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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

So where can I get an actual privacy focused streaming box, even if the apps (Neflix etc) running on it are not?

These are not "streaming boxes" in the sense you are talking about. Their appeal is that they come preloaded with chinese pirate streaming apps. Traditional streaming boxes - Apple TV, Fire stick, Roku - are not affected by this, though if you want privacy-focused Apple TV is the only remaining contender, and with Apple's continued descent into advertising vendor I'd guess that one is not long for this world, either.

My understanding is that Roku bypasses DNS blocking with hardcoded tables so it can report back on various data they track on you.

Roku collects an insane amount of data on users. Basically everything that they can get their hands on

> Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching. https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-...

Can you monitor its traffic and block by IP?

I’m sure you could. At what point do you just rip out the thing that is trying so hard to work around your control of your network? An Apple TV doesn’t cost that much.

The door is slowly closing on all of these blocking schemes by moving ad content to the same domains as the primary content.

This is already a common feature for analytics toolkits.

I probably could, but haven't done so yet.

Apple TV is currently the best balance of privacy and convenience. The only way to get more private is using a PC, but that limits the resolution for most streaming services to 720p or 1080p.

And longevity. It just keeps getting updated tvOS versions and every provider's apps keep working - unlike on random Android TVs that just fall out of support.

I'm on my second one and I've owned them since the first version. My current one is the first generation 4k that's ... seven years old? Still works like new.

I assume apple TV doesn’t do malicious things like this, and we love the interface and it “just works” with HDR

Besides setting up your own device, Apple TV would be the best bet from any of the large manufacturers.

I'm increasingly being convinced the only way to do that is you do a media pc nuc. The problem, of course, is you probably won't have the netflix app. It's painful to setup such a box to stream from various services.

What's wrong with Apple TV? It runs VLC if you want to stream something from your NAS.

I tried going that route, but most apps for streaming are Android. And that was only one of the issues.

It was a rabbit hole and in the end I got back using my NVIDIA Shield. This is about 10 years now, but it’s actually still the best option.

I tried to look at setting up an stripped down privacy-focused Android based box for Netflix, but ran into issues. Seems like you need to be spied on to run Netflix.

What about just using the Netflix desktop website? Or does that limit the resolution?

If you want actual privacy (rather than promises from Apple or Google), what you need is a mini-PC running Linux with the Plasma Bigscreen DE. You then use a Web browser rather than invasive "apps" for your streaming. For Youtube, there is VacuumTube (an improved Youtube Leanback client). The main limitation is capped resolution on some commercial streaming services. I believe Windows does not have that restriction, so a VM could presumably be used for streaming (I have not tried).

The Onn TV devices from walmart seem fine, baseline google tracking not-withstanding... but no residential proxy or botnet participation without you knowing! You can just block them at the router and stream content locally.

kodi on an rpi5?

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