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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

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buro9

If you don't like this:

1) Buy an Nvidia Shield, Google Chromecast, or Apple TV

2) Connect that to your TV

3) Factory reset your TV and never connect it to the internet again

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This really is the only viable option right now, and specifically only the Apple TV. The Shield and Chromecast are slight improvements, but of the mainstream TV choices, Apple TV is literally the only product that puts your privacy first.

And sadly, you need to trade your freedom for your privacy with AppleTV. I have a shield so that I can sideload apps like NewPipe and Kodi.

I wish AppleTV would allow side-loading apps. That would be the best of both worlds.

Apple TV does let you. You just have to reload them once a week, or factor an additional $100 into the price to only do that only once a year.

Is a there a good collection of Idevice apps somewhere that we can take and compile and use for this purpose? I am starting to go down the path of making my own simple versions of popular apps like Twitter or pulling the backend apis of other apps for stores all in an effort to remove as much tracking as I can while still keeping functionality.

For example, there is a popular convenience store app that gives discounts on items such as coffee but in addition to the standard tracking, I also discovered code that indicates they are using bluetooth beacons to do in store tracking. Instead I am pulling their api to fetch the deals so I can ditch the app. Would be great if there is an existing collection so I can ditch more official apps more easily.

https://altstore.io/ is the best known. Google "alternative app stores for ios", there are many.

(Not an endorsement; Have not used any of them myself).

Ah yes I remember AltStore when it came out. Left it on my phone for a while but all that was ever published was his emulator(which kept crashing btw). I wonder if the store has improved since.

This is a temporary measure. Soon enough, they will have 5G or 6G modems inside, a special arrangement with carriers (a la Amazon’s whispernet), and You would have to wrap it in tinfoil to stop it from reporting on your viewing habits and showing you ads.

IIRC don't Samsung TVs already connect to any open access point they can find in an attempt to upload analytics, or was that Vizio? I definitely remember someone was doing that, meaning not connecting to the network only worked if there were no open APs around.

I'm sure soon enough the TVs will refuse to boot unless connected to the internet.

I recently turned on my Vizio to see it had updated its firmware and I was forced to accept terms of use and privacy policies from both Vizio and Google before I could do anything else on the TV. It was essentially bricked unless I accepted. I accepted, then immediately unplugged the TV from the network, removed the WiFi information and manually entered bad DNS settings. I rebooted the TV and it reconnected to WiFi automatically! Not happy. Forget network, re-enter bad settings, check router logs... it’s no longer connected in any way that I’m aware of, through my network anyway. Very negative experience.

Don't these guys just do deals with the wifi hotspots from comcast for backhaul? My understanding is the move for hotspots is to have a "guest" spot show up automatically that other comcast users and third parties comcast sells access to can use.

Samsung pays a bit to get access to this and voila - they can skip the internet setup steps (so more consumer friendly) and block you from blocking their ads / ACR (consumer not friendly).

If it hasn't already happened it will.

At that point maybe it would be lucrative for people handy with the soldering iron to remove those modems and resell the TV.

They would also need to to root the TV as well, as it will refuse to work without said modem being functional. This is a losing game, and it seems like the only recourse is regulatory.

or buy a dumb TV and connect a computer

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