network. Nothing to spy on me because it's a FUCKING MONITOR and THAT'S IT.
https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-48gq900-b-gaming-monitor
Use any screen or projector connected to a linux box or AppleTV for streaming. Personally I use an old laptop running Kodi.
What sort of screen? Well, whatever you can tolerate. I use a very old commercial display I got through an e-waste reseller. It’s not great, but it was cheap ans has worked fine for years. If you insist on a “TV” screen or any monitor/projector with connectivity, pick one you can root. As other users have pointed out, simply “don’t connect to the Internet” unfortunately isn’t enough to guarantee your data stays private.
My three Sony Bravias from 2010 are still going well - LCD 1080p, no screen wear at all (a later Sony I bought ~2017 has already worn to buggery)
Not sure if there’s even a used market for older TVs, though
An interesting question is why aren't there companies in the same vein as AMG was for Mercedes, that buy the product, modify and resell them? In this case, buy the factory LG and using expertise, lobotomize it and resell it people here? If this post shows the demand the where is the supply?
It doesn't seem that it's a DCMA limitation, yet at least. Would it fall under "right to repair"?
Never plug it into the network. Connect it to an AppleTV or something else that is. Then who cares.
It's not hard, in fact it's what OP said they're going to do.
Presumably they want to make sure their dollars go to the least-awful company while doing so.
A computer monitor and small computer.
The Apple TV itself might be more privacy friendly or open about policies, but I have no reason to believe that any streaming app you’d install on it would provide for more privacy than the app installed directly on the TV.
At least they won’t record you, which is something others won’t promise, and, if they did, I wouldn’t trust them.
I shop for elite televisions at the “reuse” center, my latest score was a 2013 Panasonic plasma which is a perfectly good dumb TV hooked up to an XBOX ONE and a home theatre. Downstairs I have a big curved Samsung 4K attached to my big PC. Someday I’ll see the high end OLED that I crave.
If you have the room and price is no object you definitely want at least 5.1 theatre, both movies and TV programs sound great in 5.1. The next step up is a second subwoofer, even for music subwoofers take a load off your other speakers and reduce distortion.
Does anyone make TVs with Opera/Vewd (rythmes with lewd) anymore? That's what mine is running, and it supports Netflix and whatnot, but doesn't show ads or spy.
Also, Android TV boxes sometimes have shenanigans installed by the manufacturer, but they are easy to customize to only run what you want, and they run fine without a Google account.
As far as I can tell, there's no way to use an Apple TV box without linking it to an Apple account and letting them spy on you.
> run fine without a Google account
But you still need to accept Google TOS, before being allowed to do anything
Aside from getting a "dumb" tv, your best bet right now is to get a tv running google/androidtv and run a script like https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv against it to remove all of the tracking etc. from it.
buy a commercial display meant for advertising or store/business use
As everyone is saying: just don't let it on the network. It's a little annoying because you can't have smart home stuff like "turn off the TV when I leave the house" working, but that's it.
My thing is, don't use an Apple TV. For the last 15 years or so I've just used a Mac Mini plugged into a big TV, and it's perfect. Get a wireless keyboard and trackpad and one of the many available trays that will hold them together. I'm literally typing this right now on this exact setup.
It should mostly work with HDMI CEC. My Android TV (Nvidia Shield) will turn my TV on and off. I only use the LG remote to adjust the volume although if you're using an AVR, it should do everything.
you can let it on the network, just block it from leaving the network. Lets you have the remote control features but without the risk.
Better hope that no guest connects the TV to their phone hotspot to watch their Netflix like one user in a previous post reported happened to them.
I recommend turn off tv via home automation involving smart plug thingy, and tv set to turn on on each power cycle return
Personally, I used to be very privacy-conscious, but have given up on enforcing it everywhere over the years. I still care, more than most people I know in real life, but when it comes to stuff like TV's I just get whatever has the best panel for the lowest price. Last time I bought a TV, that was an LG TV running WebOS, which is not exactly the best from a privacy standpoint. Initially I used it with an Apple TV, but now I just use the native apps and try to disable the telemetry that I can in the settings panel.
sorry to interject on your experience, but this sounds really bleak
Unsolicited advice, with a different approach, from personal preference / experience:
Sitting screens considered harmful.
Treat them as a liability and "trash"-adjacent, no matter the actual display technology or whether you can remove the spyware.
That goes double for TVs, so don't buy one.
