Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?

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 factor-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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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).

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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 firmware?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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’m sticking with my 2010 Toshiba REGZA until it dies. 1080p is fine for me.

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.

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

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.

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.

Huge fan of "never give it wifi, hook it up to a little linux box, remote control it via input leap" myself

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.

- Buy any TV you want

- Don't connect it to the network

What my own research led me to: https://www.viewsonic.com/global/products/commercial-display... (OS-Free Commercial Display, all sizes available) + HTPC.

I just had claude connect to my Android TV over adp and rip out all of the spyware it could find.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

You could just use something like adguard to block DNS requests for telemetry endpoints.

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.

The fact that we even need to have this conversation is messed up...

Thanks everyone for more practical comments, definitively bookmaking this post.

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.

I just rooted my LG in about 30 seconds [using claude] and disabled all the junk. can also run own apps / homebrew.

I just dont connect mine to the internet, hook up an Apple TV to it.

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.

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 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.

Samsung Frame is esthetically pleasing, high picture quality.

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