I have heard good things about Apple TV as a better alternative to most smart TV native apps. Would some TV’s pair better with this than others for privacy? I don’t want the TV doing anything other than being the display for Apple TV.
I am curious what success others have had.
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.
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.
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.
(I don't care about integrated speakers though)
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Sidewalk
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.
Apple could easily make tens of billions dollars extra if they spied more on their users.
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.
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.
Source: I work at Apple. The privacy story isn’t just marketing, it’s very real and part of every discussion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Iirc, Amazon uses a tool they call “sidewalk” for this purpose
The TV belongs to you and it will obey you with modest effort.
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.
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.
Not that I would forget that tiny detail when I mounted mine. Of course not.
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.
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.
Jellyfin is the answer if you are looking to spend a premium on a privacy-focused media experience.
These are generally meant to display (static) advertisement media, you'll have a false experience watching movies or playing games on them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
reply
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.
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.
- Don't connect it to the network
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks everyone for more practical comments, definitively bookmaking this post.
Or a projector against a wall.
Also, do not plug any Internet-facing devices into it, have a captive SBC that connects to a LAN server hosting (legally owned) videos.
[1] https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv
https://allaboutcookies.org/smart-tv-tracking-privacy-opt-ou...
Never connect to internet is the best option.
Still, might be best to run an android tv box yourself, and plug hdmi.
I researched a bit for business displays from Samsung and these also have enshittified with "smart" features, so it lost my trust as well.
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
I use my monitor with a fire TV stick and it renders very well. LG 4k panel.
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.