Re-invest the time and attention you save in a good projector and a generally "invisible" screen / room setup.
I'm a happy owner of a $1000 DLP LED projector and a similarly priced motorized 150" screen. Do look into laser projection, which has been getting steadily more affordable for a while now.
Disclaimer: I've never subscribed to the "maximum screen size" formulas. As long as my own nose isn't in the way when I look to either end, it's fine, and inching towards that range is exactly what I'm deliberately going for. So yes, I'm one of those people who sits in the front rows at the movies.
I keep filler-free shows (TNG, anyone? :') movies and game time strictly out of band. So to me that's even more enjoyable in an immersive and optimally shareable setup whenever I do purposefully take the time.
More reading, as well as a nudge towards doing stuff, is probably the main side effect I'm after here, as you can tell.
Best setup is buying whatever tv, never connecting it to internet, and connecting to an external device running whatever os flavor you prefer. I have setup using bazzite with a steam controller and an old laptop, and added non-steam games for YouTube and jellyfin, works great for my needs and I play a few small steam games on the tv aswell
I buy the best tv that satisfies my needs. I will not handicap my viewing pleasure reading chicken little stories of the paranoid Internet.
Few years back, I bought two TVs: 65" LG latest at the time TV ($2k) and a 55" Sceptre tv from Walmart for $200. The TV from Walmart is a dumb TV with terrible speakers. So, in addition to tv I got a $150 soundbar and an Apple TV. I almost don't watch the LG one and daily watch the Walmart tv. It’s good enough in this setup.
Whichever one does not connect to the internet
Buy any TV you like, never connect it to the internet.
Get a cheap open source media box and attach it to the TV.
fwiw I've disabled ACR on my Sony Bravia, not the cleanest way but it's something useful perhaps if you already have one. https://github.com/joelio/bravia-guard
I ran into issues with only the smart TV apps being able to provide certain formats like Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, etc.
Suggestions for second hand the last of the “pre” smart TV’s.
What’s models. What sort of year? What to look for?
One that can be purchased and shipped from the EU.
They have the strongest consumer protections and guarantees.
I'd go for a Sony.
No TV at all, for series and movies get at projector and some sound system, to keep update with the news, read or listen to newspaper in the morning and that is it.
Disconnect the TV from internet and use a solution like Apple TV for apps you would like in TV. Even better is a Mini PC connected to the TV if you are savvy enough.
Is this really more complicated than just never connecting it to wifi and then using a dedicated device like AppleTV only?
Any AndroidTV and then run CleanYourTV [1] on it, gets completely rid of all Google ads and additional bloatware by the manufacturer. Maybe run Claude against the repo first to check for malware but going by the number of stars it seems to be solid.
[1] https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv
Samsung is the worst by far. Samsung (TizenOS) does not respect even privacy opt outs. It seems like LG, Google TV OS (Sony) and Fire TV OS (Amazon) and VidaaOS at least do that.
https://allaboutcookies.org/smart-tv-tracking-privacy-opt-ou...
Never connect to internet is the best option.
Curious -- Does Samsung smart TV (circa 2019) allow us to root? Where can I find the community and tools around Samsung devices.
Out of curiosity, do these “smart” TV features even matter if you’re just switching to one of the HDMI inputs? I’ve used an external device to drive my TV for years, and I honestly have no idea what is installed on the TV itself.
They don’t. My Hisense doesn’t nag me at all. I just use my Apple TV and 4k player and PS5 without issue. It’s not nearly as hard as all the comments here have made it out to be.
Maybe it’s more of a factor for people who watch over the air broadcasts or use cable TV. I haven’t used either in years.
Similarly, my Hisense TV never gets a chance to show the VIDAA interface. It just displays the HDMI input and I switch that between Kodi running on a Raspberry Pi and a VirginMedia TV box.
They will probably find an open (or semi-open, like the comcast ones) to connect to.
ACR also notes what you're watching even on HDMI and will upload it if given a chance.
Philips 28inch CRT witha worldwide chassis that only shows vintage arcade ganes through MiSTer fpga and can sync to any 50 to 60hz signal
The answer is really simple and this gets asked a lot.
Buy any TV, don't connect it to the Internet. Then connect the HDMI or DP to Apple TV and you're good to go.
I think the answer now changes with ability to root some of these tvs.
Still, might be best to run an android tv box yourself, and plug hdmi.
