alt Hacker NewsI thought it was relatively common knowledge within technical circles to never give smart TVs an internet connection, but I suppose not.
Also, it's worth noting that TVs built on Android TV have a massive advantage here in that you can plug them into your laptop and remove the content recognition package using adb (Android Debug Bridge) just like you might with a phone or tablet. This might be possible with Samsung Tizen and LG webOS devices too, but both are going to require more esoteric tooling.
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The sad part of all of this was that the company that does this tried to poach me back in 2013 or 2014, but I was disgusted by the practice, so I refused to even interview.
Since then, I've made sure every single TV I own has this turned off (I go through the menu extensively to disable, and search on Google and reddit if it's not obvious how to disable like the case with Samsung).
I have an LG Smart TV, and just a week or two ago I was going through the settings and found Live Plus enabled, which means either they renamed the setting (and defaulted this to on), or the overrode my original setting.
Either way, I'm super annoyed. I want to switch to firewalling the TV and preventing any updates, but I need a replacement streaming device to connect to it.
Does anyone have recommendations for a streaming device to use (presumably one with HDMI CEC, that supports 4k and HDR)? I use the major streaming services (Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Apple TV) and Jellyfin.
I recently did a lot of looking into this, and sadly most of the previously wide-open loopholes for rooting LG webOS were all patched in the last ~6 months. You can fiddle with dev mode but you can't get proper root.
I basically settled on an (incredibly expensive) Sony commercial Android TV -- beyond the ADB method, their commercial line gives you additional admin controls over which apps are allowed to run and which are allowed on the network. Between the two i felt I'd be pretty content.
Granted i haven't tried it because my new job fell through and a $1400 TV was no longer an option.
i hardly consider this post to be within a technical circle, this is normie-stream
i expected someone to be diving deep into the software within a TV, not some guy who finally decided to check the settings tab
even if you turn that off it's definitely still spying on you
What’s the point in having smart TV without internet access?