Unless you're using a disconnected TV (i.e., no CATV/SATV/Internet), your viewing habits are being tracked and sold.
Privacy is only half the issue. Freedom is the other half. Most manufacturers control what you're allowed to install on your "smart" TV. And most can't record either.
How "dumb" is that?
If not on the receiver, the client (likely your phone) may be reporting it.
And then if not that, wherever you're streaming from may be reporting viewing habits.
This seems like another one of those things that's just intractable because the overhead is too high. You can limit who gets your viewing habits, but preventing anyone from getting them is hard. Similar to tracking on the internet.
The solution is legislation, not playing cat and mouse with corporations.
All devices stream via Kodi from my NAS
I will never have ads and always have complete privacy.
I also don't have any streaming services because none of them have an option to avoid ads and maintain privacy no matter how much you pay them.
When I can buy physical copies of content, I often do. Sadly in most cases the only way to consume modern media in full 4k quality for any amount of money with privacy and without ads, is piracy.
Exercise to the reader to see what is still sent when it's disabled.
I've updated their firmware a couple times. I connect them with wired cat6 on their own isolated VLAN to update, and then disconnect them afterwards. Maybe I am a little unnecessarily paranoid about it, but I don't really trust TV manufacturers, not with some of the (maybe apocryphal) stories I've read.
Of course there will be bugs when you’re consuming content at the very bleeding edge. I’d rather still fight with getting some Dolby stuff to work than not have it at all.
I don't keep the firmware preemptively updated, though. I just did it as a debugging step in trying to fix some problems, and shockingly it did both times.
I have a decade old Sony Bravia that we got because it supported DVB-T (terrestrial digital television; now no longer in use because of a switch to DVB-T2) without the need for a set-top box. It has an Ethernet jack, but other than some experimentation after we got it I never connected it. I can't imagine ever trying to update its firmware at this point; no reward and plenty of risk. After DVB-T went we just stopped watching broadcast television, and this early 'smart' TV only gets turned on sitting on the HDMI input it gets from a receiver hooked up to loudspeakers and an HTPC with Netflix in a browser and other media. Of all its features the on/off button on the side is the only thing interacted with now. I've stopped repairing the remote years ago.
I fully expect it to just die one of these days, and it will probably be the last smart TV we'll ever own.
This is the only way. And beware, they might still be connecting to some public wifi hotspot behind your back.
I have loved this TV (C9), but I can see what LG is doing and I do not like it at all. I was planning on getting a CX 48” for my desktop monitor but decided against it after this experience.
Routing data to the CPU wouldn't make much difference without a network connection to transmit the data back to central collection point.
Tracking won’t work without a phone home though. But that’s a solved problem. We’ve been delivering ads for a while without 100% knowing which are watched.
Do satellite TV boxes even have an uplink connection? AFAIK the satellite dish is one direction only.
Policy requires a telephone connection, partly for the purpose of reducing subscription sharing.
Pirates and many others wouldn’t or couldn’t plug them in.
Once an update was built to check for a dial tone intermittently and eventually deactivate, so pirates created a 555 timer device with a 9V battery to generate a frequency close to the dialtone. Even though a dialtone is 2 frequencies, the modem accepted any single frequency remotely close to the right range.
At some point, the provider would call subscribers with several boxes on the same sub that didn’t phone home and ask for “secret” numbers from all receivers, but someone quickly published a program that generated those keys. Saves legit customers from walking around the house too.
Fun times.