I bought a Hisense TV three years ago. I do not connect it to the Internet. I use an Apple TV for streaming. I went with Hisense because it was well reviewed. I think you'll be fine with whatever TV you buy as long as you follow this strategy.
My preference is not connecting the TV to the network at all, and using an Apple TV via HDMI.
I just had claude connect to my Android TV over adb and rip out all of the spyware it could find.
I have an LG OLED. It's gorgeous, but
- It's MAC address is blocked from the network
- It's never had WIFI credentials
- It's ONLY ever used with an Apple TV or PlayStation
The consensus thus far appears to be that all modern TVs wipe their ass with user privacy.
Given what happened with games very recently, perhaps the question should be rephrased to: "Which modern TVs support flashing unsigned/self-signed firmware?"
Gamers Nexus has a good discovery video on how extensive smart TVs are snooping on people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA
I get that they’re not equivalent, price wise, but have you tried searching for “55 inch computer monitor”? They sell large ones for use in video conferencing rooms for example.
Anybody has experience with TCL and Spectre? I'm seeing them a lot, even saw one really big TCL TV in a local shop and loved the colors and the FPS, but no idea how good are they really, are they longer-lasting, are they annoying if you don't give them network access etc.
I have a TCL that I'm happy with. I followed 'some instructions somewhere' to use adb to disable the default launcher and replace it with the ProjectIvy launcher, which is nice and clean and has no ads or promotions (ads by any other name).
Mine _is_ connected to my network, but I have DNS blocking via self-hosted Adguard along with specific SmartTV block lists and regular expressions, plus a firewall for the 'entertainment' VLAN that's fairly tight. I'm also monitoring (and recording to a database) all outgoing traffic on the entertainment VLAN so I can add further firewall restrictions - once I have the time to analyse the logs, maybe after I've retired...
From your message I gather it's a Google's Android TV software, then? Can you send me a shortened / anonymised link to the "some instructions somewhere", please?
I use AGH as well but haven't gotten around to an untrusted VLAN yet; once I get a TV I'm definitely adding one though...
Spectre is the only manufacturer I'm aware of still mass producing non-smart consumer TVs.
Where are you buying them? I can't find them and other users seem to reporting the same. I'm thinking they are silently discontinued.
Do local repair shops offer aftermarket “TV lobotomy” services these days?
You have local repair shops?
I was thinking about the places that repair phones, but was deliberately vague because I’m not sure what’s out there these days.
Sceptre. They have okay 4K panels at ludicrously cheap prices at Walmart that don’t have WiFi or a network port or any smarts at all. HDMI goes in, rendered images come out, end of story.
Do they sell them in stores, because they seem to always be sold out on the website every time I check?
A lot of people are saying to not connect an ethernet cable to the TV, but what about if I want to connect the TV to LAN for my Jellyfin server?
Buy an Apple TV.
But I have zero interest in using Apple services though.
Then hook up some other sort of computer or streaming box or whatever. I have no further recommendations because I went with an Apple TV and have never looked back. It just works.
It's not hard to find options if you stop looking in stupid places with bad search terms. "TV" on Amazon is literally the innermost circle of consumer hell.
> I don’t mind paying a premium
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1916990-REG/lg_65ep5q...
A RPI 5/4 with a basic TV works really good !
LTT did a video not too long ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJh72_O4pXE
I used to work in VFX, and for our big bright displays in the office we used digital signage displays.
I started using them at home in about 2018, after my nice medium budget sony TV died in a way that I couldn't repair.
I currently have an old HD NEC 48" display attached to an apple TV, and a freeview recorder for broadcast (although 98% of TV is done via apple TV)
Pros:
the screen is bright and adjustable. You can, if you wish fiddle with the colours and brightness
The screen is designed for 24/7 duty cycle, so is built like a fucking tank
It has all the HDMI you would ever need, plus displayport compute module ports (if that floats your boat) you can also get an ethernet remote control module (never tried it so it might be shit)
Second hand, they are dirt cheap. on ebay there are a couple of them in various sizes for <£400
If you don't have a compute module, the screen isn't going to spy on you.
Cons:
they are just screens. you will need speakers
They are built like tanks, so are heavy and thick (they are not the 15mm thick OLED jobbies)
Second hand, they generally don't come with stands or remotes
On ebay at least, they are generally pickup only.
In terms of driving it, Apple TV >> anything else I have used, apart from maybe a humax. Amazon firestick is frustratingly slow/unreliable. They also break after a year or so. Yes the apple TV is probably 5x the price, but the time to playing a show is about 7 seconds, from first pressing the remote to wake everything, to navigating to the show I want.
everything else I have used is horribly slow in comparison.
Disconnect it from the internet and connect a media player.
LineageOS TV is pretty good, just hook it into a non smart TV with HDMI CEC
Connect any TV to a laptop/desktop computer... running Linux, of course.
A Benq gaming monitor with an android box, chromecast tv, nvidia shield, etc, with a soundbar.
Many TVs are advertised with features (even local features) that don't work until the first firmware update.
So plug it in, and update it once.
Then you can do all the things these other comments suggest.
A solid late 80s RCA Colortrak 2000 with down-converter is a solid choice and excellent conversation piece. Hardwood finish, or go for the full console experience. Best part is it can't call anything.
There are retail displays that don't have the ad/nag/crap-ware of home TVs.
I was browsing through the comments and thinking how insane it is that the answer basically appears to be “there isn’t any”. Most common advice seems to be either “buy an evil product and work against it” or “buy a close-enough something-else not-(yet)-affected”. Another instance of “enough bad choices make better choices no longer an available option”? Smh…
Am i wrong if I say: get a simple PC screen, or a beamer without android ?
Thread-adjacent question: who is running REA against these tv firmwares so anyone can root their TV?
Hotel/Business Signage TV may be a good options, but they may lack speakers and be considerably more costly and harder to procure
A TV should just be a display. If I already have an Apple TV or a mini PC, I don't need another smart OS tracking my activity.
I'm in Brazil, so I'm going to get Smart TV TCL 50 inches. It comes with Linux and you can manage it via adb.
I recently was stressed about the same & ended up buying an LG C6, sticking it on an isolated VLAN, rooting it, then just letting it hit my NAS for jellyfin.
Don't connect it to a network, buy a mini pc and install Linux on it. Get a Logitech k400 keyboard with an integrated touchpad to control it remotely
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how absurd it is that our world regularly manufactures TVs that we have to be worried spy on us?
Can you imagine explaining that future to someone in the 80s? They would not believe that our society let it happen
It's probably pretty easy to explain it to somebody from the 80s.
"Remember that discussion we had about phones? Yeah, so TVs are kinda like that except they're really big so we stick them in a room instead of taking them with us".
One of my best scores at Radio Shack in the late 1980s was an LCD TV. The screen was about 2.5", black and white. It was powered by 4xAA or AAA batteries. It featured a single-knob tuner, an FM-like telescoping mast antenna, a speaker, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
The screen would snap down for carrying, and it was reflected for viewing in a mirror, so it required a strong light from above to shine through the LCD panel. There was an accessory backlight with its own batteries to snap on top.
It had a pocket-size form factor, and I carried it around to Disneyland so we could watch TV while we waited in line, and it could receive any OTA TV channel in VHF or UHF.
I kind of miss that little guy!
just pick a PC screen with TV sizes, although they might max out at 55 inches. displayspecifications.com has many hits for what has no FRC then.
Just open up whatever you buy and pull the networking components, microphones, and covert cameras. Leverage HDMI after that. Problem solved.
Yep, that solves the problem for 95+% of the population that barely knows how to use a screwdriver. /s
Finding and watching some Youtube repair to figure out where the parts are and learning to do it is cheaper than buying anything that isn't spying on you. It's just depressing this is what we have to put up with.
Any TV that you want. Just don't connect it to a network. Why is this hard?
I just rooted my LG in about 30 seconds [using claude] and disabled all the junk. can also run own apps / homebrew.
There is a huge need and somebody has to deliver
I think Sony/Apple/Huawei/whoevergotballs needs to make a full TV with screen, really expensive, not a set-top box, and for the love of god make it zero ads, zero profiling, and zero camera/mic on by default, allow it to install apps and make it fully customizable. There is plenty of people with money that would pay big bucks for a TV like that
We are all fed up of all this invasive, privacy breaching, ad targeting scheme, and the first one to crack that nut will reap it dearly
Buy something used that was manufactured before ca 2018. Or get a projector that doesn't have any smart stuff built in.
I was going to write buy Apple TV and never ever connect the actual TV to the internet, but:
- I am unsure whether modern TVs utilize ethernet over HDMI to connect to internet through Apple TV (I have no idea why Apple TV should allow this, but I don't trust Apple to not accidentally enable this)?
- I can only imagine nefarious five eyes reasons for why Apple released Apple TV that plays 4k60 exactly like the previous models, but now has 8 GB RAM, powerful machine learning CPU, and built-in microphones that are impossible to disable
So, apart from getting used prev gen Apple TV (and still having to trust company whose leader has to accept Trumps's lunch invite), I have no good advice.
- Almost nothing supports Ethernet over HDMI (this was already discussed in this thread).
- I can imagine several reasons for upgrading the CPU. Supply chain related, mostly.
That said, I am perfectly happy with previous generation Apple TVs and won’t be replacing them any time soon.
Would a simple pc monitor also work?
The one with the best looking picture at the store. Don't connect it to Internet and use your own streaming box (that you trust).
Really I think in store is the way to go. Some "low" and "mid" tvs look identical to me. Some "high end" are meh. Some other "low end" look great. I think it's a bit of a crapshoot. Not sure currently but Samsung QLED used to be rated well but I always thought LG OLED looked worlds better. I've always liked LG OLED although I've heard their firmware has gotten pretty predatorial...
W końcu padło to stwierdzenie "use your own streaming box (that you trust)". Ale które urządzenia są warte zaufania? Apple TV zapewne, ale jest bardzo drogi. Ja mam set top box Xiaomi 4K Box gen.2 i nie wiem czy mogę mu ufać...
Just use a desktop computer.
I'm unsure on current models, but historically the best bet (and what I did last in 2023) was to purchase a TV from Costco, as Costco used to (and probably still does) mandate that SKUs they sell must be able to be operated in a non-connected state. I bought a 70" Sony 4K TV in 2023 and /only/ the Costco version provided this option, but on first power on you could select "Basic Display" or "Connected Experience", and after that unless you explicitly changed it that was set. It's never asked to connect to a network or done anything I can detect as nefarious since, and is used only via an HDMI connected appliance I use for streaming.
You could just use something like adguard to block DNS requests for telemetry endpoints.
DNS layer blocking is very coarse and easily bypassed.
Agreed, some LG TVs even hardcode the DNS these days. A simple cron job that resolves the hostnames and blocks the IP on a firewall level is very hard to bypass though ;)
Just don't connect it to wifi
You can use a Sony Bravia connected to an Apple TV without connecting the Sony to the internet.
I read this as piracy and I was so confused.
Buy a TV from 2016. Mine's a Samsung from 2016. It showed me a EULA on first boot. I declined it. It's been a dumb TV ever since. One input is a LibeELEC NUC, the other an Apple TV, because Netflix requires a botnet to stream >480p.
4K is unironically a meme. You don't need it. A set of decent floor standing speakers (and room treatment) will elevate your movie experience far more than more pixels ever will.
Err - dont connect your tv to internet ?
Any TV if you disconnect from the network and stream via HDMI instead.
Better hope that no guest connects the TV to their phone hotspot to watch their Netflix like one user in a previous post reported happened to them.
buy projector, laser one are good, some of them are quite dumb in a good way. mostly US owned, or Japanese. Any chinese one are full of "android tv with their own flavors of spyware"
Digital signage displays are dumb PC screens in giant sizes, like you are looking for.
no, if you're plugging something in just pick a good tv and never connect it to internet :p
Does anyone know about the kiosk tvs used for professional displays? Do they still make/sell those?
That old kind that just had a VCR slot on the front.
Or a projector against a wall.
9 years ago I got a hisense 65h8c for around $800, at the time it seemed like the dumbest tv I could get (all new tvs, that now-old one included, are advertised as 'smart') that still hit other criteria. It has only ever connected over HDMI to a PC or an AV receiver. Still works great, used mostly for gaming, occasionally movie or show watching. It has weaker blacks and some edge bleeding, but meh; I'll never buy an OLED TV since at some point I'd play a game on it and soon enough after get burn-in from static UI elements.
Find an old projector TV
Samsung Frame is esthetically pleasing, high picture quality.
My honest answer at this point is none.
I'd recommend a search, this gets asked at least once a year
Stop connecting TVs to the internet.
Sceptre dumb TV. Failing that, large computer monitor or digital signage display. You WILL pay a premium.
buy a big monitor and hook whatever you want to it. samsung sells them and theyre about the same price as a tv, if not cheaper
A large format monitor that does not connect to the Internet nor has any smarts at all.
Also, do not plug any Internet-facing devices into it, have a captive SBC that connects to a LAN server hosting (legally owned) videos.
Well, I have CRTs in most of the rooms in my home. That's because of an unrelated condition for which I refuse to be treated, but they are great for privacy!
Do crts make you better, or lcds make you worse? What about plasma?
Plasmas are great, and I have one - and our main screen in the living room is just a bog standard Sony...I just love CRTs, but I'm a retro gaming nerd.
Panelook.com (DIY)
Another slightly pricier option is buy a digital signage display. These are screens intended for use in like retail floors or even outdoors. They tend to be extra durable, resistant to burn-in, very bright and devoid of most fluffy end user features.
I second this. Both my TVs at home are previous signage from my work. Samsung panels and the one that does have smart features is from the far flung past.
At this point I'd just hooking up a gaming monitor (a very large one) with separate speakers and low-spec computer to run it.
I researched a bit for business displays from Samsung and these also have enshittified with "smart" features, so it lost my trust as well.
just be careful to not buy a gaming monitor with Smart TV features (yes, those exist)
A "Dumb TV" that doesn't have any Android / set top OS on it. Plug a debian box into it via HDMI, and you're all set.
Rather than trying to get a TV which doesn't have blatant spyware (when in all likelyhood, they all do, or will get one in a software update), I would suggest solving the problem the other way around - get a TV you know you can disable that functionality in. Trusting the manufacturer is a recipe for disaster.
I stripped out the bluetooth+wifi module from my TV and keep it disconnected from ethernet. Now it doesn't matter what it tries to collect, it can't send it anywhere.
SOFTWARE SWITCHES CAN NEVER BE TRUSTED!
OP, I have been a user of the AppleTV family of products for years. I have no complaints. So far I trust Apple more than Roku or Amazon, and I find the devices work far more smoothly and easily than other players in this space.
Consequently, I have no interest in hooking ANY TV directly to the network. It seems pointless.
I'm 100% not interested in any discussions that begin with "buy model XXX and then install different software..."
I'm not going to hack my TV. I have no interest in sysadmining my television. Success for me would be finding a TV that would work fine for its working life without ever being attached to a wifi network, and that will not try to do so on its own (ie, by joining known-open networks like those provided by Comcast and ATT).
Any TV, just don't connect it to the internet
What my own research led me to: https://www.viewsonic.com/global/products/commercial-display... (OS-Free Commercial Display, all sizes available) + HTPC.
(Assuming you've already bought one and have been using it for a while)
Have you tried using the built-in speakers or have you been using external speakers the entire time you owned it?
I'm curious if the (specs say 10watt) built-in speakers are in any way usable -- my criteria would be, can you easily hear dialog at the normal viewing distance; I wouldn't hope for hi-fi sound suitable for music.
Next TV I buy im connecting to to Claude code and lobotomizing it...
I use a projector plugged into a tiny Linux box.
You can literally just buy any Sony and turn it onto dumb TV mode and not connect it to a network.
That's it, that's all you need to do, and the level of crazy over engineering and spend by some people below achieves literally nothing more at great difficulty.
Does anyone trust hdmi cables anymore?
I have a 42” tv from this cheap brand i found in MediaWorld in italy (i guess it’s called MediaMarkt in Germany and Switzerland): it’s called Ok.
It’s just great. Besides decoding digital tv it does essentially nothing.
If i want smart features i plug in an amazon fire stick.
I had it for six years now, i still love it.
One of the supermarket chains here have their own line of TVs. They are dirt cheap, absolutely fine quality. Some of them do run Android, or GoogleTV, so you'll get whatever tracking that may yield, but they certainly don't have the resource or infrastructure to run their own separate tracking and spying on those units.
My tv runs absolutely nothing, except for the software to decode digital tv.
That’s the whole point: it’s a dumb tv. It’s an appliance.
It's like every 3 months someone asks some variant of this question.
There are certainly new TV models coming out almost constantly, do it seems warranted? I see no problem with "duplicated" questions?
What I find amusing is people asking for advice on buying an appliance on this site. Not bad, just an unexpected pattern to my eyes at least.
The Russian user manuals for LG OLED TVs list the exact part numbers for the WiFi and Bluetooth modules. Search the PDF for IEEE and it will be listed. The English manuals omit this information!
I think desoldering the WiFi antennas and leaving the Bluetooth antenna connected is also a viable option. Although I think a 50 Ohm dummy load is needed if doing that(?).
Just get a big monitor or projector and whatever TV box you want.
If you really want privacy there's always the NUC running youtube.com in a browser
I just buy any TV, never allow it anywhere near the WiFi network, and attach an Apple TV
Unless… they’re not putting SIM cards in modern TVs or anything right?
I love all these people spending money and tearing apart their TVs instead of changing their WiFi password and not giving the new one to it
Absolutely every single TV that you don't hook up to your wifi. Easy.
Don’t connect it to the internet, only to your lan (on a separate vlan) connecting to your jelly and *arr setup, or, you can get a tv box, flash it with vanilla android, have kodi and addon pointing to your jelly server, and from that tv box is an hdmi to your TV, same is also doable with a rpi. It won’t be plug and play but it’s a weekend project, because there are no tv manufacturers who cares about privacy, or get a dumb tv and connect an hdmi to your pc but you will lose new features.
Only the one you gut with LLM first. Even when you disconnect it from the internet these devices often connect to unsecured WiFi's around you and snitch about you. There could be more tricks they do.
is a computer monitor big enough?
Honestly, anything pre-2020.
I love this: Just hook up your Apple TV for streaming.
A monitor. You will lose some controls over color & clarity (motion smoothing). But it will provide the best “dumb TV” experience.
I use my monitor with a fire TV stick and it renders very well. LG 4k panel.
Tvs can themselves have their privacy improved by never connecting it to WIFI, except, maybe for software updates, if needed (rare).
The smarts you connect to the TV can vary.
Apple Ts manage things in some good ways.
NVidia Shields are good in others for Android TV.
The Android TV platform is likely more customizable (check youtube the past few weeks) to get it how you want.
Last, but not least, some poeple may just hook up a web browser to the TV and then contain that.
Any 2000s Bravia, they're given out for free.
>4k
lol
get a projector? or don’t get a tv at all
That's not the problem space. There are lots of "smart" projectors now, too. Unless you mean overhead.
A lot of the advice here seens to be "disable wifi, don't plug in ethernet, use a computer or similar to provide content".
This is good advice. But I'd consider it the absolute baseline. I'd be much more interested in hearing about TVs that'll still try to get to the internet (neighbor's badly secured IoT network, bluetooth, 5G) or ones that cripple themselves when you tamper with wifi.
Do you really need a propaganda box? Connect with family or friends
Read a paperbook
Avoid Vizio at all costs!
I recently picked one up at Sam's Club. Since my use was only to display an external HDMI source, I never even configured Wifi. Unfortunately, they're now wise to this. If it detects its been offline for ten or so start-ups, the TV will 'helpfully' force you into the Wifi config workflow on the next start. It seems to keep an internal counter in flash memory which nothing but a factory reset will clear. In my tests, it seemed like it can be kept offline forever but at the cost of manually dismissing the Wifi config workflow with three clicks on the remote every ~10 power-ons.
The TV also will not turn on and just display an external HDMI source even though it has a "Remember Last Source" feature. That feature does work as expected with any internal streaming source but external sources must first be manually selected with the remote after each power on (also undocumented in the manual).
I figured this out because I bought this small TV to be a wall-mounted screen in the dedicated bathroom of our home theater room. It's only job is to turn on while someone is in the little bathroom and display a copy what's on the main 150" projector screen in the next room, then turn off when they leave. The on/off is handled by a motion sensor and standard Home Assistant automation but after power on it correctly shows the Last Selected external HDMI source for 1 second, then blanks the screen. The source is already selected and working but being blacked out until you manually re-select the same source with the remote (only if it's external). This is clearly an undocumented anti-pattern added specifically to prevent the TV being used unattended as a display screen, picture frame, digital sign etc. Why? Because Vizio (now owned by WalMart) doesn't get rev share if it's: 1) Not online, and 2) Only displaying external sources. That's why it demands manual "proof-of-life" before it'll grudgingly deliver the basic functionality it claims on the box.
This made me angry - and the TV was otherwise the perfect size and feature set for my use case. So I programmed an ESP32 with an IR emitter so that every time the TV powers on it sends the remote presses to manually clear the "Please Connect Internet" message and re-select the already-selected external HDMI. Very annoying to be forced to figure this out but now it works fine and no one even sees the annoying messages as they're already gone before by the time we enter and see the screen. So, fuck Vizio :-). Although, I'm pretty sure almost all current consumer TVs now sell all your data exactly the same. The only differences may be the depth of dark patterns they deploy to resist offline usage.
To be fair, aside from all the super evil dark patterns, it's a shockingly good quality small TV (24-inch) for $88. Although it's obviously not a high-end display (no native HDR or 24fps), the chipset does do a decent job tone mapping external HDR (and HDR10) sources to SDR and it does proper 3:2 pull-down to display 24 frame external sources at 60fps - which very few TVs in this size do well (or at all). This is why I kept it and spent the time 'fixing' it. Of course, this is only because the TV is subsidized by the $35-$60 avg yearly revenue TV manufacturers reportedly can collect from advertising, app install payments, rev shares and selling all your viewing data. For $88 at local retail, it's probably being sold at a small loss. What's sad is I would have paid double that for the same TV without the dark patterns (in fact, I did buy and return two 24" TVs before this one for $160 and $200 but they couldn't even display external HDR or 24fps sources at all - which was a requirement since this secondary display has to display sources configured for the main projector).
lol, I Ctrl+F'ed for this brand after having pointed my agent at it. There's some pretty bad stuff on there, some of which I've already reported to Vizio.
If you wanted to give your coding agent a crack at the internet connection thing and patching that out, there's some sort of pairing you can do over LAN to allow access to launch web content, this can be chained with old Chromium RCEs to gain root access.
> some of which I've already reported to Vizio.
I'm not sure they'll care about any of the issues I had since they were clearly put there on purpose. Kinda like complaining to the concentration camp guards about the poor service and lumpy bedding... :-)
> If you wanted to give your coding agent a crack at the internet connection thing
Good to know but I've got the IR commands and timing working to nullify the dark patterns and I'm not going to touch it. To Vizio we're not the customer, we're the product. I wish the community godspeed in pwning Vizio TVs as they've certainly 'earned' the attention through bad behavior. :-)
Frankly, I've never used any apps in a smart TV nor have I ever allowed a TV internet access. I always feed my displays via external HDMI because our main viewing room is a custom-built, fully sound-proof, tri-level screen room with elevated stage and motorized curtains. All walls & ceiling are 100% fabric over acoustic padding (no windows), separate snack bar and dedicated restroom. Seats 17 in matching, reclining theater loungers. The sources are mounted inside three in-wall sliding racks and include UHD disc, PS5 Pro, 3 older consoles, media server, satellite, cable, vintage LaserDisc and cloud streaming multiplexed through dual AVRs with separate amps driving 9.2.4 sound (B&W THX speakers + subs the size of 55 gal oil drums backstage).
I just needed to make that little 24-inch Vizio work because that's how big the in-wall display cutout in the restroom is (the screen cutout is integrated into the interior design). Finding a secondary display that small able to at least display via conversion every format all those sources can throw was challenging. :-)
Just get any old TV and use the HDMI input and don’t connect it to the internet. The fears of it phoning home anyway even when you don’t configure wifi are overblown (almost no TVs can do this), as are the privacy implications. Nobody cares that you watch Severance and MCU movies. It’s sort of like people who tape over their laptop camera but leave the mic alone, as if 86400 photos of your face are somehow private and sensitive but all of the conversations in the room are not.
Use dumb.tv
I tried the URL and got this:
My apologies!!!
dumbtv.org/
I'm a big fan of my Sony KV-25C5E. /s
When it comes to TVs you can buy in a big box store today, I'm not sure there are any TVs that fulfil your requirements. Everything's more or less on a scale of privacy to quality, where on one side you have the panels of 10 years ago with dumb electronics from brands you've never heard of, and on the other side are the LG panels, but with LG non-privacy. The other notable brands you've probably heard of fall closer to LG than to the no-name brands.
You can probably scrounge up a decent modern-ish panel on the used market that's old enough to not have been shipped with malware, but then you're betting on it not having been updated to receive the malware, or relegating yourself to rooting it the instant you get it home.
My unspoken assumption is that you don't want to give money to evil companies. If you yourself are fine with giving your money to evil people, then you can Just™ buy an LG panel and root it.
Get a panel and controller from China
I have not checked the details recently, but it should still be possible to get an aftermarket "dumb TV" generic controller board to fit the panel, as LCD panels have a somewhat standardised controller-panel interface.
6 years ago, discussion of an article about such: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24877363 (site hasn't survived, but article can still be found in archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre...)